There’s a popular idea about high performance that sounds really good, but it’s actually completely wrong when you look closely: if you want to do your best, you have to do your best.
Every day, every project, every deadline, push harder, stay focused, raise the bar, give 110%. It all sounds so good in theory, and it sounds so disciplined and high-performing and like the mantra of someone who is a cut above the rest.
The rub is that nothing is designed to operate at 100% all day, every day.
Your PC overheats if you leave it at max power for too long
The battery dies if you leave it draining
Your muscles need rest and recovery time
Your motivation needs a boost
Even the most disciplined people have down days, where they aren’t at their best, and their focus and motivation just aren’t there. Yet, somehow, at work, we are often judged as if these aren’t down days. It is almost as if, because you produced your best yesterday, today is no excuse for being less than perfect.
Because you got through that hectic week in May, this week is no excuse to dial things back, and if you’re especially good for a while, people, including yourself, start to expect it to be the norm. We start to expect peak performance, since everything was peak performance for a while. That’s where the rub starts to become really bothersome.
Peak Performance is a Peak, not a Permanent State
We tend to think about performance as a sliding scale. You’re doing 60%, or 80%, or 100%. The more you can push towards 100%, the better.
However, real performance isn’t about getting to 100% and staying there. Some days you can push, sprint, and run at maximum capacity; other days, you need to hold steady, slow down, breathe for a bit, and take stock. It’s a matter of the ebb and flow of performance.
The mistake is seeing peak performance as the maximum and assuming that maximum performance is sustainable. Maximum performance is a peak, just like the name suggests. That doesn’t mean it can’t last long. It just means it can’t last forever.
For example, you may be able to work ten hours straight at an amazingly high level during a crisis, but that doesn’t mean that ten hours of work is now your new standard. You may be able to pull off an amazing presentation after a few nights of poor sleep, but that doesn’t mean sleep deprivation is somehow good for you. You may be able to handle weeks of non-stop deadlines, meetings, and interruptions, but that doesn’t mean your brain can function at peak capacity under those conditions. A peak is valuable, precisely because it’s a peak – it shows you where your ceiling, your upper limit is, when all the conditions are right to achieve it. If everything is a peak, nothing is.
If your company always expects you to have your best week, then eventually your best week will be the week that ruins everything for you. That’s where the myth that high performance comes from high pressure falls apart.
Pressure can create urgency or generate focus. It can help push through challenges when things really matter. What it cannot be is a productivity strategy. It simply doesn’t make for a sustainable workplace. That’s why the research into the effects of work demands and performance is so interesting. Some demanding jobs are energizing when the demands feel meaningful and manageable, but other demands, particularly ones that are unnecessary or obstructive, lead to exhaustion.
That means it’s not a matter of getting rid of all demanding situations, but more so a matter of realizing that more pressure will stop giving you returns at some point. You will eventually reach a point where, instead of pushing you forward, it’s holding you back.
This leads to the problem companies have with high-performance employees: the difference between getting people to work hard and getting people to work beyond sustainable levels. They may look similar on paper, but they’re very different in practice.
Your Workload Is Not a Test of Your Discipline
If performance doesn’t mean operating at 100% all the time, then the next question is obvious:
What is actually getting in the way of sustainable performance?
It is rarely a lack of discipline. It is actually the design of the work required of people.
We tend to measure workload in fairly simple terms: hours worked, deadlines met, tasks completed, targets achieved. That’s the visible part of the workload, but it’s only part of the picture. There is also the invisible workload of constantly deciding what deserves your attention:
Which email needs an answer?
Which meeting matters?
Which project has suddenly become urgent?
Who needs a response?
What can wait?
What did you forget?
What happens if you don’t get to it today?
Additionally, we combine these two parts with the dreaded interruptions: a message arrives while you’re writing, a notification appears while you’re analyzing something, someone asks a “quick question” while you’re trying to solve a complicated problem.
You move from the presentation > email > slack > meeting > presentation.
Technically speaking, you have been working the entire time, but working is not the same as concentrating.
Being Busy Can Look Like Performance
One of the stranger things about modern work is how easy it is to confuse activity with progress.
A full calendar looks productive
A constantly active inbox looks productive
Being available all day looks productive
Answering immediately looks productive
Working late looks productive
None of these things necessarily produce valuable work; in fact, they can make valuable work harder, since deep work requires continuity & focus. Complex problems need enough uninterrupted attention for the brain to build connections, test ideas, build the mental box in which it will work, and hold several pieces of information in mind at once. Every interruption adds another demand on that limited attention, pulling our focus out of the box.
This is why a day filled with meetings, messages, questions, inquiries, and small requests can leave you exhausted without giving you the satisfying feeling that you actually accomplished anything.
You weren’t doing nothing; you were just spending your energy on switching, and switching has a cost. Modern workers often carry several streams of cognitive and emotional work simultaneously while constantly toggling between them. The problem isn’t the number of tasks, but the mental energy required to change priorities and modes of thinking repeatedly.
This is an important difference to keep in mind, because if the problem is workload, the obvious solution is to become more efficient. However, if the problem is fragmented attention, efficiency will not solve it.
You can become extremely efficient at being interrupted. You will still be interrupted.
Your Brain Needs Some Space to Do Its Best Work
This is where deep work becomes more than another productivity trend. If you have important work that requires judgment, creativity, analysis, or sustained concentration, it needs protected space. This isn’t due to some weird ingrained ideas of “fragility”, but because the work itself demands it.
A complicated problem cannot always be solved in the gaps between notifications
A good strategy rarely appears because someone answered 47 emails before lunch
Creative thinking doesn’t necessarily improve when your calendar is full of meetings or bombarded with additional tasks
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is make yourself temporarily unavailable. That might mean different things to different people: 45 minutes with notifications turned off, a meeting-free morning, closing your inbox while you work on something important, or batching email instead of reacting to it every five minutes.
The exact method matters less than the principle: you don’t have to be available for everyone, every time, all at once.
There is an important detail to add here regarding expectations, because they matter, and every organization differs. Some are better at understanding what expectations are and how to forge them, and some aren’t.
If an organization says it values deep work but rewards instant responses, deep work will lose.
If leaders say people should disconnect but send messages at midnight, people will notice which instruction is real.
If managers say priorities matter but continue adding new priorities without removing old ones, employees eventually learn that everything is urgent.
If an organization says quality matters but consistently rewards whoever delivers fastest, people will learn to optimize for speed.
If leaders say employees are trusted to manage their own workload but constantly monitor when, where, and how they work, autonomy quickly becomes another word for surveillance.
You cannot solve a structural problem with a motivational speech. Actions matter more than words.
When Everything Is Important, Nothing Is Prioritized
Another pressure mechanism hides in plain sight, and is tied to the aforementioned expectations: that people should somehow fit every new demand into the existing workload.
A new client comes in.
A deadline moves forward.
Another meeting is added.
A new reporting requirement appears.
A project that was already important becomes even more important.
