Nov. 15--If there's one thing we human beings are good at, it's finding extremely complicated and wildly ineffective ways of addressing problems that really aren't that hard to solve.
The workplace, more than any other arena, highlights that skillful ineptitude. Companies form committees to appoint panels to pick members for task forces that will investigate ways to cut down on unnecessary committees, panels and task forces. And so forth.
So it does my heart good to see examples of simplicity prevailing. For example, Stanford University researchers decided to take a look at the things that motivate workers, and what they found is that people will work considerably harder, longer and more effectively if they believe they are working together with other people.
That doesn't sound revolutionary, I suppose, given that "teamwork" is such a long-standing corporate buzzword. But what was interesting in this study -- which was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology -- is that the workers didn't actually work together. They worked on their own but were told they were working together, a group of people each working solo toward a common goal.
The study found that "symbolic cues of working together can be sufficient to raise motivation." And not just by a little. The people who were told they were working on a project together worked 48 percent longer than others who were given no cue of togetherness. They also felt less depleted by the task, showed greater focus and expressed more interest in the subject.
I spoke about this study with Heidi Grant Halvorson, associate director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School and author of "Nine Things Successful People Do Differently."
She was not involved with the study, but said it's a perfect example of motivating people by understanding the way our brains work.
"We have the same brains, basically, that we had 10,000 years ago," Halvorson said. "We evolved by working in teams, working together. So it's easy to see why it makes sense that this would be very motivating, that we'd be wired to seek out banding together."
The problem is, even though the word "teamwork" is tossed around willy-nilly and many companies break employees up into teams, most of us still work largely on our own.
"If you ask people how many times do you actually sit at a table and get the work done as a group, it's not very often," Halvorson said. "People actually work in a very solitary way."
So if managers or team leaders aren't injecting the concept of togetherness skillfully, the motivational factor that comes from working as a group can easily get lost.
This is where our skill at making simple things complicated comes into play. I can imagine a company hearing about the Stanford study and interpreting it like this:
1. Hey, this study says that if we just use the word "together," people will work way harder.
2. Cool, let's print up a giant banner that says "together," give everybody buttons that say "TOGETHER!" and hire someone to record a jingle that's just the word "together" over and over and then play that in the office all day long.
3. Now let's sit back and watch productivity skyrocket.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. The results of the Stanford experiments give us a window into the relatively simple ways our brains work and how those brains can be tweaked to make us more motivated.
Tweaking is subtle.
"It's like a nudge in the right direction, where you nudge people in the direction of a way that they work better," Halvorson said.
Creating a sense of working together is not about being a cheerleader or getting people to bond during contrived team-building meetings. It's about subtly making sure people understand that they're working in concert, supporting each other and building something as a group.
"You don't want to overdo it," Halvorson said. "If a word like 'together' becomes something that's coming out of your mouth every five minutes, people are going to wonder why that word is coming up so often. What's going on? Are you manipulating me? What this study suggests is that when you're talking about the goals people are working on, working that word 'together' in the description of those goals can be powerful. Don't go crazy with the word, maybe find specific moments where you're going to make that togetherness salient."
In other words, keep it simple. Foster a certain level of face-to-face connectedness through team meetings and collaboration, and then recognize the kind of motivation our brains respond to naturally.
Subtle cues. Not flashing lights and waving banners.
TALK TO REX: Ask workplace questions -- anonymously or by name -- and share stories with Rex Huppke at IJustWorkHere@tribune.com, follow him on Twitter via @RexWorksHere and find more at chicagotribune.com/ijustworkhere.
