The Bucket and the Basket
January 8th, 2009 by Joel D CanfieldAsk a business owner what would motivate his unhappy employees and most will answer "More money!" Unless his people are genuinely underpaid, he's wrong.
Frederick Herzberg's studies on mental health in business are a sort of practical application of Maslow's heirarchy of needs (which, by the way, isn't really heirarchical.) Often called The Two Factor Theory, Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory shows that, as expected, there are things in our work which make us happy, and things which make us unhappy. What's unexpected is that they're not the same things.
Certain aspects of work fall into the 'preventing dissatisfaction' bucket. Workers need to be paid fairly. They need safe working conditions and reasonable hours. If these needs aren't met, workers will be unhappy.
Which is very different from saying that if they are met, workers will be happy.
Other aspects of work fall into the 'creating satisfaction' basket. recognition, advancement, meaningful work, a sense of achievement—when these things are present, they increase happiness (which, we assume, will increase production and value; this assumption is intrinsic to Herzberg's work.)
Which, again, is not the same as saying they decrease dissatisfaction.
The 'preventing dissatisfaction' bucket gets filled with water. Pay enough money, have a safe workplace, meet the basic needs, and the bucket is full. Add more water (by paying more money, for instance) and it doesn't pile up—it overflows. Once dissatisfaction has been reduced as far as possible (hopefully, eliminated) there's no value in trying to reduce it further.
It's not a long scale with 'unhappy' at one end and 'happy' at the other. It's not a zero sum game, where reducing dissatisfaction equals increasing satisfaction.
What you have is two separate containers. Once the 'preventing dissatisfaction' bucket is full, you can't fill it more. But the 'creating satisfaction' basket—that, you can pile to the sky.
Recognition? There's no such thing as too much. Tell every employee, every day, how much you value their loyalty and hard work. Do it sincerely. Read The Carrot Principle and put it into practice.
Achievement? How about helping every employee do as much as they can? It helps fill their satisfaction basket, and fills yours at the same time.
Keep checking the 'prevents dissatisfaction' bucket, 'cause sometimes it leaks. But once you've got it full (or if it was full to begin with, for you A+ entrepreneurs) focus on creating satisfaction for your employees and customers.
And at the same time, you'll be creating your own.
September 1st, 2010 at 11:41 pm
Brilliant, as always.
And I say that because my ego needs the stroking, and we do seem to be sharing a brain.
I don't use grades to evaluate my students. I don't average, and I don't rank. Everyone works till they get where they are going, and then we decide where to go next.
When we begin something, we decide (as a group) what success will look like. We define it and list as many details as we can. We call that the full bucket.
Then we wonder what would go above and beyond mere success, and we describe excess. We call that an overflowing bucket.
Then we go back and fill in what partial success, or a half-bucket might look like.
And then we imagine the project as an empty bucket.
Now, as we begin, we all have empty buckets. We have just started the project. But we can goal-set, and we can learn and grow, and we can continuously improve. And because a thing is never done until it is a success (though the opposite is true in many classrooms where a grade is a judgment of relative success upon reaching a time called "done") we persist in revising and critiquing and revising against the standard set - until everyone has a full bucket.
Except, of course, for those who set their sights on the imagined (and unimagined) and have a bucket overflowing and growing beyond the initial definition of success.
Till one day when I had a child who was distressed by the overflowing bucket because it seemed messy to spill over, and that couldn't possibly be better.
So we changed from water in a bucket, to apples in a basket.
It is indeed a satisfaction and achievement basket. And remarkably, the fact that they get to define success for themselves, set their own goals, and help one another achieve, is all the basic needs filling it takes to prevent leaks in that other bucket.
September 2nd, 2010 at 7:28 am
I'd love to talk about where you came up with that, because I read my stuff in a book and just put it in my own words. I have the impression you probably thought about how the human mind works and then came up with a teaching method that respected it.
But maybe you read it somewhere, like I did.