In looking for an article of this type I was searching for an article talking about motivational factors in a workplace environment. I found this article to be insightful and interesting because of its outside of the box approach to explaining the issue of motivation in a mundane office space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nImagine a workplace where everyone comes into the office. (This story is set in 2019.) It’s a totally normal office, except that for some mysterious reason, the company has always kept a group of weasels as office pets. The weasels have a special area in the back with their food and nesting materials and they are also free to wander about the office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It isn’t cute. The weasels bite. Unprovoked. Every day! They approach silently and employees have no warning. You’re at your desk, lost in your inbox, when suddenly there’s a piercing pain in your ankle and one of the weasels is running away before you knew it was there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone complains about the weasels. Even the senior team acknowledges that ideally <\/em>the weasels wouldn’t be there. But they’ve always been there, and no one has time to think of a good plan to get rid of them. Some employees can’t take it, and they leave. Turnover is high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day, at long last, the senior team locates a shelter for weasels and moves them all out. For the first time, the office is weasel-free. The senior team expects big engagement dividends from this. They have been hearing employees ask to ditch the weasels for years<\/em>. And on the first day Post-Weasel, the staff is ecstatic<\/em>. \u201cThis is so nice!\u201d everyone says to each other. \u201cBest. Day. Ever.\u201d someone posts (in GIF form) on the company Slack. They celebrate by throwing stuffed weasels at each other and laughing with relief. On Day 2, the atmosphere is still festive. The next week is calmer, but people still seem to have an extra spring in their step and an extra heart emoji in their DMs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the third week, however, the euphoria is gone. People’s moods have sunk back down toward the old status quo. True, there are no more shrieks of \u201cYouch!\u201d every hour or so. People aren\u2019t so resentful or nervous anymore. But they don\u2019t seem more motivated about their work, either. The senior team is perplexed. What went wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Born and Cooks go on to describe the \u201cFrederick Herzberg\u2019s <\/a>\u201cmotivation-hygiene theory.\u201d<\/a> They go on to say that \u201cHygiene factors\u201d<\/strong> can\u2019t make you happy, but they can make you miserable\u201d, and that motivational factors \u201cwon\u2019t, in their absence, make you miserable<\/em>, although the lack of them might leave you feeling sort of blah.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Salaries\u2014along with healthy knees and a lack of biting weasels\u2014are hygiene factors. Other hygiene factors include workplace policies and procedures, a safe and pleasant physical work environment, social status, and reliability of employment. But hygiene factors are\u00a0floors\u00a0<\/em>for creating a great place to work, not ceilings. They aren\u2019t engagement drivers, because even getting every one of them right just isn\u2019t enough to get people truly engaged. Getting them right is just enough to get to\u00a0normal<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trusted leaders, good communication, and a sense that the organization truly cares about employees as people\u2014these are what we call engagement drivers, and what Herzberg would call motivational factors. They go beyond fixing what\u2019s wrong and build organizational cultures that are actively right (Born & Cooks, 2022).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Although the story of the Weasel problem is amusing, I believe that the real meat of the article comes afterwards. Motivational and Hygiene factors are terms that I have never heard of before reading this article but I found them to be very insightful. Hygiene factors are the the bare minimum when it comes to creating an inspiring workplace, but they are not nearly enough to build a positive workplace from the ground up. Not having weasels biting at my ankles is a new issue I have to be looking for when searching for jobs, but that won\u2019t be the core of what I\u2019m looking for. To find an organization that has \u201ctrusted leader, good communication\u201d and an organization that \u201ctruly cares about employees as people\u201d will be my new \u201cfloor\u201d<\/em> (Born & Cooks, 2022). After reading this article how can design use these hygiene factors to create the floor for solutions that inspire these motivational factors?<\/p>\n\n\n\n