From financial bonuses to extra time off, supervisors are always looking for ways to motivate employees to be more creative and share ideas with colleagues. Psychologist and business professor Adam Grant suggests an outside-the-box alternative: Find ways for your employees to grab face time with their customers and their colleagues in other departments.

An organizational psychologist and professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Grant has done several studies aimed at figuring out what motivates employees to innovate and share ideas. His findings indicate that when workers meet and talk with customers and colleagues — and subsequently realize that what they do actually benefits real people — it serves as a strong catalyst for creative thinking.

Ironically, the isolation of workers from end users is largely efficiency driven, says Grant. Organizations generally discourage interaction between workers and end users, assuming it makes people and processes less efficient. In addition, modern technology increasingly minimizes face-to-face communication.

Grant says his interest in employee motivation is largely driven by his own work experience. He noticed that while some people always came in early and stayed late, volunteered for projects, and took extra initiative on things, others would just do the minimum. “I always wondered why that happens … and how can you best align the interests of employees with the interests of the organization.”

To help determine what motivates employees to develop and share creative ideas, Grant conducted a study several years ago at a large utility with employees scattered across 30 to 40 different sites and had little contact with each other.

One of the study’s findings came as no surprise: Employees who are intrinsically motivated and curious come up with lots of great ideas. But the counterpoint to that was far less intuitive: For the most part, those concepts were usually impractical to implement.
“The most novel and useful ideas came from employees who were most adept at taking the perspectives of others … thinking about their work from co-workers’ points of view, or understanding a supervisor’s goals or a customer’s needs,” Grant says. “It’s that active perception-taking that allows them to filter through ideas and select the ideas that are the most practical to apply.”

So what can supervisors do to increase creativity and idea sharing? Grant suggests they start by thinking more broadly.

“The upshot for supervisors is that they often think about how to make work more interesting for employees, whether it involves giving them more autonomy to do a job, or provide learning opportunities to heighten their interest in work,” Grant says. “Studies suggest that those are valuable things, but we need to take some additional steps to translate ideas to others, like hiring employees who naturally tend to take the viewpoints of others.”

Supervisors can accomplish this by asking specific screening questions during job interviews or having job candidates perform short tasks that would indicate an aptitude for considering others’ viewpoints, Grant says.

For current employees, supervisors should create opportunities for employees to meet with the beneficiaries of their work or, at the very least, more effectively explain to them the urgent problems faced by customers and/or coworkers.

“You also can train people … get them in the habit of walking in other people’s shoes more often and more effectively,” he says. “One way to do this is through job rotation. Doing various jobs for a couple weeks at a time allow employees to see all the tasks an organization does … and creates more interaction between people whose work is interdependent.

“Too often we do work without a full, complete and vivid understanding of how people benefit from it,” Grant concludes. “There’s a lot we can do to humanize work and make employees understand how their ideas can affect people around them.” 

By Ken Wysocky

Ken Wysocky, owner of Write Words Communications, is a freelance writer based in Whitefish Bay.