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Introduction
Welcome back to Season Three of Linking Our Libraries! We are Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to share information with all types of libraries, archives, and other nonprofits working to build their skills.
This season, we are working on building a toolbox of leadership skills and ideas. By the end of this season, you will have fifteen specific skills that will make you a stronger leader and manager in your organization.
This week we are looking at strategies motivating people at work.
The Basics
Although working in libraries is a wonderful job most of the time, the repetitive nature of the work, the service focus on people’s needs, and just working at the same job for years, can start to wear people down. Keeping staff motivated is an important part of that job as a leader. It is also one of the most difficult parts of the job.
Ideally people will enjoy their jobs, but may need work in expanding their horizons so they don’t get stale. Many things librarian staff do in a day or a week are pretty repetitive. You can only show people to the bathroom so many times, or set up a new library card account, before you have the whole procedure and all its nuances completely understood. And then what? This is where motivation comes in – helping staff to see how their small daily actions add up to a larger effort, in support of the library’s mission and strategic plan.
Most leaders – the good ones anyway – want to help staff to be as successful as possible. But knowing how to do this is tricky; your employees (rightly) insist on being unique individuals, each with their own set of motivators, which you may or may not know. And you need to help push all of them to be their best at work, doing that without a lot of the information that would be very useful. Keeping people going is much more complex than a quick pat on the back, or an occasional “good job!” But it does not have to involve a huge amount of work – just consistency.
Think back to our first episode on theories; there all sorts of ways to deal with motivating and directing people. You can try yelling and screaming, you can try being everyone’s friend and letting them do what they want, or you can find something in between.
One management study looked at ways to motivate people who were working on an assembly line. Researchers tried everything: they sped up the line and they slowed it down. They changed around break times. They turned up the lights to be very bright, and then turned them way down. What do you think happened? Every single thing they did increased productivity, and decreased absenteeism. The staff were so happy that people were paying attention to the work they did, and that the researchers were taking the time to talk with them about their jobs, that they responded by working harder. The group as a whole worked together to make everyone’s individual performance stronger. This is called the Hawthorne Effect, after the Hawthorne Western Electric factory.
Regardless of your management style, it is not likely that all people will respond the same way to the same motivators. It will be your job to figure out different motivators for different people (or departments), while trying not to let anyone feel others are getting preferential treatment. Being a good leader is tough!
Self-motivation
You need to keep yourself motivated, even through the challenges of workplace boredom and stress. Leaders need to be able to walk the walk here – and an unmotivated, bored, burned-out leader inspires nothing but a bad organizational culture. Let’s talk about a few strategies we can use to help keep your motivation high:
- Choose to be positive. This is harder some days than others, but making a deliberate choice to set aside problems and to be positive will have a lot of good benefits for you.
- Set a schedule. Your job may be pretty regimented, or you may have a lot of freedom to choose when and how you do your tasks. Either way, having a schedule for regular activities means they get prioritized and they get done – so you don’t have a lot of unfinished work left hanging. The fewer decisions you need to make about small stuff, the more decision-making energy you will have for important things.
- Talk to people. It is easy to get lost in a bad place when work is not going well, deadlines are whooshing by, and things are falling apart all around you. Go find someone to talk to about your work issues, or talk about the latest Game of Thrones book – when IS that coming out, anyway? Just the connection will help to build your motivation to try again.
- Talk walks. Move around, don’t just sit at a desk all day. Even of you eat your lunch at a desk, you need to get up to clear your head so you keep having good thoughts. A little physical movement will help reduce stress and keep your day positive.
Motivate Others:
Ideally people will enjoy their jobs, but may need work in expanding their horizons so they don’t get stale. Many things library staff do in a day or a week are pretty repetitive. You can only show people to the bathroom so many times, or set up a new library card account, before you have the whole procedure and all its nuances completely understood. And then what? This is where motivation comes in – helping staff to see how their small daily actions add up to a larger effort, in support of the library’s mission and strategic plan.
As a leader, even if you are not a supervisor, your behavior and outlook affect other people. So you want to be a motivating influence, not someone who drags down the people around you! Being deliberate about taking actions you know will be motiving is a great way to help build a good organizational culture! (We will be talking more about that in a few episodes.) Here are a few ideas:
- Thank people. It sounds like a small thing, but too often the good work people do is overshadowed by the busy day, or the mean patron who came in, or the latest budget disaster. Take a moment to acknowledge that someone has done good work, and you might inspire them to keep building on that!
- Set goals. Setting new goals each year in a performance evaluation, and specifically working to ensure they are something people can do is very motivating. If people still care about their jobs, knowing they have interesting things to look forward to at work will give them incentive to try new things, to work in new areas, or just to hone the skills they already possess. We do not need people whose contributions are “still sitting in this chair” – we need people in libraries who want to do things!
