Demotivation by Design: How Organizational Systems Can Hurt Performance

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Nicole: What really motivates people at work. For decades, organizations have tried to answer that question with performance reviews, incentives, policies, and management frameworks designed to push people to do their best work. But what if some of those systems are doing the opposite?

Welcome to Honest HR, where we turn the real issues facing today's HR departments into honest conversations with actionable insights. I'm your host, Nicole Belyna. Let's get honest.

According to SHRM's research, stress and burnout levels are among the most pressing needs that organizations must address. So today we're taking a closer look at the psychology of motivation and the gap that often exists between what organizations intend and what employees actually experience.

Joining us is Pete Ketchum, head of HR at autonomy, organizational psychologist, former army interrogator and de-escalation specialist. Welcome to Honest HR Pete.

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, thank you, Nicole. Great to be here.

Nicole: Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you. So you have worked in some high pressure places, as we just mentioned, military interrogation to prison de-escalation. How did those experiences change the way you see what really motivates people when they're under stress?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, well it takes me back a little bit. Several years ago, when I enlisted and when I went into the military and interrogation, I kind of had this thought of what Hollywood portrays it as. Lights, dark rooms, a lot of pressure, maybe some yelling, you know, the things that you see there.

What surprised me when I went there is it was complete opposite. The military has done a lot of research in this craft and rapport is what they found that gets better information, it's more accurate and it's faster to obtain.

So I learned the importance of being able to relate to the individuals, to understand what their motives are, what their goals are for themselves, their family, their community, and then to be able to find how that alignment can come into place with the mission objectives that I had.

Later when I worked at the state prison, I was able to take some of those skill sets and apply them in intense situations that we'd have. The block that I worked was pretty intense, among the most intense that was on site. There'd be lots of need for cell extractions or having a SWAT team come in to be able to maintain the safety for staff, but also for the inmates and the other ones that were in nearby areas. We want to make sure that they're safe and well.

Oftentimes I'd be called to come in and just talk to them and use some of those skill sets that I learned and just treating them like a human, listening to what they have to say, understanding what the frustrations are that are going through their mind, but then also for me to share with them what my goals were, why I am there, what I want for them, and how we can bridge that alignment, come together.

Taking those experiences later on, fast forward several years later, corporate environment. I was surprised to find that there's a very similar, if not same dynamic in the importance of building that rapport, listening, finding that mutual ground and alignment, and then being able to move forward as a team, as a department, as organizations.

My biggest learning from that was that it's rapport, not pressure, that can bridge those gaps.

Nicole: Yeah. Imagine that. So you work with the self-determination theory, which says people need autonomy, competence, and strong relationships. How do you think most organizations accidentally make it harder for people to get these needs met?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, you know, sometimes when things come down the pipeline, I think sometimes employees can see it and just imagine in their heads, wow, when they're sitting in the boardroom, you know, are they just sitting there saying, "Hey, how do we control employees more and how do we make them feel more incompetent? And how do we get them more isolated?"

It might feel like that sometimes, but I'm sure that's not what's happening. What really happens is just an accidental cause of weighing one side over another and not really understanding the consequences that'll follow when we aren't stress testing both on the operational side and the human element side.

I'm releasing a new book next week that's called The Missed Meeting and I talk about in there the mechanical operating system, which on the business side is more of your compliance control, your transactions, and those are super important. Your compliance is going to mitigate liability. Your control is going to help with your numbers, how you're moving forward. Transactions gives us forecast.

But on your human side, the human operating system, you need to have that autonomy, that competence, the relationships. And when those mismatch, that's when that motivation dies.

Just to give a couple examples of what those look like for listeners here, and you'll be able to quickly relate. I'm sure if we haven't seen our own workplace, we see it in others. Autonomy can get killed real quick when a team leader's required to get three signatures to be able to take their team out to lunch, right? They've got to go through all this red tape.

