GA 436 | Work Design and Intrinsic Motivation with Thomas Bertels

I think a lot of jobs are a little bit like, you know, you ask people to go bowling blindfolded, right? And so you roll right the ball down the lane, and then the supervisor says, you knocked five over. And you're like, which five? Right? You don't know. So you can't self correct.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Thomas Berthels to his show. Now, today, Thomas and I talk about the topic of work design. Now, Thomas has a background in Lean and six sig, which is. Influenced the work that he does today, which is really help companies design work that is. That's meaningful, that there's autonomy and there's mastery and there's purpose to the work. And so it was really interesting. You know, I am personally fascinated with the whole idea of sort of the difference between intrinsic motivation. Dan Pink talks about it with mastery, autonomy, and purpose, and extrinsic motivation, which might be, you know, dangling a carrot, if you will, to motivate people. And so we kind of get into that a little bit and talk about the right way to help people be inspired to do their work. And so there's. There's definite parallels to the things that we're doing within the Lean movement. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode four. 36. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Thomas, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm excellent. Thanks for having me, Ron.

All right. You calling in from.

I'm outside New York City. I'm in northern New Jersey. Okay.

All right. How's the. How's the weather there this time of year?

Well, it's like 99 degrees. Feeling like 104. Right? Something along those lines.

Yeah, we're. We're 104 here. Feeling like 120 in Texas, so. Yeah, it's been a hot one this summer, that's for sure. All right, well, hey, I'm excited to. To have you on. Our friend Martina kind of introduced us, so thank you for that, Martina. So, Thomas, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one?

I do. My favorite quote is from Frederick Hertzberg, which is, you can only a good. You can only do a good job if there's a good job to be done.

What's that mean for you?

Well, it means for me that, first of all, I think that's true. Right. I think, you know, having had a number of different jobs. Right. All of us had some jobs that are great and some jobs that are horrible. And it's just very difficult to perform if the job is not well designed. The second thing, what it does for me is it really triggers the question, what makes a good job? Right. And so I think that that leads to like an exploration around, like, what are the, the ingredients of a good job? Meaningful work, autonomy, feedback, those kinds of things.

Yeah, got it. Hey Thomas, tell us a little bit about, about yourself. Tell us about your background, how you first got into this line of work that you're into and then what you're up to these days.

Excellent. Yeah. So my background is I started my career at a company called AZ Brown Bavari, which was one of the first companies to implement Six Sigma. And so I got got involved with process improvement there. I ended up going joining a consulting firm called Ras & Strong, which was heavily, you know, invested in the whole Lean and Six Sigma space and worked there for seven years. And then my other colleagues started a global consultancy called Vallejocon where our primary focus was operational excellence. So I have a 20 year background in Lean and Six Sigma. And you know, I decided two years ago that I wanted to go into slightly different connection and really take everything that I'd learned to make work a better place. And so I started my own firm, PurposeWorks Consulting, January of 2021.

Nice. So the topic of today is going to be what you're calling work design. So let's just begin at the beginning, if you will, and what is work design and why does it matter?

Okay, so work design. I got introduced to the concept in 2004 by a colleague of mine, John Hussey. And I'll never forget that because we had to ask John to introduce the topic at a company meeting. It's something he cared about, we were curious about it and he was so passionate and excited about that. That really stuck with me for many, many years. And it's in a lot of ways it's like the natural counterpart or it's like if you think about Lean and Six Sigma as one side of the coin, it's a little bit the other side of the coin. And the basic notion, I think it goes back to the Hertzberg quote that we started with, is that you can only do a good job if there's a good job to be done. So what can we do to really design work to be intrinsically motivating, as most people kind of think about designing a job or creating a job description or whatever it might be? We never really think about that job from the perspective of the person that's doing it, and to what extent we need to create a job that meets the intrinsic human needs to have some autonomy to do something from start to finish, to have variety. We just think about, here's the list of tasks I need to get done. And so I see it really as a natural extension of the process improvement mindset, that when you create an efficient process, that's great, but let's do the extra step and also make sure that the work that we're creating or that we're changing is in itself, meaningful work to be done.

So talk a little bit more. I'm curious. You use the analogy of two sides of the coin. Talk a little bit about the linkage between work design and, say, lean or just continuous improvement.

