Applause Is Not Enough: Key Workers, Meaningful Work and What Really Motivates People

Every Thursday at 8pm since March 26, people across the UK have stood on doorsteps and balconies to applaud NHS staff, carers and other key workers. Tomorrow will be the tenth time. Annemarie Plas, who started the campaign, has said it should be the last, partly because she fears it is becoming politicised, and that she would like to turn it into an annual event.

It is a good moment to ask what the applause was about. In a few weeks, the public conversation about work changed. The people we suddenly depended on were nurses, care workers, supermarket staff, delivery drivers, cleaners and bus drivers. According to the Office for National Statistics, around 10.6 million people, about 33 percent of the UK workforce, were in key worker occupations and industries in 2019. Many of them are not well paid, and some are at higher risk from the virus themselves.

At the same time, millions of office workers have been furloughed or sent home, and some of them are asking an uncomfortable question: if my job stopped for two months and nobody noticed, what is it for?

This post looks at what research says about meaningful work and motivation, and what managers in any kind of organisation can learn from this spring.

1. Meaning is a strong motivator

The clearest evidence that meaning matters comes from a simple experiment. In a study published in 2007, the organisational psychologist Adam Grant and colleagues worked with a university call centre whose staff phoned alumni to raise money for scholarships. It is a repetitive job with a lot of rejection.

Some callers spent five minutes meeting a student whose scholarship had been funded by the calls. Others read a letter from a student or had no contact. A month later, the callers who had met the student spent 142 percent more time on the phone each week and raised 171 percent more money than the control group.

Five minutes of contact with the person who benefits from your work more than doubled effort. Nothing about the job, the pay or the targets had changed.

Key workers do not need that experiment. A nurse sees the patient. A delivery driver sees the person at the door. The applause added a public signal on top of something they already knew: what they do matters to someone.

2. But meaning does not replace the basics

There is a risk in celebrating purpose. It can become a way of asking people to accept less.

In the late 1950s, Frederick Herzberg and his colleagues proposed a distinction that is still useful. Some things at work motivate: achievement, recognition, responsibility, the work itself. Other things are hygiene factors: pay, safety, working conditions, job security and fair policies. Hygiene factors rarely make people enthusiastic. But when they are missing, they cause dissatisfaction that no amount of meaning can fix.

That is the tension many key workers have described in the past two months. They were applauded on Thursday and then went to work without enough personal protective equipment, or on wages that make it hard to pay rent.

The lesson for managers is not cynical. Recognition matters. But thanks without the basics feels hollow. If you want people to feel that their work is valued, start by making sure they are safe, fairly paid and properly equipped. Then say thank you.

3. Meaning can be designed into most jobs

Not everyone works on a hospital ward. Office jobs, back-office jobs and support roles can feel far from anyone who benefits. Research suggests that meaning is not only a property of the job title. It depends a lot on how the work is designed and how people see it.

The job characteristics model. In 1976, J. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham identified five features of work that predict motivation and satisfaction:

Job crafting. In 2001, Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton described how people reshape their own jobs. In one study of hospital cleaners, some saw their work as cleaning rooms. Others saw it as part of helping patients get well, and acted on that: talking to patients, noticing what they needed, timing their work around visits. The job description was the same. The experience of the work was not.

The progress principle. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analysed nearly 12,000 diary entries from knowledge workers for their 2011 book The Progress Principle. The single biggest factor in a good day at work was making progress on meaningful work, even small progress. The biggest factor in a bad day was a setback.

4. Lessons from the lockdown for every team

The past two months have been an unplanned test of many of these ideas. A few patterns stand out.

• Clear purpose made fast change possible. Hospitals reorganised whole wards in days. Manufacturers switched to making ventilator parts and hand sanitiser. When people know exactly why something matters, they accept disruption that would normally take months of persuasion.
• Distance hides impact. For teams working from home, the link between their work and the people it helps has become harder to see. There are no customers walking in and no colleagues saying "that helped".
• Uncertainty is draining. Furlough, restructuring and talk of recession make it hard for people to feel that their work has a future. Meaning needs a story people can believe about what comes next.

5. Practical ways to make work meaningful, without the spin

Connect people with the people they help

• Share real stories and feedback from customers, patients or users, with names where you have permission.
• Invite an internal or external customer to a team meeting for ten minutes to describe what difference the team's work made.
• When a project ships, tell the team who used it and what happened next.

Make progress visible

• Break large pieces of work into steps that can be finished in a week.
• Celebrate small wins in public channels. They matter more than managers usually think.
• Remove obstacles quickly. A setback that the manager could have prevented is one of the most demotivating experiences at work.

Give people room to craft their jobs

• Ask each person which parts of their work they find most meaningful, and see whether they can do more of it.
• Let people choose how to reach a goal where possible.

Get the hygiene factors right first

• Check that people have the equipment, safety measures and information they need, at home or on site.
• Be honest about job security, even when the honest answer is "we do not know yet".
• If you cannot pay more, do not pretend that a thank-you message is the same thing.

Recognise specifically

• "Thank you for working hard" is fine. "Thank you for staying late to fix the payment bug, it meant 2,000 customers got paid on Friday" is much better.
• Recognise effort that is invisible: the person who quietly helped a new colleague, or who handled a difficult customer well.

6. A checklist for managers

• [ ] Can every person on your team say, in one sentence, who benefits from their work?
• [ ] When did your team last hear directly from someone they helped?
• [ ] Does everyone have the equipment and safety measures they need?
• [ ] Have you been honest about what you know and do not know about jobs and pay?
• [ ] Have you recognised at least one specific piece of good work this week?
• [ ] Is there a setback you could remove for someone tomorrow?
• [ ] Have you asked each person which part of their job they would like to do more of?

Why this matters

• Purpose is a performance tool. Contact with the people who benefit from the work can more than double effort, as Grant's study showed.
• Meaning without fairness backfires. Asking people to be motivated by purpose while ignoring pay and safety breeds cynicism.
• Remote work makes meaning harder to see. Managers now have to connect people with impact deliberately.
• The way organisations treat people now will be remembered. When this crisis eases, people will remember who looked after them.

Final Thoughts

The weekly applause was a moving thing. It was a way for a country stuck indoors to say something it does not say often enough: that the people who care for us, feed us and clean up after us matter.

The research says that people want to do work that matters, and that knowing it matters makes them work harder and feel better. But meaning is not a substitute for fair pay, safe conditions and honest leadership. The challenge for every organisation, after the applause stops, is to provide both.

Sources

• Office for National Statistics, Coronavirus and key workers in the UK (May 15, 2020).
• The Irish News, Clap for Carers should end next week, says founder (May 22, 2020).
• Adam M. Grant, Elizabeth M. Campbell, Grace Chen, Keenan Cottone, David Lapedis and Karen Lee, Impact and the art of motivation maintenance: The effects of contact with beneficiaries on persistence behavior, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 103(1) (2007).
• Frederick Herzberg, Bernard Mausner and Barbara Bloch Snyderman, The Motivation to Work (Wiley, 1959).
• J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham, "Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory", Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16(2) (1976).
• Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, "Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work", Academy of Management Review 26(2) (2001).
• Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).