Competence can die quickly when your marketing leader has to click on three different programs, 12 different clicks just to log in a new batch of leads. Or relatedness can suffer when efficiency is overemphasized and all communication needs to be handled via email versus face-to-face interactions, where people can see each other like we are now, or meet face-to-face at the desk and be able to understand where that person's coming from by reading facial expressions, hand gestures, hearing the tone.

Then understand being able to use that creative side to problem solve, that you just don't get in that same kind of Slack or Teams kind of communication. So I would just say it's the unintended consequences that come across. We're trying to over optimize on one side without really stress testing the human element. That's what we need to watch for.

Nicole: Yeah. Well the autonomy piece, you know, I keep thinking, going back to that in my head because, you know, I think about when a company's sales plummet for one reason or another, and it's almost, in most organizations, oftentimes the initial reaction is like, oh, we got to tighten things up. We've got to get some more structure in place rather than say like, "Hey, let's give people more autonomy." That's not necessarily that initial instinct that you get from leaders.

So it's kind of interesting to me because I imagine there's some training that has to happen with a leader to think, okay, things aren't going the way they should be. Let's help our teams think more autonomously.

Pete Ketchum: Right. And that can be a really great strength. And that comes with a little bit of how is the organization built out to cater to that control or to that trust? And do we want that autonomy? If you want it, you have to build a structure around it. Otherwise it's not going to be set up for success, as we were mentioning there.

Nicole: Yeah. So most companies treat performance management as a must have. How can these systems take away motivation for people?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah. When it comes to systems, every company is a little bit different, right? And how they deploy these systems. One example that I like to use that kind of emphasizes this, and I'll be brief with my sports analogy here, but bear with me.

You imagine a basketball coach and they go to their team, they go to the locker room, they got a tough game tomorrow, and they say, "I need your best effort and you guys to work hard. We can easily beat this team. Just give it your best, give it your all. Let's go." Right? So there's one version.

Then you have another coach that comes to their team and she comes in and she's like, "Hey. We got a tough team. It's going to be a long game today. I need you to give your best. Player number one, last time you put up eight points. This time I need you to put up 12. Can you do that? And player two, hey, you get so good at rebounding, but this time I need, every time you get a rebound, just put it right back on the net" and so forth as she goes, right?

So there's a clear distinction in how one leader can approach another and saying, "Hey, just go win." And we think, well, what are the outcomes? If they don't, or if they do, do they feel like they own that win? Or was it more of like just a corporate win? Whereas for the individuals that got their own goals, they can see that as a personal win and a team win and a corporate win.

We need to make sure that people feel that they understand what the goals are so that they can be motivated for that. And it carries through. Anytime you have stressors coming into play, you got that cortisol coming in, you have adrenaline coming in. You can't just live off of that without having the dopamine afterwards and saying, "Hey, quality job. I'm looking forward to the next time I go through some of that stress, because then I get this reward of achieving my goals and meeting those motivations."

There's an interesting article that was released by NeuroLeadership and, without getting into the specifics, they talked about how when people are in these kind of stressful situations of getting a performance evaluation, or having these kind of discussions with, "How am I doing? Where do I need to go from here?" that their heart rate, their blood pressure, it increases to that equivalent of somebody who's doing a public speaking session in front of a live audience.

It's pretty incredible. You imagine they can be very defensive as far as trying to look out for themselves and realizing, "Hey, this could be a threatening situation."

So to be able to manage that performance, we also need to be able to set them up for success in that performance management. It comes with that consistency, as many of us know. So we want to be consistent. We want to focus on development as we lead towards those quarterly or annual performance evaluations.

But the real coaching is done during those one-on-one sessions or the ad hoc 15 minute session at the desk of, "Here's what you're doing so well, I really appreciate X, Y, and Z. Moving forward, how do you think we can achieve this next initiative?" Right?