Now what happens to the old work? To the previous task that was the main task up until a moment ago?
Usually, nothing. It simply moves, but not laterally, vertically, or horizontally, but in a list. It gets placed into a list, and it stays there. This creates an impossible equation comprised of 3 variables: more priorities, the same amount of time, and an expectation that performance should remain unchanged.
Eventually, people compensate by extending the workday: they answer messages at night, work through lunch, catch up on weekends, or borrow energy from tomorrow to finish today’s workload.
Since the deadline gets met, the system concludes that the workload was manageable. This is one of the most dangerous feedback loops in high-performance environments, because successful overextension gets mistaken for sustainable capacity.
Example Scenario
Someone stays late and saves the project ➜ the organization learns that the project can be delivered.
Someone answers messages over the weekend and prevents a delay ➜ the organization learns that weekend availability works.
A high performer absorbs three people’s workload for a quarter ➜ the organization learns that one person can apparently handle it.
The same person keeps doing it because they are praised for being “reliable” ➜ exceptional effort becomes part of their reputation.
The next deadline arrives with the same unrealistic timeline ➜ instead of changing the timeline, everyone assumes they will find a way again.
They do ➜ the organization gets another successful outcome and receives even more evidence that the system is working.
The workload quietly becomes the new normal ➜ what was once exceptional is now simply expected.
Eventually, the person starts taking fewer breaks, working longer hours, and recovering less ➜ their available capacity shrinks.
Since they are still delivering ➜ nobody sees a problem.
Until the performance finally drops, and then the story can become: “What happened to them? They used to be so good.”
The individual may even reinforce the story themselves, internalizing it by thinking, “I can handle it.”
Perhaps they can. For now, at least. However, capacity isn’t infinite simply because someone has demonstrated exceptional capacity once.
This is how the vicious cycle reinforces itself: exceptional effort produces a successful outcome, the successful outcome becomes a new expectation, the new expectation requires more exceptional effort, and eventually the effort that once exceeded capacity becomes the baseline.
Sustainable Performance Requires Pacing
Think about almost any activity where performance matters over time. Take sports for example. Sports don’t work by asking an athlete to sprint at maximum speed from the beginning of the season to the end. Their training, recovery, crunch, and competitions all have cycles. Intensity changes according to the objective. So why should work be expected to look identical every day, too?
Some periods will require extraordinary effort for a major launch. There will be periods when a difficult problem demands intense concentration. There will be moments when the right thing really is to push. The problem comes when the exception becomes the operating model.
A crisis becomes the normal workflow.
A deadline becomes the permanent pace.
The “temporary” late nights become less temporary and more like the expected late nights.
The sprint becomes the marathon.
Eventually, people stop recovering between efforts.
That is when pressure stops being useful and starts consuming the very capacity the organization needs. It is also why sustainable performance isn’t about finding a magical level of effort and holding it forever like a dragon’s hoard. It is about pacing effort intelligently, where some days will be stronger than others & some weeks will produce extraordinary output. In contrast, other periods will be quieter or more focused on maintenance, learning, and recovery.
When we witness this type of variation in the workload, it isn’t evidence that performance has disappeared; rather, it is evidence that performance is human. Organizations that understand this can start designing work differently:
Protecting focus rather than glorifying availability
Clarifying priorities rather than continually adding them
Reducing unnecessary meetings and interruptions rather than expecting employees to “manage their time better“
Creating genuine boundaries around communication
Stop treating recovery as something employees earn after they have finished everything, because they will never finish everything
There will always be another email, another project, another target, another thing to improve. If rest only begins when the work is finished, rest never begins, and without recovery, the organization eventually starts spending tomorrow’s performance to pay for today’s output.
The Best Performers Know When to Push and When to Recover
So, if sustainable performance isn’t about 100%, what is?
The answer isn’t as flashy as it seems, or as some gurus would have you believe. In fact, the people who sustain high performance across years are often not the ones who push relentlessly whatsoever.
They can concentrate intensely when the moment calls for it, disengage when concentration is a liability, balance intensely demanding work with more routine work, have a draining week without every week being draining, and, most importantly, know how to quit.
A lot of people are under the (misguided) impression that quitting is the easiest part. As any high performer will tell you, quitting can sometimes be quite uncomfortable, to the point where you feel it physically, for what is otherwise a mental task.
If doing a good job is a part of your identity, having a less useful self feels like falling short. Yet quitting is not true renunciation, but recovery, and recovery isn’t the opposite of performance – it is its enabler.
There are studies about psychological detachment from work, and large-scale reviews show the benefits of switching off from work: better wellbeing and less exhaustion, linked to improved sleep and work performance. Therefore, recovery can come in without depriving you of performance. Conversely, it can add to your performance.
Recovery Has to Be Part of the Design
This is where organizations get it wrong, since they usually tell people to recover when the work is done.
“Take your holiday after the big project.”, “Rest after the deadline.”, “Switch off after being caught up.”, “Take a breather after we’re done here.”
The problem is work is never done, and there is always another project waiting. Consequently, recovery has to play second fiddle to work and has to be seen as an input rather than an output.
Sleep matters, breaks matter, time away from screens matters, a lunch that isn’t dedicated to answering messages matters, an evening where nobody expects a response from you matters, and even having enough space between demanding tasks for a reset before the next one matters. None of that requires turning the workplace into a wellness retreat, just a recognition that people can’t spend attention and energy endlessly without recharging them.
Even small interruptions in the cycle can help and are better than nothing: walks in between meetings, ten minutes of no notifications, a real lunch break, a protected block for focused work, an end to the working day. All of these things seem insignificant compared to a quarterly target, but performance is made up of small conditions that repeat over time.
The same holds for the other direction: small amounts of unmanaged pressure repeated every day ultimately add up to a very large amount of exhaustion.
Boundaries Are a Performance Tool
The boundaries between work and life are often seen as just about employee wellbeing. They are, make no mistake, but they are also about performance. If work follows you everywhere, your working day never really ends. You might not be at your desk, but part of your attention is expecting the next notification.
Did the client reply?
Did the manager send something?
Is there another issue waiting?
Should I check email?
All this background monitoring incurs a cost. This is especially taxing for remote and hybrid work, which can make it harder still to create psychological boundaries between work and everything else.
A simple transition ritual can help: shut the laptop, take a walk, change clothes, leave the workspace, and decide the day is over. The ritual itself is not important (it can be anything feasible for you); the separation is. Then, leaders compound this effect.
If the person at the top sends emails at midnight, people notice. If managers work through every holiday, people notice. If someone tells you “you don’t have to respond tonight” but then follows up ten minutes later asking why nobody has responded yet, people are very aware of it.
Culture isn’t what the handbook says; it’s what people learn they are actually expected to do:
If you want people to recover, make it visible
If you want boundaries, be them yourself
If you want deep work, protect it
If you want sustainable performance, stop rewarding people for secretly extracting energy from them
The Organization Has to Stop Spending Tomorrow’s Performance Today
This is ultimately about more than just the individual. An employee can turn off notifications, plan their day, take a walk, and use a focus block. All of that helps, but no productivity tool can compensate for an organization that continually demands more work than the people can handle.
