What makes us feel good at work?

What makes us feel good at work?

Dan Ariely is American professor of psychology and behavioral economics. He has conducted numerous experiments and researches mainly in the field of human behavior. I have been following his blog and presentation since few years and this one particular TEDx is inspiring and provides insights into 'what makes us feel good at work'?

You may watch his presentation here http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work.html

You could take away a lot of learning's from this talk, but the one that fascinated me the most was, the origami experiment. 

So he called a group of people and divided them into 2 groups. Group A would be given a piece of origami paper with all instructions to create a beautiful duck. Group B would monitor the work of Group A. Once the group A was done with their end product, he asked both the groups to evaluate and put a price tag on the end product. The end product to be honest was not really good as expected because group A didn't have much experience in origami.However when they were asked to evaluate their work, Group A who created the product, priced it much higher than the group B who were evaluating the end product.

Next, he removed the instructions on the origami paper and made it even harder for the Group A to create the end product. So naturally the end product was not that great. However when he asked both the groups to price it. Group A priced it even higher than the previous time and group B even lower than the previous time.So, what this suggests is that. Group B, who is evaluating the end product, did not look at the effort put in to create the product. They were concerned of the value the product provided to them.Naturally, they didn't like the end product and priced it too low the second time. However, Group A who had created the product, put extra effort the second time because they didn't have the instructions and thereby they priced their product even higher, though the end product had deteriorated in quality.

Now, let's correlate this to our work environment. We could probably take 3 learning's from this experiment. These learning's become even more important for our organization since our motto is to keep challenging and innovation is the way to do that.

1. When an employee A, innovates a new process or product and presents it to his manager/lead B, what would happen if the B only looks at the dollar savings due to the innovation and simply puts it aside by comparing it with other innovations within the team? - Can B change the behavior of A by not comparing just the dollar but acknowledging the effort and suggesting a modification or change to the innovation done by A ? Can we award the best innovation but not ignore the smaller accelerators that makes almost the same difference to client satisfaction?

2. Can employee A not get into the paradox of thinking that his or her innovation is the best because of the effort put in? Can employee A conduct a small research to find out how useful the innovation could be to others and then proceed in small steps by involving everyone and getting regular feedback instead of being adamant on 'my way is the highway' theory ?

Sometimes being within the system smudges our thinking. Sometimes we got to get out of the system and just watch it like a movie to understand what's going on and what could be done better. That's where talks, experiments and researches such as this one helps us immensely.