In that way, we don't want to mix the medicine, which is those development things with the poison per se, right? You want to be able to build them up so that nothing's a surprise in their evaluation. You decrease all that stress and that way you're building momentum on the motivation, engagement of the employee, throughout the weeks, months, and quarters to come.

Nicole: Well, I actually appreciate your sports analogy. You know, I imagine if you're on a sports team and, I don't know, let's say you're on the basketball court and your coach never talks to you, right? Never. Like, there's never communication there. You just kind of go the whole game without any communication that would be weird, right? Like that would be a little odd.

And yet many organizations still treat performance management, like the performance review cycle as one big event, right? You get, employees have this one big conversation which leads to that fear that you mentioned, that feels a little bit like public speaking, right? And you also have managers who perhaps only have that conversation once a year. They may not be very good at it because they aren't used to having those little one-on-one informal interactions with their team every day to say like, you know, "Great job here." Or, "Oh, I saw what you did here, way to go. Next time maybe try this."

So, you know, it's less of an ongoing conversation and I can see where if you've got just that one big event, there's a lot riding on that one big event for both the employee and the manager.

Pete Ketchum: Yeah. No, I think you hit the nail on the head. You don't want that all to be a surprise. You never want them to be a surprise. You want them to be able to anticipate and know, and sometimes there's something we just haven't been able to achieve, but we're a team, right? And so they can realize where they stand even before they have that meeting.

I think that's the best use case and a best way to kind of do a self check. You know, when you're doing your math problems, you used to do it in reverse, make sure you're doing it right. I think you can also do that if they're surprised in those evaluation meetings. Like, okay. Where did we not mention this? Why is this a surprise? And how do we fix that going forward?

Nicole: Yeah. And the more interactions, that's where that rapport comes in too. So, you know, going back to kind of your first point, which is building that rapport, having that rapport, that's kind of the first piece of it. So what are some early signs that an organization's systems are starting to hurt motivation?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, I think there can be several, but the one that stands out to me the most is probably going to be silence.

Let me share a story that happened to me, and this is a failure of mine that I'll be transparent with. After military and some time in law enforcement moved into the corporate space and then there I was, had leadership positions. Well, at one point I moved into this new team. I wanted to do some one-on-ones to better get to know each of the team what they're working on, what the objectives are, right? Just typical stuff. Where does everybody stand?

So I had my questions prepared. I did our one-on-one session with, call her Sarah, very senior employee, like excellent worker, just outstanding performance. We were doing this one-on-one and going through, and I got short answers. Not a lot of engagement, kind of seemed like just waiting for it to be over.

I didn't really feel like we were making too much headway, so we ended a little early and I said, "Well, thanks for your time. Let's plan on doing this next week around the same time, if that works for you." And I won't forget that she looked at me and in an appropriate way, like, not in a very angry or mad way, just said, "Do we have to?" And she wasn't being rude by any means.

But later, after reflecting on that, I realized she was just being really rational and later getting to know the rest of the team and the culture there. I realized that the environment had taught her and several of her coworkers these one-on-one kind of check-ins, like they just weren't worth it. People didn't really listen. There was no outcomes afterwards. It wasn't a safe place to express frustrations or blockers that you had because it would always come back to you.

So understanding that helped me realize, okay, this is a signal I need to look for. Not only now, but in the future too. So I use the analogy of a check engine light, right? When you have an engine light on your car, you can do what I do sometimes. Try to ignore it, put a piece of tape over it and hope it goes away next time you start it. Or you can do the responsible thing and look into it, take a look under the hood, really identify what the problem is and being able to have these ad hoc meetings that are just short, you know, and I say ad hoc because sometimes we're really busy and we're just not able to have as much interaction as we want to, or something catches our eye and we're like, you know, I'm just going to go check in on this person. And I think it's really good to take advantage of those.

But when you see those signals, when you're not getting pushback, when there's silence in the rooms. The same blockers just keep coming up over and over and you're like, "What is going on?" Those are some of the signs I would say that motivation and engagement is not being nurtured. It's being hindered.

