And then, in the other bathrooms, they had the signs talk about
the consequences of the hand washing practice to patients.
Now remember, why do healthcare workers, many of them, go into this occupation?
They wanna make a difference for patients.
That's one of the common intrinsic motives,
values that really drives people to engage in these professions.
And so, imagine these two different bathrooms,
one focusing on the consequences of hand washing for you, the healthcare worker.
The other bathroom's focusing on the consequences of hand washing for
the patient.
Hypothesis being that we're gonna see greater meaning, greater relevance, thus,
greater engagement and
motivation in the bathrooms where it's focused on the consequences for
the patient less so for the healthcare professional in those bathrooms.
And that's exactly what they found.
What we're seeing here on the y axis is, the metric is usage of soap,
if you want to assess how often, or how effectively people are washing hands.
One of the metrics you can use without being too invasive is actually
measuring how much soap is used in the restrooms.
And so prior to changing the signs, they did a pretest and
that measured the baseline, if you will, of soap usage.
And then, they implemented a control condition, no sign and
then either signs focusing on the personal consequences to the healthcare worker, or
signs in different bathrooms focused on the consequences for the patient.
And then, measured the soap usage over the course of time.
And consistent with what you might expect, they found that the soap usage in
the bathrooms that were really focused on patients, was dramatically higher
than the soap usage in bathrooms that focused on the personal consequences of
the control condition where there was no change in the sign.
And so again, this is a classic example and a wonderful illustration
of how you can outsource motivation by talking about the impact of
individuals' work on beneficiaries such as the customer,
the patient, whatever the context you're in,
you always have some beneficiary of your work.
If you're in a restaurant, it's the people eating at the restaurant.
If you're in a hospital, it's the patients.
If you are Volvo, for example, and you're building cars, what is Volvo known for?
Safety.
So, if you wanna motivate people on the assembly line to perform
with a greater diligence and motivation, you bring in people whose
lives have been saved by Volvo automobiles when they were in accidents.
Give their work meaning. Give their work relevance, and
you will see an increase in motivation.
No matter what field, no matter what occupation you're in, there's
an opportunity here to outsource this intrinsic motivation to that beneficiary.
At the same time,
I want you to understand that this notion of meaning can be a double-edged sword.
There are both pros and cons, benefits and costs.
One of my favorite studies to this end was conducted by a good friend
Stuart Bunderson and Thompson, published in 2009.
And they were really interested in the impact that meaning and
meaningful work has on the employee.
And they focused on zookeepers.
Zookeepers are people who generally go into this occupation
because they're very passionate about the animals.
They really want to contribute to the well-being of these animals.
But they're underpaid.
They get paid very little.
The hours are really difficult, really unpredictable.
The work conditions are tough.