- Continuous training. Libraries are fast-moving and ever-growing places; we have no time for people to sit around letting their skills get stale. Library staff who are not regularly involved in either formal or informal skill development are soon lagging behind; and when people get too far behind, they tend to give up. If you can provide training – great; otherwise look around to help people find training they can use. Call CMLE, and we will help you!
- Reward, but don’t over–reward. Proving some small rewards can help your employees to think about their work as fun. But studies show that employees who are just working for rewards, not nothing else, will become very de-motivated after the rewards are finished. So, sure – hand out toy fish if you are doing a FISH program from Episode One; but know that handing out a new fish every week will quickly stop being a motivator
- Money. Money is great of course, and providing regular raises, and maybe an occasional bonus as your budget allows, is great. But again – this is not a long-term motivator. If you get a raise of $1,000 a year – that’s great! But consider: a third of that probably goes to taxes, then you have other withholdings like social security, health insurance, and maybe donations to the United Way or other things. You may be down to $600 by now – still nice! Divide that by 12 months, and you are looking at $50 per month, or $25 per paycheck if you are paid twice a month. It’s still nice, but are you going to notice an extra tank of gas in your budget after the first couple of months? Probably not. And it is almost certainly not inspiring anyone to work harder. As long as people have enough money (and that amount varies depending on personal need), a few more dollars do nothing.
Have you seen those motivating posters that say “Hang in there!” and other motivational messages? They make me want to break things and refuse to work –I don’t respond well to being told what to do. If this also speaks to you, try the Demotivators posters, that look just like regular ones, but have more realistic messages:
- You Are Special. If you require additional affirmation, get a puppy. The rest of us are trying to work.
- Downsizing Because we’re all in this together but there’s always room for one less.
- Mediocrity Just because we accept you as you are doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned hope you’ll improve.
- Multitasking The art of doing twice as much as you should half as well as you could.
- Tradition Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly stupid.
Gamification
“Gamification introduces game design elements into non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. It uses competition, points, achievement, rules of play, status and self-expression to encourage actions through positive feedback.”
Gamification does not just mean playing games – at work or in a classroom; it does mean making work or learning more fun. And that is never a bad thing!! (We shoo away crabby library people who insist that work needs to be dreary, and bringing in fun is a bad thing!) What could be gamified in your library? Circulation of books, answering reference questions, cataloging new items, shelving, filing paperwork – anything you do can probably be gamified to make it more rewarding.
You may already gamify things in your life. Zombie, Run! is a great game app to make running, or walking, more fun by helping you to save humanity after a zombie apocalypse. Habitica is an app and website that rewards you for accomplishing your to-do list each day. Step Bet actually pays you money if you hit your daily step count, and the Charity Miles app donates money to charity for every mile you walk.
Libraries have been enthusiastic participants in gamifying our work. Academic libraries set up games for incoming students to play to replace boring orientations. Instead, students work together to find a cure to a plague spreading across campus, or hunt for treasure in a jungle adventure. Library patrons can come to the library to play games that encourage them to check out books to solve a mystery, or to find a ghost. Adding game elements can make the dull things you do a little more fun.
To learn more about gamification, read Jane McGonigal’s book “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They can change the World.”
How do you design a game, or a gamified experience? It is not too hard!
- Set a specific goal. What do you want to accomplish? It needs to be something people can accomplish.
- Establish a framework. Are there points? Are people paying against themselves or a clock – or are they playing against others in the library? What are the rules? Check out other gamified systems to give you some ideas for structuring your own games.
- Provide opportunity to fail. This is a key difference between real life and games; it’s okay to fail in a game and then to come back and try something different. Try to keep mistakes or failures from becoming a disaster; and instead make it a learning opportunity.
- Provide opportunities to win! You can keep the game going, but there needs to be a place where people can win, or achieve goals. Whether they manage to grab the golden snitch, or achieve Platinum status, or just hit the monthly goal – be sure to allow opportunities to celebrate!
Motivation is important to keeping a library functioning, and to keep staff working toward their own successes. Hopefully, these ideas will help you to stay motivated, and to keep your staff motivated to achieve your library’s goals!
Books Read
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being―how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.
But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?
By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind―and on our own.”
Conclusion
Motivating and coaching can be challenges for everyone involved – it is hard to maintain a generally positive attitude toward work all the time. When people work for your library for several decades, every needs to stay focused on providing great service. Taking some positive step to motivate yourself and the people around you can help to build a good organizational culture!
Thanks to everyone for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week to discuss our next topic: Discipline and Termination.
Do you need more books in your life? Sure you do! Subscribe to our Books and Beverages book group podcast. Each week we look at a different genre, chat with our guests about their book suggestions, and sip our beverages. It is always good to find a new book!