Sometimes we can see heads down at the office, a lot of work looking like it's being done. It's silent. We can confuse it with harmony, but in reality it's a surrender just to the work environment that they're subjugated to.

Nicole: Yeah. I agree. Silence is much more concerning. You know, sometimes when a people manager will come to me and they're like, "Oh, so and so comes in, and they're telling me every day like, oh, we should do this, we should do that. It seems like they're never happy." And you know, my response is always like, it could be so much worse. They could not be sharing their opinion with you. So the fact that somebody's even sharing their opinion with you means that there's time, there's room to build that rapport and, you know, and make things better.

Pete Ketchum: Yeah. A hundred % agree. Yeah. There's still engagement, there's still, they're still giving you a chance to help them work through it or to engage. Yeah.

Nicole: Well, we'll be back in just a few moments. Stay with us.

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Nicole: What would be one structural demotivator that you've come across that really surprised you? Something that even you didn't expect?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, I'm thinking of a recent occurrence that I was made aware of from an acquaintance of mine. They work at a top four, top five financial institute. I mean, it's a global company, you know, tens of thousands of employees, and they told me that within, I think it was within the last eight or 12 months, they've been deploying within their engineering departments, cameras on each workstation that's able to track kind of eye movement through facial recognition where your head's turning if the right person's at the right seat. These kind of things that would make sense from like a security standpoint in some areas.

But what they were telling me and as they were telling me, I was like, "Okay, you're telling me this because I'm sure it's going where I think it might go" is the result of it was that the employees were very taken back by it. Took it in a different direction than I think was anticipated. They started to either cover the cameras, remove the software that would be doing all the kind of AI facial recognition features, and then even wearing glasses that would distort the controls to allow them to see where their eye contact's going or when their head's turning. So they couldn't do the facial recognition.

And that really stood out to me. And it maybe sounds like an extreme on like a demotivator because I mean, to me that would certainly do it. But there's also similar cases that are smaller in ways not as obvious, but they stack on top of each other.

As a result, what happened was that instead of doing what I imagine some great leadership team wanted to have, which is like, "Hey, we need to increase security and we need to help with engagement and we need to produce more out of our software team. We have the same headcount and yet lower results like it must be, this must help us. Let's do it." So on paper it looks great. It looks like it answers all the questions. It's the answer to all the problems. Let's implement.

What happened was, like we talked about earlier, is that likely, again, that we're talking about a mechanical operating system versus the human side. So likely the human side wasn't tested against and saying, "Hey, how do we implement this in such a way that we don't demotivate people, we don't take away that trust and autonomy and relationship that they can have with team and so forth."

Rather than building in a system that would produce more engagement, they, in fact just promoted their employees to find, to divert more energy into finding ways to how to get around the facial recognition and the blocker that was put up. So I share that because it just stands out to me as something that is obvious now when you hear the story in that context. But it wasn't so obvious in the boardroom. I'm willing to bet that they had every good intention that it was a good thing for the company. But they didn't have somebody there to kind of translate and do the testing on the other side.

Quick other example that's much smaller and granular, I think most of the audience would relate to is in your sales team. I mean, how often do you have a salesperson that's looking to close a deal? They're trying to hit quota, they're already stressed, coming to the end of the quarter that I got to close that last deal. And then they have to go through six different approvals from their software engineer and go through this step and step six to close that deal. So how much friction then are we putting in front of our team members who are there to help the organization move forward, help build it, generate revenue, and then we have these policies that look good again, look good when they're written out, but then when you try to apply them, not always going the way we think.

Nicole: Yeah, and leaders often introduce new policies with the goal of improving performance, consistency, accountability, you know, as you've just explained to us. But sometimes those well-intentioned changes can actually reduce motivation and hurt results. And you gave us some really good examples. How can HR help business leaders recognize when a policy that looks good on paper might be creating unintended consequences for engagement, productivity, or retention, ultimately impacting their organization's bottom line?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, I think there's a couple things there to unpack, but the one that stands out to me the most is being involved with the teams at a personal level, understanding when those communications happening at the one-on-ones at the smallest team level up all the way up the chain. And you want to be able to know that because it gives you a perspective of the people design.

