At the end of each workday an e-mail survey arrived. It asked about the day’s emotions, motivation and view of the team and the boss, and then it asked for a story: “Briefly describe one event from today that stands out in your mind.” One evening a programmer answered: “I smashed that bug that’s been frustrating me for almost a calendar week. That may not be an event to you, but I live a very drab life, so I’m all hyped.”
That entry was one of nearly 12,000. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and her husband, the psychologist Steven Kramer, collected them from 238 people on 26 project teams in seven companies, each person writing on every workday of a project. The projects ran from kitchen gadgets to IT problems for a hotel empire.
They sorted the days by mood. On the best days, the most common event was a step forward in the work, by the person or the team. It appeared on 76% of best-mood days, and setbacks on 13%. On the worst days the numbers flipped: setbacks on 67%, progress on 25%.
Ranked fifth of five
The researchers also surveyed 669 managers at varying levels from dozens of companies. They asked them to rank five things that can affect how motivated and how happy staff are: support for making progress in the work, recognition for good work, incentives, interpersonal support and clear goals.
Only 35 put progress first as a motivator. Overall, it ranked last of the five as a motivator, and third as an influence on emotion. Recognition came first.
Recognition did help in the diaries. “But it wasn’t nearly as prominent as progress,” the authors wrote. “Besides, without work achievements, there is little to recognize.”
Good workdays tend to be the days when work that matters moved forward, even a little.
What a fixed bug does to a day
Amabile and Kramer call the mix of emotions, motivations and perceptions over a workday a person’s “inner work life.” On days with progress, their participants reported more joy, warmth and pride, more interest in the work for its own sake, and more positive challenge, and they saw their teams as more supportive. On setback days they reported more frustration, fear and sadness, and were less motivated both by the work and by recognition. Setbacks, the authors suggested, can leave a person “generally apathetic and disinclined to do the work at all.”
The step needn’t be big. Of the incidents that had only a minor impact on a project, 28% had a major effect on how people felt about it. Another programmer wrote about working out why something wasn’t working: “I felt relieved and happy because this was a minor milestone for me.”
There is a condition. The progress has to be in work the person finds meaningful. The authors point to the teenage job of washing pots in a restaurant kitchen, where there are always more pots and the only sense of accomplishment comes from the time clock or the paycheck. Meaning doesn’t require curing cancer, they argue; it can be as simple as making a useful, high-quality product for a customer. But it can be drained. In the diaries it drained when a leader ignored people’s ideas, when projects were abruptly reassigned, when shifting priorities suggested weeks of work might never be used, and when nobody passed on that a client’s priorities had changed.
Amabile and Kramer tie this to Frederick Herzberg, who argued in 1968 that people are most satisfied with jobs that let them experience achievement. Their diaries, they say, show the mechanism underneath: consistent, meaningful progress. The interest in the work itself that rose on progress days is the intrinsic motivation at the center of Self-Determination Theory.
Heavier on the downside
The scale was not balanced. In their book, The Progress Principle (2011), the authors report that the power of setbacks to diminish happiness was more than twice as strong as the power of progress to boost it, and their power to increase frustration more than three times as strong as progress’s power to reduce it. Small losses could outweigh small wins. People also wrote longer diary entries about negative events than about neutral or positive ones.
Their own caveat comes next. “Our analyses establish correlations but do not prove causality,” they wrote. A good mood may make progress easier, just as progress may lift a mood. From reading thousands of entries, they judged that the causality “almost certainly” goes both ways. Their participants were knowledge workers on creative projects describing their own days, and the authors put their finding about performance in those terms: “at least in the realm of knowledge work.”
A plan B, mentioned in passing
Say Ruth leads four analysts building a pricing model. Three weeks in, a vice president mentions in a meeting that a different approach might be worth trying. Nothing is cancelled and nobody is criticized. Her analysts may still hear that their work might never be used, one of the four ways the diaries showed meaning draining out of a job.
What Ruth can do is small. She could find out that afternoon what the vice president meant, and tell the team which parts of the model stand either way. She could cut the next goal down to something they can finish this week, the way Amabile described breaking a cancer-research goal down to understanding the mechanism that can block one type of lung cancer cell. None of this guarantees a better week. But in the diaries, a setback weighed more than a step forward, and the authors’ advice was to start by removing the obstacles that cause setbacks. A short conversation that afternoon might keep a remark made in passing from becoming the setback of someone’s week.