In my last blog, I shared my key take-aways from Lynda Gratton’s recent keynote at this year’s CIPD annual conference. She made the case to move from talking about hybrid to talking about flexibility, which I’m all in favour of. She also emphasised the point that the purpose of hybrid/ flexibility is to give employee greater autonomy at work. This is something we at People Lab have been talking about from day one.
We know from our own research that autonomy is one of the universal themes reported when people talk about great experiences at work. Direction and control of our own lives is important, and a key feature of intrinsic motivation.
Harry F. Harlow first talked about the concept of intrinsic motivation in the 1940s. He originally developed this theory whilst studying primates solving puzzles. What he found was that primates appeared to enjoy solving the puzzles, even in the absence or expectation of a reward. This idea of intrinsic motivation was built on via the work of Deci and Ryan in the 1960s and 1970s. They replicated Harlow’s studies with humans and developed their theory of self-determination (SDT). SDT proposes that we have an innate drive to be autonomous, competent and connected to each other. When these conditions are present, research demonstrates links to a whole range of positive outcomes, including higher levels of positive emotion, wellbeing and employee engagement. Deci concluded that human beings have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capabilities, to explore, and to learn.”
We need to focus on our innate need to be self-directed, and design experiences which provide employees with autonomy over some (or all) key elements of their work. Here are some ideas you might like to consider when thinking about how to build autonomy into the employee experience and the work people do:
- When they do it (time) – examples include:
- Focusing the roles on outputs rather than time
- Flexibility over how employees complete tasks
- Flexibility over working patterns and hours
- How they do it (technique) – examples include:
- Freedom to figure out the best way to do their jobs
- Involvement in defining how they do their jobs
- Who they do it with (team) – examples include:
- Facilitate opportunities for collaboration
- Opportunities to join cross-company projects
- What they do (task) – examples include:
- Using design thinking tools to enable creativity over the role they do
- Hackathons and open-source projects to enable people to work on different projects
- Job-crafting
- Where they do it (place) – examples include:
- Remote working opportunities
- Flip open and closed spaces in the office
Autonomy also promotes a feeling of respect; respect for individual abilities within the organisation which would otherwise be missed. Autonomy sets employees free from limiting micromanagement and demands good communication within the organisation. This instils freedom for employees and communicates a level of trust, both of which are associated with great experiences and higher engagement, which is great news for everyone.