One of the better examples that I've heard that I really like is Ohio State University, way back early 1900s. And when they built the university, they didn't put in pathways to each of the buildings. They just put the buildings there and there was no sidewalks or anything of that nature. They let the students and the faculty kind of make their way to wherever they saw was the most direct route or the best way to get there.

And then later, the developer went in a hot air balloon, looked out, saw kind of where all the trails are, mapped them out, and then they followed those paths that were made by faculty and students and put in the sidewalks there. So to me that's always been a really good example of what people strategists, HR leaders can do is always have this in your mind of, and it's not something you want to do once, right? You don't want to just say, "Hey guys, like the cameras are bad because that's bad for people." You want to be constantly training and talking about people design in every angle so that it becomes kind of a habit for everybody from your finance guy to your CMO, to your CFO that they're thinking about, not just the numbers of what it says on paper, but they're also thinking about people design.

And then they come to their HR rep and say, "Hey, what do you think about this? I'm thinking it could help affect people this way. What are your thoughts?" That way you're already starting halfway up the hill. It's not a full battle from the ground up.

I strongly believe taking that approach is going to help leaders see that how that can benefit them. It's also going to help HR leaders be more of a behavioral translator rather than just kind of fighting an unseen battle, they can be looked at as a resource to say, "You know what people are going through, you see what they're saying, and you understand the feedback. How could we implement this to make it work?" And that scenario we talked about with the cameras going into the engineer workspaces could have been a lot different if maybe a similar conversation happened.

Nicole: We'll be back in just a few moments. Stay with us.

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Nicole: So if HR professionals wanted to quickly improve motivation and performance. Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn't adding something new, it's removing what's getting in the way. Based on what you've seen, what are three organizational practices, policies, or systems that HR could eliminate to unlock better performance?

Pete Ketchum: So I'd say there's probably three areas we want to consider of some indexes to think about. And I love how you phrased it, and I'm saying like, we don't always want to add things to fix the problem. It's sometimes the best answer is just to subtract something and take it away. When you think about your tech stacks, you think about processes.

When we think about autonomy, relatedness, and we think about competence, we want to look at, okay, where's our autonomy index? So are we treating adults like adults? Are we giving them the trust? Is the system built up, built in such a way to support that trust? And if it's not, then we'd want to match and appropriate the processes to match what level of trust can be given so that we can have as much autonomy as possible while at the same time having that accountability. Because in my mind there, there two of the same thing. We're just trying to put it on paper and make sure that it makes sense.

So as far as that goes, let's make sure that we're treating adults like adults for the positions that we've hired them for. Anywhere you have over approvals. Try to cut that back a little bit. There's too much oversight and it's causing more time and labor than it's worth. See where we can cut that back little by little.

Another one that I call, for a lack of better word or stupidity, index, it's going back to the tech stack when we have too much technology in place, or too many steps for people when you're, like I said, with the marketing manager, if they're going to have to put in 12 different clicks just to upload a new list, maybe we need to re-evaluate the technology and how it's using, and maybe it's good for another organization. For making sure that it's right for yours and reevaluating in that way and how it's being used.

I'm sure one thing that's come up a lot here, Nicole, I'm sure you've heard with AI coming out and people talking about CRMs and where their data lives and how important it is. A lot of people mentioning, well, your data needs to be clean, otherwise AI's not going to be helpful. And I've never heard of a company yet. I'm sure they're out there, but I have not talked to somebody that said, "Wow, my CRM is so clean. I'm so happy we maintained it so well."

And more often than not, I think that's because we're getting into maybe the most popular CRM, the one that everyone said has rave reviews, but it's not a right fit for our company and our initiatives and how we build out our processes. And that can be another thing that we want to try to subtract, maybe even replace with something that's going to fit.