Too many priorities?
Someone needs to kill some priorities.
Meetings eat the day?
Some meetings need to vanish.
Is every request urgent?
The organization needs to learn what actually is urgent.
Not enough people to do the work?
The organization needs to address the capacity gap instead of expecting existing employees to absorb it.
When a high performer is carrying the workload of three people, telling them to “manage their stress” or “deal with it” is outsourcing a management problem to the person living it. This is why sustainable performance has to become a work-design issue: leaders need to ask better questions.
It is fine for them to ask “How much did we get done?”, but they should also ask “What did it cost us to get it done? Did the team have time to think? Did quality suffer? Did people stop taking breaks? Did decision-making become rushed? Did employees lose patience with each other? Did everyone finish the quarter exhausted? Can we do this again?”
If the answer is no to such questions, what you achieved might have been impressive, but it wasn’t sustainable performance; it was extraction, much like how we’d rapidly deplete an ore mine by mining 24/7, and then wondering what happened when it dried out.
A team that achieved an extraordinary result and then spent the next three months recovering from it won’t have outperformed a team that delivers strong results repeatedly over time.
The first team might have had a higher peak, but the second has a higher baseline, and that wins out in time.
Final Thoughts
High performance doesn’t require relentless, unmitigated pressure; it doesn’t require maximum effort every day, or people to live permanently at their personal peak. That’s not how humans work. People simply don’t function optimally under such circumstances.
Performance has rhythms; there are peaks and troughs, intensely demanding days and days where recovery is needed, days where the brain is sharp and days where it is not, projects that require everything you have and ordinary days where a steady performance is what good performance looks like.
The goal isn’t to remove those fluctuations, but to work with them rather than pretending they don’t exist. That means realistic workloads, protecting attention, reducing unnecessary interruptions, creating space for deep work, setting expectations, making boundaries real, and recovering to enable future performance.
For leaders, it also means resisting a tempting but dangerous equation: more pressure equals more output. Sometimes it does, until it doesn’t. Until someone breaks and the pieces can no longer be put back together, which is how you can easily lose a star employee.
The organization that continually pushes its people towards maximum capacity might win impressive numbers for a while, but the costs will eventually appear elsewhere: poorer decisions, weaker relationships, lower creativity, disengagement, turnover, and exhaustion.
The smarter question isn’t “how do we get everyone to perform at 100%,” but “how do we create the conditions in which people can perform well, recover, and do it again tomorrow?“
A 100% effort might win a sprint, but business is rarely a sprint, and sustainable excellence doesn’t come from staying at the peak but knowing when to climb, when to push, when to slow down, and most importantly, when to recover so you can climb again.
For decades, companies have been trying to find a way to get employees to be more motivated.
Some have tried to raise salaries, others have tried bonuses, employee-of-the-month plaques, team-building exercises, pizza Fridays, wellness programs, flexible schedules, or free coffee in the office (and the coffee is the cheapest one imaginable).
Every few years, a new management theory comes along, promising to revolutionize the workplace and unlock the secrets to engaged employees. Despite all this, it seems disengagement is still the norm and burnout is rampant. People are leaving well-paying jobs for seemingly little reason, while at the same time, refusing to budge from lower-paying ones.
What gives? What does it all mean?
The popular answer is simple: money is the most important motivator.
On paper, it makes intuitive sense. People need money to survive, and more money usually means more luxuries. Seems logical, seems good. The problem is it’s only half true!
Money is an important motivator, surely, but it’s a motivator for getting a job, not for doing a good job. This is an outstanding distinction, because most companies don’t have trouble finding people willing to do the work. Getting people through the door is the easy part.
Finding people willing to go above and beyond, solve problems, hone their skills, help out their coworkers, and really care about the job – now there…THERE’s your real challenge. Those things can’t be bought, and no, the old adage of “everyone has their price” doesn’t actually work.
You’ll soon find out that as you increase the salary to keep up the good work & dedication, it goes up and up and up, becoming unsustainable. Then, sensing a shiver down your spine and a feeling of dread, you will quickly realize it was never about the money…but now you’re in the red.
Money Isn’t the Villain, and It Never Was
Before diving into the subject matter, it is important to dispel a common misconception that often surrounds discussions of motivation. In many cases, articles on the topic present the premise as a choice between paying employees well and providing them with motivation at work.
In some cases, they go so far as to list “ways to motivate employees without spending money.” This is not an accurate perspective, however, as fair compensation is a necessity, and not a variable that should be bargained with.
If someone has to pay rent, cover utilities, feed their children, and buy groceries, motivation is most definitely not a priority.
If people are aware that they are significantly underpaid in comparison to their peers, motivation is not a priority.
If salaries barely see an increase from year to year, while workloads and expectations remain steady, motivation is not a priority.
In all of these cases, money is the determining factor in an employee’s attitude and performance. It is an obvious point, but one that is often overlooked by management in favour of other, less effective, motivators.
Money may not solve every problem, but it certainly helps in many cases. Few other motivators hold as much power when it comes to financial concerns. Therefore, it is plain to understand that fair pay is the foundation upon which motivation is built, rather than the other way around.
Or, to put it in less academic terms: you cannot simply replace a raise with a pizza party.
The Difference Between Showing Up and Caring
One reason this myth was born is that compensation really does change behaviours.
Pay someone more, and they will be more inclined to join your company. Offer someone a substantial bonus, and they will be motivated to perform better so that they can receive it. This is known as extrinsic motivation, and it works. Extrinsic motivation is real, and it is important. Without it, few individuals would willingly commit to forty hours of unpaid work each week.
However, once a person’s most basic needs are met, additional increases in compensation motivate them less and less. That’s where intrinsic motivation comes into play.
Think about it:
Why is it that some people always seem to seek out better ways of doing their jobs while others are quite happy to do the tasks that are simply required of them?
Why do some teams manage to stay enthusiastic about their work while others burn out at the same salary?
Why do some talented individuals choose to stay in their current position at a lower wage rather than move to a new company?
Why do some employees remain deeply committed to an organization despite receiving offers with higher salaries elsewhere?
Why do people willingly go above and beyond for one manager, yet do only the bare minimum for another?
This is the motivation that comes from within. Once people stop thinking about how money affects them, they start to think about how their work affects them.
People will rarely change their behaviours for a different paycheck if they feel that there is no impact beyond whether or not they can afford the food on the table and a roof over their head.
If they do not feel that their work has meaning, that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves, that they matter, then they are unlikely to put in extra effort.
Motivation Is Not a Transaction
Perhaps the easiest mistake to make when it comes to motivating employees is thinking it can be bought. It can’t.
Companies often act as if motivation is something they can hand out like another type of compensation: raises, bonuses, employee recognition, wellness programs, benefits packages.