Yeah. And they're really natural. It's like bedfellows there. So the idea behind work design is that, you know, oftentimes when we take a work process, we chop it into smaller and smaller bits and pieces. All right, so going back to Taylor's model, right, and the Industrial Revolution. And that, I think is really effective. If you look at manufacturing work where you can say, I just need somebody to tighten this screw, right? I'm just willing to pay somebody to do this. And as we have done that, we basically separated people further from the customer, right? So if you're like, somewhere in the middle of that process, you have no connection to the outside customer. And oftentimes you also don't get any feedback, right? So the feedback you're getting comes from your boss. And so that creates, like, a host of problems. And oftentimes what we're doing with Lean is we're trying to remedy that. On the lean side, you create, like a lean cell. Like, you put the three or four or five operators together and you say, you guys own this line, right? You guys own whatever the output of this, of this, of this operation. We don't actually do that oftentimes when it comes to service work or administrative work. And I think it's a huge opportunity to apply those lean principles and put the work back together and create whole jobs that people can do from start to finish, right, where they can see the outcome of it, where they have a connection with the work product and with the customer and so work design. So it gets at the same outcome, right, that the lean would get it just through the lens of the person doing the work.

I'm curious, like, from a transactional environment, like, one of the toughest positions for some companies to motivate or to figure out the best way to configure it is like, say like a sales professional, you know, who might be on some commission, perhaps if they're, they sell a widget, they might get a certain percentage of that widget. This can obviously create a lot of tension, you know, like, hey, wait a minute, that was my lead. What are you doing calling my lead? Like, how do you, like, what's a work design idea for an environment like that or position like that where, you know, money's at stake, emotions can be high. But obviously from the company's perspective, we want to have a motivated salesforce and that they can benefit personally. But also, hey, it's good for the company, right? The more you sell, the better the company's going to do.

Yeah, I mean, if it's like a job where the salesperson itself kind of does all the work, right. So you got a product, I just got to go out and sell it. Right. That actually is probably a job that's fairly well designed. Right. Because you presumably own this entire thing from identifying the lead all the way to. Right. Getting the contract done from start to finish. So that's probably a good intrinsically motivating job. Now, what oftentimes happens in the real world? I've done a lot of work in the pharma industry. Right. So they're the commercial models. Yes, you have sales reps, but you might have three or four sales reps that call in the same doctor and you have some inside sales groups and you have some other folks in the field that help. So there's oftentimes not just like this one person that does all the selling process. It's like 39 and a half people involved in that. And so I think there, I think it is, it becomes important to say, you know, let's really align, for example, the four or five key roles that we have really directly towards the customer so that people have again, this direct line of sight to the customer.

Okay, so talk a little bit about if you're going to go in and work with a company, what does a typical work design effort look like? Like how are you going to go going about, you know, lean, we break the job down, we value added, non value added, all this kind of stuff. So how does it work for, for this work design?

Very similar, actually. So one starting point is obviously you got to get an understanding of what's the work that's being done. So you might map the entire process from start to finish at a reasonable level of detail to figure out where are all the handoffs, where are all the decisions that need to be escalated and so forth. Because ultimately, again, we want to put the job back together. We want to challenge and really see do we need all those handoffs, do we need to have all these escalations? Can we drive decision making down? So a process map is a great starting point. A second element is like the cultural readiness. This really only works in an organization where leaders think people come to work and they want to contribute to something that's bigger than themselves and they're intrinsically motivated to do a good job. If you have the worldview that people are lazy and stupid and I really got to tightly control them, motivational work design is not going to fit. That's not going to help. So you got to have a culturally ready environment. And the third element of it is to do a diagnostic. So there's a framework that's been around for the last 50 years, it's been validated countless times, that in essence measures how people experience their work, how intrinsically motivating they experience it. And it looks at a couple of different factors and calculates like an overall score. And what it does is it gives you a little bit like a heat map in the organization where work is broken. Right. So similar as like in lean. Right. You could look at like you calculate tak time and so forth. Right. That's like the equivalent of think of like a, you know, maybe like a non value added ratio. Right. Where you just try to understand where are jobs that people don't experience as particularly meaningful, where they feel they don't have enough autonomy and where they don't know how they're doing. And then. Right. Let's zero in on those jobs and see how we can put humpty and humpty back together.

How do you. Is it like a surveys or you're doing interviews or how do you get the data?

Yeah. So you typically start off like in the general context with interviews with managers and focus groups. Just understand the work. But then beyond that. Exactly as you said, you survey the entire organization. So you have everybody take the survey takes about 10 minutes. And it basically tells you. Right. How well designed the job is.