Last one I'd say is the loneliness Index. So we want, we talked a little bit about driving efficiency. We'll see where we can kind of pull back a little bit on just the email communication and the Slack and Teams. See how we can help teams build closer connections by getting more face-to-face time. And we schedule that in and we allow for that. It's going to replace some of those mandatory fun days, maybe those wellness apps just by being able to talk more to their team, get more of that engagement and motivation and understanding and creative side from one another, and that'll carry them through.

Nicole: Well, I love the concept of those three different indexes, particularly measuring them against your organization's culture. And, you know, I think that's the key is analyzing those indexes as they relate to, you know, what your culture looks like, and as you said, there may be some solutions that are right for one organization, but perhaps not for others.

Pete Ketchum: Right, right.

Nicole: So organizations still need high standards and accountability to achieve business goals? There's no question about that. How can leaders maintain strong expectations and performance outcomes while still giving employees the autonomy and the confidence they need to stay motivated?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah. We kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but in talking with autonomy and accountability, I think oftentimes we view those as two separate things, but I think they're the same thing as how I'd see them. In really, in having true autonomy, we're trusting the individual with that outcome and the path to get there. Whereas the accountability comes in the same way. They're saying, "Hey, I will own this. I will get this done and this is how I'm going to do it." You have both. You're able to have both there. It just matters like how you're creating it. How you're visualizing it. And how it's being communicated.

So we want to be like very clear when we talk about accountability, and I'm going to go down to like basic level, simple level. When I say basic, I mean it's very important, but it's also pretty simple to do, right? Is have those one-on-one meetings. And when you're meeting with a MEMBER of your team or even with just a small team group, you want to be crystal clear on what needs to be done. That's going to be that accountability saying, "Hey, we need to strive for 10% upsells in the next quarter," right? Or what have you.

But then be radically flexible on the other side with how they do it. Let their creativeness come out, let their expertise and their backgrounds. And their diverse knowledge and experiences come out to play, which is going to drive some new innovative ways to achieve goals that maybe the company hasn't seen before.

So in that way, I strongly believe you can have both the accountability and autonomy together. You just have to phrase it right, make sure we're looking at what we're trying to accomplish, and then let them drive. Don't grab the wheel. It's hard sometimes you're like, "Oh, whoa, this isn't what I'm used to." But that's how innovation happens. Like, fail quick, get back up, try it again. And that's how we're going to move forward and be very adaptive and especially the environment we're in today.

Nicole: Yep. That's exactly right. So if you could build a company structure from the ground up, using everything you know about what drives people, what would it look like?

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, so boy, that's a pretty broad question, but I would say some of the focuses I'd have are going to be on, if we're starting from the foundation up, the vision, the mission, and the values, I want to be able to know where the company wants to go and who the market is that they're looking to service. Who are our buyers? What do they look like? And some of the common things that we all talk about is who is our ideal customer profile, right? Who is our buyers? What does our champions look like? We want to know them, but then we can now, once we understand that to a degree, we can take that a click down and understand now how do we build those job descriptions?

Who is it that we're looking to fill these positions that can relate to the mission and the vision of the company? But then can also relate to our buyers, understand where they're coming from. It's, I think it's those kind of people that are going to really want to dig in and innovate and be able, those are the kind of people I think you can start trusting with this autonomy. They're going to have the competence because they love it, they're passionate about it. They're going to build those relationships not only with coworkers, but future clientele.

So to me, that's what that would look like is really prioritizing, making sure that that vision mission aligned well with who is our buyer, what's our services that we're doing, and then making sure that our hiring criteria, training and development, fit in that same scope of what we're developing and building.

Nicole: Excellent. Well, thank you Pete, so much for sharing your insights with us.

Pete Ketchum: Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed my time.

Nicole: So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Honest HR. We'll catch you next time.

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