Now, to be clear, all of these are important, but none of them are motivation. Motivation comes from somewhere else. It comes from the relationship between what employees put in and what they feel they get out: trust, opportunity, recognition, respect, growth, autonomy, fairness, meaning.
It all adds up when you think about it. When employees feel as if they are no longer getting what they believe they deserve in return for their efforts, it doesn’t just affect their opinions of the company. It has a direct impact on their willingness to put in that effort in the first place.
It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly at first.
People stop trying to contribute.
They stop experimenting.
They stop advocating for their ideas.
They stop caring.
None of these things occur because they’ve decided the work itself isn’t worth it, but because they no longer feel it is.
That, in the end, is the real reason for any drop in performance: not a change in the work itself, nor a shift in the challenges they face, but a feeling that the effort it takes for the rewards isn’t worth it.
A far easier way to think of it is that people rarely stop working because they’re doing something hard. They stop working because they’ve decided the rewards for getting it done aren’t worth it.
What Actually Keeps People Motivated?
If fair payment is the basis, what else is missing?
This is a question many psychologists and economists have asked for decades. Their main focus has been on finding the correlation between motivation and pay. The different perspectives have led to different conclusions. However, almost every theory boils down to one main idea, which, funnily enough, is also true for almost every aspect of human life:
People will only stay motivated if their work continues to satisfy certain criteria.
One of the theories, which has some strong points, is the Self-Determination Theory, or SDT for short. It focuses a lot on the quality of motivation.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, the psychologists who came up with it, believe that researchers should not think about motivation being high or low. Instead, the emphasis should be on the type of motivation a person is showing.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Aren’t Opposites
Most people have heard of the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
To keep matters brief, the former refers to one’s inner drive to engage in an activity, whereas the latter is one’s desire to engage in an activity to gain some reward from outside.
While the ideas behind this division are not wrong, they are often misinterpreted since those who promote this view suggest that intrinsic motivation is good and that one should only strive for it. In contrast, extrinsic motivation is presented as bad, and one should even go so far as to actively shun it.
In reality, the truth, like people, is more nuanced and multifaceted. Few people are driven purely by one factor alone, and their motivational factors are usually intertwined and cannot be easily decoupled.
If one wants to become a competent software developer, one has to study and learn the subject matter regardless of any rewards that society offers. However, most developers choose this career solely because of rewards and benefits, such as high pay, opportunities to work remotely, and job stability.
Similarly, few nurses engage in their work purely for personal satisfaction, and most are motivated by the desire to help others, coupled with the ability to earn a comfortable income.
While some salespeople might love what they do and find fulfillment in building relationships with clients, most aim for career growth and the additional income that comes with it.
Likewise, many teachers enter the profession because they genuinely enjoy educating others and making a difference in young people’s lives, but they also expect stable employment, career progression, and compensation that reflects the importance of their work.
From an employer’s perspective, the best course of action is to make sure that their employees’ extrinsic motivations are well taken care of so that their work does not become a chore and they can continue bringing their best performance on the job.
Autonomy Creates Ownership
One of the most effective ways to predict long-term motivation is surprisingly simple: people want some level of control over how they work.
Autonomy does not mean having no accountability or being completely independent in all aspects of work, but rather, having enough freedom from a controlling force to feel trusted in making decisions without being dictated at every step.
Think about the difference between two contrasting office environments.
A well-oiled machine; everyone knows their place, what is expected of them, and how to do it.
A loosey-goosy environment, with laid-back guidelines, but more trust & confidence in their employees to figure out how to get the work done, even in a crisis.
Both have equally competent workers, but which one do you think has the potential to create truly motivated employees?
Well, let’s answer this question by saying ownership breeds motivation. People who have a sense of ownership in their work are more likely to think beyond what is asked of them and how they can make a difference. They see a problem before it is brought to them and take initiative in fixing it. They think beyond their job title and do the work because they want to, not because they are told to.
As can be seen, this has absolutely nothing to do with accountability or lack thereof, but rather the feeling that they have a personal investment in what they do.
Trust fosters a sense of ownership, and that leads to motivation, or in a more modern-worded take: people want to feel that they have a say in how they do their work.
Mastery Makes Improvement Rewarding
Think of any skill that you’ve learned over the past weeks, months, or years: driving, cooking, programming, writing, teaching, or playing an instrument.
At first, you were most likely, probably not very good. You must have made lots of mistakes, and the work was hard, but THEN…then something magical happened. You started to get better. Things that were once hard became easy, and problems that seemed impossible became doable.
This stoked a warm feeling deep inside, and your brain got hit by wave after wave of dopamine as you neared the solution to your challenges. The feeling only got greater as you saw yourself improving. Psychologists call this urge to improve mastery.
Many companies fail to realize how important mastery is. Most people don’t just want a job. Some do, but eventually, after many dreary eves pass, even such individuals crave more.
They want a career
They want to learn and grow
They want to be challenged
They want to become experts in their field
They want to get better every day
If you stop challenging your employees, you’ll start to see a drop in curiosity. They’ll still be putting in the hours, but they’ll feel like they aren’t really accomplishing anything, and your ambitious employees will get hit much harder by this than the average staff member.
That’s why companies that invest in making sure their employees are constantly learning and improving usually see much more than just an increase in technical skills. They send a message to their employees that they care about their future.
In other words, employees are much more likely to stick around if they feel like they’re constantly improving.
Purpose Gives Effort a Reason
There is this phrase that most people never actually get to experience and is uttered in almost every mission statement: “Our people are our greatest asset!”
(If good taste would allow it, they’d add 3 !!!, and then the next company would do 4, and soon it would turn into an !-measuring contest)
Purpose, as a concept, has followed suit much in the same way, sadly. It has become one of those hollow words that is overused in the corporate world, to the point it has become a meme.
It is lamentable because a sense of purpose is one of those things that can be incredibly motivating for people. Purpose doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing something that will change the world. It just means that you know why you’re doing what you do.
A customer service rep who helps angry customers return products
An engineer who makes the widgets that people use every day
An accountant who keeps the company’s finances in order
A janitor who ensures that the hospital is a clean environment for its patients
An IT technician who keeps the systems running so hundreds of colleagues can do their jobs without interruption
A warehouse worker who ensures that products reach customers accurately and on time
They might not all be earth-shattering jobs, but they all have value, a sense of purpose, meaning, and impact on the world. What’s important is to realize that the thing they’re doing isn’t just something that they do for the sake of it. It needs to be something that they do for a reason, a purpose – that’s when it becomes transactional: do this for me, and I’ll give you that.
It’s not a bad system, and there’s nothing wrong with it. For some people, that’s all they need. For many people, though, eventually, it becomes dissatisfying. They stop caring about doing the thing and start caring about why they should do the thing. That’s when the “I just want more money” becomes a problem. That’s also when people stop thinking about the task at hand and start thinking about why they should even care about it.
It’s much harder to answer that question with a raise because money can’t achieve that. It can’t tell you why you should care about what you do. It can give you a reason to do it, but not a reason to care.
