Discretionary effort

The idea of discretionary effort is one that came in to, and, I think, went out of vogue in HR circles at some point in my past career. I remember a time when I first heard lots of people talking about it, and now, since years, I haven’t. The idea was strongly related to the concept of employee engagement – the more engaged the employee the more discretionary effort they would put into their job, meaning going “above and beyond”.

The very next thing I remember was the idea becoming associated with doing more work for no more reward, and, especially, putting in more hours for no more reward. Maybe it was that hijacking of the idea to negative motivations on the part of companies trying to get more quantitatively out of people that sowed the seeds of its demise.

There are two readings of the force of ‘engagement’ and ‘discretionary effort’, and there’s a more positive, qualitative flavour to them that I have always preferred – and this dichotomy relates to how we approach certain aspects of KM.

One reading is that ’employee engagement’ is something that leaders and managers inspire or extract from their people, who are somehow passive recipients or objects of this. I’m not saying this is all wrong or all bad – remember I love paradox – and their must be a place for inspiration and leadership – but it can lead to (and often has led to) that kind of ‘discretionary effort’ that is counted in terms of ‘doing more work’. Spending more of your own time at work. Taking on more duties. Producing more stuff. And the point here all the time is that it’s discretionary because somehow you decided to foot the bill for this yourself in terms of your time and your stress that it cost. You probably also enlisted your friends and family in all this, quite without their involvement, because now you would be spending the time and effort you ought to have spent on them, at work instead. The person takes the write-off personally and their friends and family pay too – and all of this extra input is just another externality for the business. Finally it leads to recognition and reward systems and all sorts of rituals (thanks to their families too, without whom…) that are based on the idea that business life is tough.

The other reading is the more qualitative reading, and it’s one in which people are more autonomous and are actors in their own right. Most people are naturally engaged in their work, I find, and it’s organisational factors that turn them off. If we just stopped turning people’s natural engagement off there would be no need for hand-wringing efforts to switch them on. And I think people’s discretionary effort is turned off by being not heard, not told, not asked, not involved, not supported, not treated reasonably and fairly without distrust and fear. If work and jobs are well designed. If we have measures more than we have targets. So on. They don’t need to ‘be engaged’ by external influence because they will, from internal motive, ‘be engaged’.

The other part of this qualitative reading of discretionary effort is that it’s more about how something is done rather than how much of something is done. What flows from that engaged state are: diligence and care, growth of competence and performance, friendliness, helpfulness and happiness. In particular, jobs get done well, not just done in a box-ticking, widget-making way.

So, many times in organisations we see conversations about KM angled towards things like: extra tasks above and beyond the core job – which may demand extra time input; talk of how to “get people to” do something – all that. And all that is about the spooky kind of engagement and discretionary effort – the kind that’s all about somehow compelling people to ‘do more’.

The other way is to make sure the whole environment is doing nothing to discourage people’s natural engagement and drive to do the best job they can, in the best way, qualitatively. When we talk about all of this reasonably we make sure KM tasks are integral not additional. We get a better outcome.

Quite a lot of our work in KM is about systems, processes, structures and stock. But we also need to be involved in whatever is going on to shape the cultural norms, messaging, role model behaviours and so on to make sure nothing is being done to shut down KM from being successful by driving it into a corner of being an other, additional, ‘discretionary’ task that in real life people are being leaned on to do after hours.