The 3 components that drive intellectual satisfaction at the workspace

There are really only three components that make our jobs bearable or even fun. These three components, if they are not ripped apart, make our jobs challenging and interesting, they can give our lives some meaning. Let’s take a look at these three components and how we destroy them:

Intellectually satisfactory jobs have these three components in common:

1. They assign tasks that require mental effort
2. They provide feedback to the outcomes of that effort
3. People working in these jobs are able to attribute some of these outcomes to themselves

Let’s have a quick look at these three components, one by one:

The importance of mental effort

First, let’s make one thing abundantly clear: physical effort can be very satisfactory as well. The act of building something, competing in a sport or just doing something exhaustive can be exciting, fun and challenging. However, looking forward, there is a trend, that we try to eliminate everything that is physically challenging from the workplace. More and more, we leave these things to machinery or automate these tasks entirely. It’s good for our backs, and reduces the risks of accidents. However, it also leaves us with jobs that are not physically challenging. The only reward remaining is the one received of intellectual challenges in our workspace, which we discuss in this article. But what makes a task intellectually challenging?

A task that requires mental effort is deliberately open ended. It is NOT specified to the finest detail. It leaves the problem to the human to be solved.

• There is the teacher, who tries to find the best way to teach a particular subject to a particular class.
• There is the doctor, who tries to treat a particular illness for a particular patient
• There is the software engineer, who tries to code a solution to a particular problem
• There is the wedding planner, who tries to to plan the perfect wedding for a particular couple
• There is the journalist, who tries to communicate a particular situation to a particular audience

There are many many more examples like this. What’s important to note is, that what makes these jobs hard, is what makes them fun. There are many implications to this observation, the obvious being that eliminating the mental effort required by these jobs makes them boring and even worse: meaningless. Put another way: People are choosing these jobs because of the intellectual challenges, not despite of them.

Let’s continue with the second component:

Why feedback is necessary

Lots has been said about the importance of feedback in learning situations. But let’s focus on the fun part of feedback for a moment. Feedback makes us happy. For example, when

• the teacher watches her class and realizes that her approach of teaching a particular subject is actually working.
• the doctor lifts an illness of her patient, and watches her get better
• the software engineer sees her code working for the first time
• the wedding planner receives a thank you note of the couple
• the journalist has the feeling that her work changed the mind of some of her audience

Again, there are many more examples like this. What’s wrong with these examples is, that they might create the impression that feedback is a natural result of mental work. It is not. It is entirely possible to imagine a world where

• a teacher does not realize that her approaches are working, because she does not see the children applying her methods
• The doctor not realizing that her work lead to an improvement on the symptoms, because a different doctor took over her shift
• The software engineer not seeing her code work, because she had no responsibility for any meaningful part of the codebase
• etc. etc.

If you feel that these examples feel strangely familiar, this is not a coincidence. Poor process design, automation and specialization often lead to a disconnect between action and reaction, or in other words: Modern processes and applications, if poorly designed, prevent you from witnessing the effects of your intellectual work.

The importance of attribution

Attribution comes in different forms, but it always leads to the same result: People can say: “I did this!”, and they can say it credibly and proudly. It’s us coming home from work to our friends or partners and being able to tell a story of a problem, that was there to be solved, a solution that came into ones head, the experimentation, the execution, the missteps and failures before it finally worked and the celebration, when it did. It’s the heroes journey. And attribution plays an incredible important part in that story.

So when I say attribution, I’m not only talking about a name at the bottom of a page, I’m talking about chances we give people to tell their stories. Giving thanks to people at the end of a project, and letting them talk for a while. Sharing a new approach, that someone in the team developed with the colleagues and asking about the motivations that let to the new findings. Giving teachers and their classes a way to demonstrate what they’ve learned together. All of this enables the people to share their stories and showcase the fruits of their hard labor.

The future we build: Rescuing the intellectual satisfaction we receive from our jobs

We are living in the age of digitization. And within this period, we’re getting rid of many jobs we used to deem necessary, but which can now be done better and cheaper by a machine.

But there is hope. There are jobs, a machine can’t do, at least for now. These are the jobs that are supposed to safe us — The jobs to transition to, when the wave of automation strikes the next industry.

Here are the bad news: We are in the middle of destroying these jobs, too. By sucking the fun out of them, by optimizing the hell out of them, until everybody is specialized to do one thing.

The process of digitization often involves breaking up processes, reorganizing work and interleaving human work with digital processes.

If done correctly, digitization can be a catalyzer for intellectual satisfaction at the workspace, tying the three components tighter together than ever before. This is an area, where social media actually shines. Social media channels like YouTube or Instagram allow you to realize yourself creatively, receive feedback from your audience and your work is tightly coupled with your persona.

Problems arise when digital transformation leads to the elimination or reduction of any of the three components or these three components get ripped apart.

Reducing mental work

Reducing mental work is generally considered a good thing. Making tasks easier and more standardized yields several benefits:

• More people can do these tasks
• You don’t have to pay these people that much money, since you increased the supply of the labor force
• The quality of the work is more evenly distributed. There are no high flyers and low performers anymore. Everybody pretty much does the same, which makes the output of the workforce predictable.

Digitization reduces mental work by designing processes and defining and breaking down deliveries (things needed from the person operating the computer). Imagine a worker at a government agency, who you interact with, because you need permission to build a barn on your property. In the past, this government agent would need to know the rules and regulations of the region he’s working with, he would try to understand what you’re trying to do and help you to find a match with your requirements and the requirements of the government. At the end of the process, hopefully she’ll be able to give you a permit. Today, this agent is sitting in front of a computer, which presents her with a list of tasks and processes which she can start. If none of these processes fits your requirement, she cannot help you. If you cannot produce any of the deliveries the process asks for (because your barn has something special about it, that nobody thought of before) the agent cannot help you. In this hypothetical scenario, the agent cannot help you only because the computer doesn’t provide the processes she needs to fulfill your request, she cannot help you because the computer program allowed her employers to reduce the training that every employee of the agency receives.

The scenario described above is a typical outcome of a digitization project. A computer program is created, that reduced the mental effort required for a job and the outcome is something more people can do, which requires less training and which is, if we’re honest about it, less exciting of a job.

Reducing feedback

Witnessing the outcomes of your intellectual work requires you to establish a connection with the subject you’re working on, that lasts long enough to see your work come to fruition.

The result of digitization projects is far too often that these connections get broken up. Processes get broken up and standardized, so problems can be relocated to people who can solve this problem at that particular time. This can have two effects:

• Specialization: One task, that used to be done by one person, is subdivided into several subtask, that can now be performed by different people that are specialized for that particular subtask (Think of the doctor, who only looks at shoulders for the rest of her life, because she has seen thousands of shoulders and that makes her the expert to see a thousand more).
• Replicability: One task, that used to be done by one person, can now be done by hundreds of persons (Think of the Call Center, which you call because you have a problem at home. You will never reach the same person twice in a row. Anyone can help you, anyone can pick up, where the last one left off).

Both effects have the tendency to reduce the feedback the worker receives for her work.