Money talks to your wallet. Purpose talks to your soul.
The Hidden Motivators Organizations Overlook
By now, you should already know that motivation is not produced by a single source. It is generated through a multitude of interactions, and it can be created or destroyed by hundreds of tiny occurrences. Pay and perks matter, as does autonomy, professional development, and purpose.
However, there are additional factors that have a significant impact on an employee’s motivation and engagement in the workplace in the long run. The crucial point is that these factors are rarely mentioned during job interviews: they are usually discussed in exit interviews.
Fairness Builds Trust
Imagine two similar employees: same salary, similar-ish work, equivalent ratings. Yet, out of the two, one always seems to get the plum assignments, public praise, endless cheer, and opportunities for promotion.
Now, the question at hand becomes: how long until the other begins to ask pungent, uncomfortable questions? Not long, I’d wager.
This is due to the fact that one factor stands out as an extremely powerful motivator: the perception of fairness.
Fairness in the workplace goes far beyond pay, as important as that is. It is the great equalizer, and it also entails consistency in how decisions are reached for things such as promotions, assignments, workload, kudos, mistakes, and communication.
People may be willing to accept outcomes they do not like, but they are much less tolerant of confusing circumstances. When it comes to explaining a decision, transparency seems to have an enormous impact on whether people will accept it. Give people enough information that they can understand a choice, even if they are not happy about it, and they will be much more likely to accept it than if they are in the dark and suspect something negative might be lurking.
When employees begin to feel as if they are getting less than they deserve, it is rarely productive to argue the point directly. Compensation issues, for example, are often emotional affairs, in which employees are apt to ask themselves not only how much they are being paid, but whether they are being treated fairly. By that, they often mean, how does my employer feel about my contributions?
Compensation is one of those tell-tale signals of how much value a company feels like it is getting out of its employees. The company is constantly sending out signals via compensation levels, and the truth is often hard to disguise, even when no one is discussing it openly.
Recognition Validates Contribution
Recognition is one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern management.
Many companies have turned it into a token, almost-jokey gesture: a monthly award, a thank-you note, an article in the company newsletter, a gift card.
While all these things may have their value, they fail to address the most important aspect of recognition: the simple fact that people care whether what they do matters. Recognition is valuable because it reassures employees that their work has not been in vain.
It is a response to the question “did what I do actually make a difference?” which is especially important when talking about demanding, difficult jobs.
“If I put my heart and soul into a challenging task and, when it finishes, nothing is said about it, does it mean it was not worth doing? Maybe it does not matter to me, but most likely, it will affect my motivation to do similarly demanding work in the future.”
Recognition is valuable because it reassures employees that someone has noticed and that what they do matters to somebody. It should be noted, however, that recognition, in many ways, is a tool that can only be used effectively in a good workplace.
If the company culture is unhealthy, and employees feel like their work is not valued, recognition gestures will do little to reassure them. They will see them as hollow tokens, attempts to manipulate them.
Recognition cannot fix rotten foundations. It cannot compensate for constant underpayment or lack of appreciation. It should not be used in bad faith, as a way to cover up management’s mistakes.
In simple, clear terms: pizza parties don’t fix broken workplaces.
Progress Is One of Motivation’s Strongest Fuels
Think about the last time you went all out trying really hard on some project. Now imagine there are two possible outcomes:
You see results. Things are coming together. You are improving. Things are getting done.
Despite your best efforts, things seem to get nowhere. One week seems much like the next. Problems arise, often in the same places. Goals appear ever distant, and your efforts seem to vanish up the memory hole, never to be remembered again.
Which would make you feel better? Which would make you want to keep working? How do we feel when we are reminded that too many workplaces are inadvertently creating the second situation for their employees?
Too many of us are working without the benefit of seeing the value of our efforts. Studies on worker motivation have shown that a sense of making progress is one of the most important factors in influencing positive emotional reactions toward work. That doesn’t mean we should expect huge leaps forward or giant achievements.
It means that people need to see some form of forward movement to feel good about what they do. It could be small steps. It could be baby steps, but people need reassurance that they’re actually getting somewhere. Some progress makes people feel their work has value. Without it, everything seems pointless.
That’s why effective leaders acknowledge and celebrate progress all the time, not just when people reach the end goal. It’s not that people don’t need goals or don’t care about rewards, but because forward movement answers the silent question, “Are we really getting somewhere?“
As long as the answer is “Yes,” then people can remain motivated. When the answer starts to sound more like “I’m not sure,” then well…that can be demotivating.
People don’t need to finish the race each and every week. They just need to know they are still running towards the finish line.
Burnout Isn’t a Motivation Problem
Burnout is often attributed to something that happens when employees “just lose their motivation.” That’s a reductive view of what it means to experience burnout. It isn’t that sudden; it usually results from a slow process of exertion with decreasing perceived psychological return.
The workload increases, or the rewards for said work decrease, and the worker’s relationship with their work deteriorates. People begin to feel ineffective, powerless, unable to accomplish the things they think are important, even if their work itself doesn’t change.
People who suffer from burnout continue to perform their tasks because they feel like they have to, not because they feel like it has meaning or value. Most people can handle hard projects, long working hours during important periods, unexpected problems, and high levels of responsibility. What they can’t handle is feeling like all of their hard work is wasted, stagnant, irrelevant, or unnoticed.
When companies have people who are burned out, the default question is rarely “how can we incentivize these people to perform better?” but rather “what made them feel so devalued in the first place?” These are two completely different lines of inquiry with very different solutions.
Final Thoughts
This article started with a simple myth: money is the greatest motivator.
Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth. Money does matter – it satisfies basic needs, reduces stress, attracts people to the organization, and indicates whether the company cares about its employees. In other words, ignoring the importance of money would be foolish.
However, it is only one factor influencing workers’ motivation. A more critical source of motivation is an individual’s perception of their work and how they are treated within the workplace.
Employees are more likely to be motivated if they realize their efforts make a difference, they improve themselves, their performance is valued, they can rely on their colleagues, and they are not stuck doing the same tasks. Such motivation is fragile, as it takes care to create the aforementioned circumstances.
Many people think of motivation as a binary indicator: either individuals are motivated to work, or they are not. In reality, motivation is more of a continuum. This is why people need to feel their contributions are worthwhile, and they can rely on their colleagues. Organizations should focus more on nurturing a culture in which employees understand that their work matters. It will enable them to achieve greater productivity as motivated individuals will be more likely to go above and beyond.
In today’s exceptionally modern times, there is no reason organizations shouldn’t strive to make employees feel that both money and non-monetary aspects of work are adequate. After all, people are unlikely to quit doing their tasks because they do not enjoy them. They are more likely to leave if they perceive no value in their efforts. People only experience dissatisfaction when their efforts do not provide them with rewards they want. Therefore, an organization should ensure that employees feel rewarded both intrinsically and extrinsically.