Okay. So the second one, if I remember right, is you were talking about the company needs to have the culture for this type of thing. What happens if you go into an organization and they don't?

Well, it just doesn't work. Right. It's very simply. You get to that point, you can do some things, obviously you can combine tasks and say, let's make the job broader. Right. But you get to that point where Rightfully, people say, listen, if you ask me to bring all these skills to bear and do this whole thing from start to finish and taking all this additional accountability, you got to give me some decision making too, right? So I think it goes hand in hand with really an empowerment of the workforce. And it's not the right fit for every organization. If you're changing nuclear fuel rods, you don't really want to delegate a lot of decision making autonomy down to the bottom of the organization. You want it to be done the same time every single time. So that might not be the best scenario. But I think there's a lot of work these days, especially if you go to knowledge work, where the de facto situation is that the workers tend to know a lot more, more about the work, the client, what needs to be done, right? But oftentimes we just haven't given them the autonomy, right? So we have these oodles and oodles of supervisors that, you know, manage what work gets done, how the work gets done, when the work gets done, whether the work got done. Right. And again, if you step back, you know, people, right, carry a lot of responsibilities in their life, right? They pay mortgages, they pay rent, right. They raise their kids. Right? So again, it's like this notion of that when they come into the workplace, right. We can treat them a little bit as dummies, right. They don't know what they're doing. Right. I think it's a little bit outdated.

Yeah, yeah. I, I'm, I'm thinking about the book. I don't. You, you may have read it. I think it's. Dan Pink wrote it. Drive the book. Drive. Talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. And, and so, you know, you, you've mentioned intrinsic motivation many times, Dan. Attribute it to mastery, autonomy of purpose. And then. But what was interesting about that book I remember was talking about extrinsic motivation. You know, the typical. Dangling the carrot in front of the, you know, the worker, you know, chasing a quota for a bonus or something like that, Right. But what's interesting is you think, oh, that's bad, you know. But he mentioned that it can be effective in some types of environments, like maybe a factory level, you know, operator or somebody like that. An extrinsic motivation can work extremely well. However, when you get to the manager, the general manager of the facility, you know, extrinsic motivation only goes so far. Intrinsic motivation, obviously, is what gets us excited Sunday afternoon to go back to work on Monday. Right. So I'm curious to hear more from your Perspective, like intrinsic motivation, like, what are some of the things that you're trying to instill to ensure employees have that?

Yeah. So, I mean, it starts out with meaningful work, right? And meaningful work is like three, right. You can break it down to three elements. So one is doing a whole job from start to finish. Right. So you have this sense of completion. Right. You didn't just, like. You didn't just, like, put brick on brick. You actually, you know, build a wall, you know, you create a cathedral. Right. The second one is being able to use a variety of different skills. Right. So you can bring everything that you need that did, you know, to bear. The third piece is the work itself is important to somebody else, ideally outside the organization. Right. So that's meaningful work. The second element is autonomy. And I think, you know, Daniel Pink, you know, the same idea of my drive, I think are behind motivational work design. And the third one is knowledge of result. Right. You got to know whether what you did was successful or not. And the best way to do that is actually to be able to tell that just by doing the work. Right. So if you're an operator and you can determine whether that product or that unit is good or bad. Right. Self inspect, that's great. If you can't tell that, and if you rely on the supervisor to tell you that twice a year, that's not so good.

Yeah. So interesting. I was thinking about even here, Gemba Academy, we've got a team of editors, video editors. And so all day long, they're sitting here editing videos. And I was trying to think my mind as you were listening those things out, I was like, are we doing that Sometimes I'm thinking about Gamma Academy a lot of times in podcasts, listening to the guest. Oh, are we doing that? And yeah, they are able to. To see it all the way through. They do. They do the whole video, you know, from start to finish, they are able to use different skills. You know, sometimes there's more graphics, sometimes it's different. The audio was bad and had to fix the audio or whatever. So I think the third one there was like sort of the. You know, obviously they can see the. The final product, but sometimes what we'll do is we'll get feedback from customers. Oh, I love that video. Or that course was so good. Oh, we make sure we give that back to the editors because, oh, man, it makes their day, right? Because here they are, they're just making these videos and they're never quite sure. You know, they're not talking to customers like our Salespeople or our customer success people are doing or I'm doing, you know, they're editing. So I really love that, that those three things that you listed there, because I can see how it can, how, how demotivating it might be if you had to start in this example, a little bit of the video and then you had to stop and then somebody else finished it. Yeah, that wouldn't be very exciting, would it? So, yeah, yeah.

