Imagine two twins, one called Timmy and the other called Tommy. They are identical in every way, including their motivation, their will to succeed and their desire to help others. They both go to university and upon graduation Timmy goes to work for a soft drinks company while Tommy goes to work in a hospital. By sheer fluke they find themselves doing identical office jobs.
Now imagine something a bit stranger, imagine that a magical new technology allows both the soft drinks company and the hospital to install a big red button on the wall of all their offices. Whenever it's pressed the button magically makes the organisation's fundamental purpose a reality - 10,000 more cans of fizzy drink are sold / 10 sick patients are healed and sent home. All you have to do is get up from your seat, walk over to the wall and press the button. As part of the deal staff are given total freedom on whether they press it or not and can press it as many times as they like. There is no oversight from the organisation, it has no impact on salary or reward and management are unable to even see whether the button has been pressed or not.
Now ask yourself, day after day who is more likely to press the button more frequently, Timmy or Tommy? It's hard not to conclude that it would be Tommy.
The idea of a magic red button may seem a fairly unlikely fantasy but the truth is that most of what we do in work constitutes a series of small actions that are taken on our own initiative, without the knowledge of management and for which we receive no recognition or reward - something as simple as answering an email query or helping a customer to find a solution in a timely, articulate and helpful manner. These are all potential 'red buttons' - we just don't see them that way. And pressing them tends to depend almost entirely on our own sense of why we are at work - our own sense of purpose.
In this sense (and in few others) public services should enjoy an enormous in-built advantage over profit-making organisations. The virtue of their fundamental purpose is rarely in doubt. A child instinctively grasps that a fireman or a street sweeper does a useful job. The utility of a currency trader or an app designer requires a bit more explanation. Tommy can believe fully in what he does while Timmy will need to construct a case, make a series of mental trade-offs and trust in the complicated mechanics of advanced capitalism. All the while Tommy can press the button safe in the knowledge that what he does is a public good.
Seen that way, connecting people to an inspiring purpose should be the ace card that all public services play when looking to engage their people and attract bright new recruits. There should be a perpetual explosion of human potential across the public sector. And yet... the 'purpose dividend' seems to melt into thin air as soon as the idea leaves the confines of a thought experiment and enters the real world.
For some reason the people who work in public services rarely feel they can or want to press that button while those in the best profit-making organisations very often do. Our public services should enjoy the highest levels of staff motivation. And yet...
Why should it be that the purpose dividend so rarely materialises? Here are a few reasons that I can think of. I have given them names of my own invention to aid the reader and obscure the fact that they aren't much more than common sense written down.
1. The Distancing effect.
Public sector organisations are often large and large organisations often feel that they need to break work down into smaller and smaller pieces to encourage specialism and release efficiency. Something about Adam Smith and pin factories I seem to recall... But do people in large organisations end up so distant from the outcome that they stop thinking about purpose and only focus on their own small part of the process? If so then the 'button' disappears and our public service organisation has just removed its greatest advantage.
2. The Virtue Doubt effect
Or is it the case that people can see the button and know how to press it but they doubt that what their organisation does is good regardless of what the vision may say. The policeman who has arrested a hundred drug dealers only to see their place taken by a hundred more while drug use soars may start to feel that there is little virtue in what they do. It's not hard to imagine this scenario in many public sector organisations as sad as it may seem.
3. The Organisational Distrust effect
Or what about this: the individual doesn't doubt the virtue of the organisation's purpose but comes to doubt the organisation itself. They start to feel that something is lost on the way and that the organisation suffers an inherent incompetence that makes achieving the fundamental purpose an exercise in futility. Lazy colleagues, self-centred management, poor rewards, short-term planning, organisational inertia. The symptoms are easy to imagine and they have a familiar ring to them.
4. The Irrational Psychology effect
And finally, what if it's something a little less easy to pin down. The organisation is competent, the outcome is visible, the purpose is undoubtedly virtuous and yet, and yet... Evolutionary psychology is in vogue at the moment for the understandable reason that it explain homo sapien behaviour in a way that rational economics simply doesn't. Our heuristics are less than logical and that means we make counter-intuitive decisions every day. In this case perhaps the button is the wrong size, the wrong colour or not on the right side of the room - something in the deeper recesses of our brain is not being triggered...
To try to sum up then... what these four possible reasons would suggest is that we should aim for our public services to:
- become smaller, less specialised
- focus only on public goods that can be achieved
- root out anything mediocre in their organisational life
- take full account of behavioural psychology when connecting their people to their purpose
That at least is as far as I get when pondering the strange case of the disappearing purpose dividend. I am sure there are more subtle analyses to be applied. Or at least I hope there are because the puzzle of the untapped human potential in the public sector deserves more attention than it gets.