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Motivation is more complex than a paycheck. Build the knowledge and skills to manage employee performance with a broader understanding of what drives people at work through Certified Employee Performance Management
The Myth: Feedback Automatically Improves Performance
We’ve been told for decades that feedback is an agent for improved performance. If that were true, annual reviews would produce high-performing teams, generic comments would influence behaviour, and being told you “need to do more communication” would make you communicate better.
None of that has been shown thus far to work in any capacity. Furthermore, organizations don’t appear to be starved for feedback. In most, performance reviews happen annually, managers talk to people one-on-one regularly, there are post-project discussions, and feedback is “offered” in casual conversations. Employees continue to rack up “satisfactory” performances with write-ups, and employees’ careers are littered with commentary in the vein of “needs development in A, B, and C,” yet continue to repeat their same errors and get stuck in the same traps. The issue stems from the inability to give people the kind of feedback they might be receptive to.
This in particular is a really crucial distinction: feedback, on its lonesome, is just information.
Information becomes development in four areas:
Understanding
Acceptance
Retention and Translation to Behaviour
Action
Fail any of these four, and feedback may have been delivered, but it hasn’t been useful. This is where a deeply cherished organizational myth crumbles. So many leaders believe that they have “delivered the feedback” and thus have “done” the change development side themselves; the remainder is up to the employee.
Research clearly shows it does not work that way. In 1996, research conducted by Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi undertook a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies of feedback interventions. While many feedback interventions were helpful, the research found that nearly a third of feedback interventions actually caused people to do worse.
This then begs the question: if feedback was so good for people’s performance, why would it be negative one-third of the time?
Such a realization clarifies why simply giving feedback isn’t the issue; rather, it’s the quality of that feedback across these different areas, as only good feedback develops behaviours.
Why Most Feedback Fails to Improve Performance
Unfortunately, most workplace feedback is not very useful. If you’re in a managerial position, think about what your employees hear every day:
“You need to be more strategic.”
“Improve your communication skills.”
“Take more ownership.”
“That didn’t turn out well.”
On the surface, these are all well-intentioned pieces of feedback. They acknowledge that something needs to change, but they don’t answer the most important question:
What, precisely, do I need to do differently?
Without this question, feedback is mere judgment and becomes an exercise in frustration. Imagine telling a person to “do a better job of taking care of their health.” Should they get more sleep? Exercise? Eat differently? Reduce stress? Drink more water?
The advice is not wrong; it is simply so broad that it is impossible to act on and will just be taken as something given in bad faith.
The same is true of workplace feedback. Telling your employee to “communicate better” leaves them with no direction on what behaviour to modify, when & how it needs to change, and how success will be assessed. Employees typically end such meetings knowing they didn’t meet expectations, but still unclear on what “different” looks like.
Clarity gives people confidence while vagueness makes them hesitate, and hesitation has a cost.
Employees unable to see what “good” is may second-guess their decisions, delay taking action, become silent rather than speak up, or fall back on familiar work patterns rather than try something new. We thus run into this weird scenario where the goal of feedback-to-performance-improvement can actually decrease this ratio.
Timing causes another major problem.
The annual or semi-annual performance review is the norm in many organizations. By the time the manager and employee gather to discuss an employee’s work, the events in question may have transpired months earlier.
Human brains are not wired to learn from events distant in the past; details, along with context, are lost, and emotions often overlay objective observation. Instead of an opportunity for improvement, the performance review turns into a historical document, and changing one’s behaviour yesterday is impossible. The more employees can effectively influence their behaviour tomorrow, the higher the quality of their outcomes will be. That is why organizations around the world are shifting from treating feedback as an event to treating it as a process.
Gallup, for example, asserts that feedback has an expiration date: the closer it comes to the event it is about, the more helpful and actionable it is. Employees who receive frequent meaningful feedback are significantly more engaged than those who receive it only once a year.
Sense & Direction – another common mistake involves turning feedback into a one-way street.
The manager delivers the feedback, the employee receives it, neither party is certain whether they understood each other, and the meeting ends.
As it should be obvious, learning doesn’t tend to work this way. Employees have to ask questions, be sure expectations are clear, reflect on their own point of view, and discuss the desired results; otherwise, assumptions, not clarity, will prevail.
Emotion (or lack thereof).
Nobody likes to feel that they have done something wrong. When feedback intended to encourage development is interpreted as evidence of incompetence, recipients’ defenses go up. People are more likely to work on solutions when they are not afraid of being judged by their manager. Ultimately, the purpose of feedback is to help the person grow, not to prove the manager was right.
Moving beyond evaluation and toward development is the first step in feedback, and, ironically, one factor has proven more valuable than anything else: stop thinking about the past and begin planning for the future.
The Science Behind Feedback That Actually Works
If bad feedback does not lead to performance improvement, the immediate thought is, what does?
As shocking as this may be to some readers, the answer is not, in fact, “more feedback.”
What happens in a lot of instances is that companies, when bad feedback doesn’t produce positive results in the organization, try giving more feedback, more feedback check-ins, reviews, or telling people the managers should provide feedback more regularly.
Although this would naturally spring up from good intention, more feedback won’t do any good as the problem isn’t frequency. Bad feedback is still bad feedback, however much you try and disguise it or apply layers of make-up over it. The crux of the problem lies in how we conduct a feedback conversation.
One of the very fascinating results of the studies being carried out into feedback research is that conversations that deal with past activities may result in managers obtaining just the reverse result. The objective of the discussion about a failed outcome seems to be to identify what exactly the problem was, to address why the results of a certain output did not quite match the standards, and to allocate blame.
So, if it is to make us understand the exact reasons behind a specific issue, it is surely easier to avoid its repetition? Well, most of the time it isn’t so.
Research conducted in 2020 found that conversations that focus solely on addressing the output from the previous stage can cause issues between a manager and employee regarding why it is likely not up to the mark. Quite contrary to creating a shared mindset, it becomes an act of making the employees defenseless towards their conduct and a tendency to self-assess the positive sides and look for external explanations for failure, increasing this discrepancy in their minds, which leads them to accept less and be less likely to adopt the feedback given to them.
If we want to have a better grasp of such findings, we need to ask ourselves: how do performance review meetings start most of the time?Do any of these lines sound familiar?
“Let us discuss this past performance and rectify the shortcomings.”
“Why was this project a failure?”
“Explain to me why you were not up to par with your deliverables.”
“What could you have done differently to achieve better results?”
“Can you explain why your performance did not meet expectations?”
“Let’s go over the areas where you fell short and discuss how to improve.”
Even though these are not bad questions, they place the focus of attention on proving oneself, not on learning in context. Once one starts doing that, they can only move their focus from learning towards showing themselves to others; in proving that they are competent or to explain their actions. After all, that’s the way one’s brain is formed.
The interesting thing, though, from this research is that managers do not need to withdraw this kind of feedback completely, but rather should aim to move their focus to discussions of the subject matter & its progress. What mostly determines whether employees accept and intend to change through a feedback process is a forward-focused discussion.