And the point about feedback that you made, right, It's a little bit like, I think a lot of jobs, a little bit like, you know, you ask people to, to go bowling blindfolded, right? And so you roll right the ball down the lane and then the supervisor says you knocked five over and you're like, yeah, which five? Yeah, right. You don't, you don't know, right. So you can self correct, right. But I think if you give people that line of sight when you like, you know, when you play golf, right, you know where the ball wins. But you know what you got to do differently next time, right? But in most jobs we don't have that. We don't know how the story ends. And that's horribly.

That's so good. I've never really thought about that way. That's really, really good. Really good. So when a leader is considering doing work design, like when should they do it? You know, is it at the very beginning, obviously before the work is done? But is there, you know, companies out there listening right now that haven't done this? So is it like yesterday you need to do it or is there a process to that?

Well, a couple of things. I mean, one is if you had the luxury to start from scratch, right? So you're starting your next business run, right? And so after this conversation you say, I like those ideas, you could actually incorporate those, right? So as you write the job description, you could simply ask yourself how well designed is this job to really give people the start to finish experience, Right. And this is broad enough from a skills perspective. And how would they know that they're doing a great job, right? So you could actually just embed it from the get go. Now in 99% of the cases, you don't have that luxury. You sit there in an existing organization and somebody brought you in as a manager and now you basically have to do this yourself again. You could take the diagnostic, you can map the process and you can start thinking about other opportunities where I can combine, broaden jobs, combine roles, create maybe a little team or a part that could own a part of the mission, whether it's a product line or a customer or a region, and basically use those principles as design criteria.

I love it. I love it. What about your personal life? Like, have you seen the whole concept of work design utilized in someone's personal life or maybe hobbies or something like that?

Well, in my personal life, right, I'm trying to write as I take on things, I'm trying to do things from start to finish. Finish, right? So actually have a complete appreciation of the task. But you know, even in my, in my personal environment, both my parents were teachers. And actually, if you think about the job of a teacher that scores fairly high on those dimensions, right, it's like you got like 15 kids in a classroom and you're right, you're responsible for them and you own their education for a year, right from start to finish. And you got to use different ways of reaching out different kids in the class because everybody has a different style and the work you're doing is enormously important. I remember it's like going to, going to my former kindergarten, right? I was dropping off my nephew there and it's been at that point, it had been like some 40 some years since I'd been there. And I was talking to one of the kindergarten teachers and she was a former student of my father and she was telling me really of the impact that he had had on her life in terms of steering her towards a career where she would be satisfied. So I think again, teachers, as an example, as a teacher, you know, when the student gets it right and the light comes on and so you have that feedback cycle, you know that the work is meaningful and you have a lot of autonomy in the classroom. Although, you know, every year they probably tell you a little bit more. It's like what you have to do, right? So those jobs are great. Now if you think about so your own personal experience and you call, let's say, you know, right now it's travel nightmare. You're trying to get out of Texas and you know, you need to change a flight or your luggage gets lost. Like, you know, how many phone calls does it take? How many people do you have to deal with? How empowered are these people to solve the problem that you have? They're not, right? They're just doing the right first line call. They take the call, they're trying to sort out, right? Whether you know what you want, Then they hand you over, then they hand you over again. So at the end of the day, nobody feels accountable for, you know, making your experience better.

So good so good. All right, well, hey Thomas, this has been really fun. If folks wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

So the best way is probably to reach out via email. Email is Thomas T H O M A S.Bertels B E R T E L S at Purpose Works. And you know know you can also go to our website and check out the survey. The survey can be found on mymojo M o J O dot works and there's an abbreviated version of the survey. It's going to take probably like 3, 4 minutes to fill out, but it's going to give you a sense, give your listeners a chance to see how well designed.

Yeah, I'm going to do it. Yeah. And just so folks didn't get thrown off your email is urpose works and that's it. No.com or anything like that. So. Okay, that's it. Got it. All right. And we'll put it in the show notes as well for everybody. So. Yeah, so. Well, hey, thanks for coming on, Thomas. This has been a lot of fun.

Thanks so much for having me, Ron. Really appreciate the opportunity.

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