When an employee feels that a feedback discussion about their performance pertains to the future course rather than past failures, they become more receptive (also, this encourages the employee’s intention to implement the changes). So the subtle alteration could have immense significance.
To better illustrate this, ponder upon the following options:
“Your presentation lacked engagement, and the audience became unenthusiastic.“
Vs
“What steps can we take to enhance the presentation to fully capture the attention of the audience right till the end of the presentation?”
Whereas the previous sentence will attempt evaluation, the other one, in contrast, would be development. One is backward-leaning, whereas the other is forward-facing. The one that is toward a bright future focuses the discussion on the future, not only on issues or deficiencies of the past.
The reason many leaders emphasize the need for managers to become coaches is that coaches develop and coach people. Managers, rather than just criticizing a situation, can ask the following questions: “What is the thing that we learned here?“, “What will we try this time round differently?“, “Is there any assistance or resource required to have an impact this time?“, “How can we make our future attempt a successful one?”
Effective Feedback Is About Behaviour, Not Personality
What’s another key element common to all great feedback?
It addresses observable behaviours, not a person’s inner traits.
That may sound obvious enough that you wonder if we need to say it out loud, but the two often get tangled into one in the real world. Here are a few examples:
“You aren’t a great communicator.”
“You’re disorganized.”
“You don’t take ownership.”
The problem is you’ve now just defined who the person is, what their traits are, which are often deeply ingrained or even impossible to alter in real time. Think about trying to tell someone they “aren’t” good at communication; how would you even begin to prove that statement wrong? How can you work on what such a statement wants from you?
Now let’s think about how such assertions could be changed:
“During today’s client meeting, several key questions weren’t addressed before moving to a decision. Next time, I’d like you to pause and invite additional perspectives before wrapping up.”
“The report was submitted two days after the agreed-upon deadline. Let’s take a look at what might have been standing in your way and figure out what we can do differently for the next project.”
Actual change occurs when we use the right words and the right amount of words, to boot. Using both the right words and the proper amount requires going in-depth and pinpointing particulars. When we do that, you’re going to want to pinpoint things that can actually be changed, because behaviour is observable, measurable, replicable, and above all else, changeable.
Personality isn’t what needs improving – performance is. In other words, great feedback doesn’t make judgments about character or intent; instead, it describes what they did, explains why it mattered, and offers suggestions for what to do next & how to achieve it.
No employee should leave a performance discussion feeling unsure if they can even do their job. They should walk away with a clear understanding of exactly what success looks like the next time around. This is the key difference between criticism and coaching, and the key reason why the most effective feedback possesses characteristics that elevate it far beyond simply being “honest.“
Five Characteristics of Effective Feedback
Hopefully by now you’re noticing one thing fairly plainly: feedback isn’t so much about constructive versus damaging feedback. That is nonetheless a relevant difference and an important one to keep in mind, but feedback, what it should be at its core, means facilitating higher conduct from others.
However, if that is the case, we then have to think about another aspect: what makes one bit of feedback more likely to be seen and acted upon as an alternative, rather than met with quiet resentment and forgetfulness?
Though the precise context in every workplace may differ, researchers agree there are five elements more likely to have success.
1. It’s Timely
Feedback is time-sensitive.
The longer a manager waits to engage on a particular topic, the less valuable that conversation becomes. Details and context are lost, and both parties have to recall facts relying on hazy memory. As a coach, would you wait until the end of the season to give one piece of advice on positioning to one player? As a drama teacher, would you wait until a child’s annual recital to mention a few words of advice for playing correctly?
While these examples seem silly, there is a grain of truth there: we don’t learn that way.
Small adjustments in experience improve performance the most effectively when they occur as experience is unfolding. In light of this, some of the best-performing organizations have increasingly embraced the notion of “ongoing” rather than “formal” feedback practices.
They have shifted from the expectation that feedback primarily occurs in quarterly, bi-annual, and annual reviews to encouraging short check-ins on a daily and weekly basis. A five-minute chat between a team leader and report following an interaction with a client, a project kickoff, or the completion of a key milestone often adds far more value than a lengthy review two months later.
To this, we should mention an added benefit of timely feedback: it has an effect beyond improving recall – it impacts momentum too.
2. It’s Specific
One of the quickest ways to make feedback useless is to keep it too vague. Statements such as “You need to work on your communication” or “Be more proactive” may seem like they convey information but are highly unlikely to provide an employee with the specific behaviour they need to adjust.
Specific feedback defines behaviours that are observable and concrete. Instead of saying,”Your communication could use some work,” you can rephrase it in a manner that actually carries realistic improvement capability:
“In today’s client meeting, you did an excellent job answering their specific questions. However, you moved to a decision without asking for other stakeholders’ input, and a few people left the meeting with unanswered questions. In future meetings, be sure to pause after asking a question and wait for other people’s questions before making a final decision.“
Now the employee has a clear understanding of what the problem was, why it was a problem, what success looks like, and how they can achieve it. The guesswork is all but removed.
3. It’s Actionable
Identifying a problem doesn’t mean solving a problem. If it worked like that, snipers would make the best doctors.
Think about a personal trainer telling a new client, “You should get in better shape.” This is little more than a truism. Good trainers tell us what exercises to do, when to practice, how often, and what to track over a period of time. The same applies at work, where great feedback will answer the question ”What next?”
It should be noted that this kind of change might involve experimenting with how you run meetings, plan a presentation, ask questions during client discussions, or break projects down into smaller stages.
4. It’s Psychologically Safe
The trick to good feedback is the existence of psychological safety – a space in which feedback can exist without its recipients feeling mortified, culpable, or punitively chastised; if people are convinced that errors are equivalent to accusation or punishment, they will inevitably be either cautious or deceptive.
The key is a framework that does not reduce standards, nor obviate the necessity of conflict (conflict IS good when one understands how & why). It is a framework that signals the desire to develop through the feedback exchange, and in determining this climate, managers are critical.
By their very nature, curiosity offers a better way to communicate than accusation; questions teach more than assumptions; and listening matters more than lecturing. Furthermore, feedback is more effective when recipients believe the purpose is to develop, not to disgrace, so the intention is to learn when the feedback is intended to help you succeed, not to catch you out making mistakes.
5. It’s Future-Focused
As we’ve iterated a few times in this article, effective feedback enables forward progress. You may remember how past failures often create more than one story about why they happened. These can turn a conversation into an argument that quickly spins into finger-pointing and defensiveness, rather than learning.
A future-focused discussion shifts the entire goal.
Instead of asking: “Why did you do that?”
Ask: “What will you do differently next time?”
Instead of saying: “That strategy failed clearly.”
Ask: “How can we approach the next project to achieve a different result?“
This is a much softer approach that moves the conversation from “who” to “what,” and avoids rewriting the past, shaping the future instead. It sets people up for future success, not failure.
Replace Performance Reviews With Performance Conversations
There’s no greater example of the distinction between providing feedback and fostering improvement than the annual performance review at work.
For decades, companies have used an annual check-in to review performance, highlight gaps, pinpoint areas for improvement, and plan for the coming year. The logic is straightforward: gather observations for an entire year, get together for one meeting to rule them all, deliver feedback, and performance improves.
It feels like magic & sorcery, almost surreal…because it is!
At the time of the meeting, events may already be months old, and employees likely don’t recall the circumstances surrounding it. Managers may bring up very recent issues and ignore the whole year’s data. Both parties struggle to draw insights out of situations that have already passed and cannot be changed. Far too often, however, employees anticipate these conversations and prepare to endure them, rather than get anything valuable out of them.
Now compare that to organizations that weave feedback into their daily work. Here, instead of a single meeting a year, managers coach employees on an ongoing basis:
They praise positive performance as it is happening
Make corrections to minor habits before they become significant issues
Provide employees with opportunities to reflect and learn from their experiences
Embed feedback as an integral part of how the team gets things done, not an event that interrupts it.
Now, this is not to say that organizations should eliminate performance reviews wholesale. They do serve important purposes as documentation of employee achievement, conversation points for career growth, and discussions to align expectations and support administrative decisions.
The review, however, should not be the key mechanism for employee development. Instead, true growth occurs through the many minor interactions between formal performance evaluations. The most effective managers don’t merely review work – they actively contribute to its shape.
Final Thoughts
Feedback Doesn’t Change People ➔ Better Conversations Do
Giving feedback is just the first step in a long series up the stairs of improvement.
The real performance increase comes from the next steps.
Did you tell someone their feedback while the context was still clear?
Did you focus on specific behaviour rather than personality judgment?
Did you give the other person something specific they could do to improve?
Did you create a psychologically safe space for conversation?
Did you help the person understand what success actually looks like for them next time around?
If the answer to any of these questions is no then your feedback will not translate into any lasting growth, rather just another conversation that’s lost from memory by Friday afternoon. The best leadership practices not only evaluate but build capacity in people to step up and try to deliver on something new.
Realistically speaking, most people don’t act because somebody just told them they should. Most people grow because somebody shows them how they could become better, and then supported them with the confidence required to get there.
A performance management system (PMS) is composed of several interconnected elements. In this webinar, The KPI Institute’s Head of Professional Services ASEAN, Andrea Minelli, is joined by special guest FX Syuralpha, an HR practitioner with a strong background in performance management and other related disciplines. The two experts discuss the core components of a PMS, how these tools are designed, their purpose, and how they fit into the design of a comprehensive PMS architecture.
The digital revolution has fundamentally reshaped how we live and work. Governments across the globe are becoming increasingly reliant on digital technologies to deliver services more efficiently, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately, better serve their citizens. This transformation, however, hinges on a critical element: a workforce equipped with the necessary digital skills.
Evidence suggests a growing interest in employee training within the government sector. Data from professional course enrollment provided by The KPI Institute shows a significant increase, jumping from just 7% of government employees participating in 2022 to 25% in 2023. This near quadrupling of enrollment reflects a potential shift in priorities, with the public sector recognizing the value of investing in employee skill development.
Why Digital Skills are Essential for Government Employees in the Digital Age
In today’s digital landscape, a strong foundation in digital skills is no longer a luxury for government employees; it is a necessity for success. These skills form a critical toolkit that empowers them to excel across various aspects of their work. The foundation starts with basic computer literacy. This enables employees to navigate operating systems with ease, utilize essential software applications effectively, and
leverage digital communication tools for seamless collaboration. Building upon this base, the ability to interpret and analyze databecomes crucial. By extracting valuable insights from vast datasets, government employees can make informed decisions based on evidence, ultimately leading toimproved policy development and service delivery.
As government agencies increasingly rely on digital platforms, cybersecurity awareness becomes paramount. Employees equipped with this knowledge can identify and mitigate potential threats, safeguarding internal data and citizen privacy—a critical responsibility in the digital age.
The benefits extend far beyond simply improved efficiency. A digitally adept workforce fosters innovation within government. With a solid understanding of digital technologies, employees can explore new solutions for service delivery, streamlining public engagement. Ultimately, these skills unlock opportunities to enhance citizen experiences, creating a more efficient and responsive government for the future, as reflected by The KPI Institute`sGovernment Services Index 2023.
Challenges in Bridging the Digital Skills Gap
While the benefits of a digitally adept workforce are undeniable, a significantskills gap hinders many government sectors. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), limited access to training stands as a major obstacle. Budgetary constraints can restrict resources allocated for employee development, while a lack of readily available training programs in specific digital areas can further complicate skill acquisition.
Furthermore, the demanding nature of government work often creates time constraints. As highlighted by the International Labour Organization in one of itsreports, juggling daily workloads leaves employees with limited time to invest in upskilling or reskilling initiatives. Finally, a lack of awareness regarding the importance of digital skills development can be a significant hurdle. Employees may resist training opportunities or feel complacent about their existing skill sets,slowing the progress of acquiring new digital skills.
Strategies for Nurturing a Digitally Empowered Workforce
Recognizing the critical need to bridge the digital skills gap, governments around the world are taking a multifaceted approach. At the core lies a focus on targeted training programs designed to equip public sector employees with the specific digital skill sets they need to excel in today’s digital landscape. As a relevant example, South Korea’s“Data Governance Training Program” addresses the need for data analysis expertise in government agencies while providing specialized training to civil servants on data collection, analysis, and visualization tools.
However, simply providing training is not enough. Cultivating a culture of continuous learning is also important. This can involve fostering knowledge-sharing platforms where experienced employees mentor colleagues and share best practices. Additionally, promoting participation in online courses orMassive Open Online Course platforms from reputable institutions empowers employees to take ownership of their digital development.
France’s Ministry of Public Action and Accounts established a uniqueprogram that pairs tech-savvy younger employees with more experienced colleagues. Through “reverse mentoring,” the younger generation shares their digital expertise, while the senior employees provide valuable institutional knowledge and context. This collaborative approach fosters knowledge exchange, breaks down silos, and ensures a well-rounded understanding of technology within the government workforce.
Gamification techniques, with elements like points and leaderboards, can make learning more interactive, while microlearning (i.e., delivering bite-sized modules) caters to busy schedules and allows for self-paced learning. Mexico’s “Digital Skills Badge System” awards digital badges to government employees upon successful completion of training programs. These badges act as verifiable credentials, showcasing the specific digital skills an employee possesses.
Employee-Led Government Transformation
Bridging the digital skills gap within government workforces is not simply about acquiring new technical skills; it is about empowering employees to become active participants in the digital transformation journey. By investing in targeted training programs, fostering a culture of continuous learning, and providing opportunities for skill application, governments can equip their employees with the tools and confidence needed to navigate the complexities of the digital age. Ultimately, a digitally empowered workforce is not just about keeping pace with change; it is about using the potential of technology to deliver a more efficient, citizen-centric government for the future.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Performance Magazine Issue No. 30, 2024 – Government Edition.
