How to design jobs to be more motivating

The way we’ve always done things isn’t necessarily the best way.

Do new volunteers show up for one shift and never come back?

Are your best volunteers flaking?

Did you scare away a new volunteer by offering them a leadership role?

These problems may be indicators that their jobs are designed wrong.

Many organizers were taught to either give volunteers boring, repetitive, micro-managed tasks or delegate overwhelming duties to someone who did one thing well and may be unprepared for more responsibility.

There is a better way.

A well-designed job can increase a volunteer’s motivation and satisfaction and move them up the ladder of responsibility and leadership in a way that doesn’t overwhelm them.

A well-designed job will also increase the quality and quantity of work done.

There is an easy-to-apply framework that organizers can use to improve any role.

In 1975, organizational psychologists J. Richard Hackman and Greg R. Oldham studied 658 workers in 62 jobs across seven organizations. They created a theory—the Hackman and Oldham Job Characteristics Model—that found five characteristics of a job that affect a person’s motivation, satisfaction, and performance.

This model has been used to improve volunteer teams at many organizations, including the Sierra Club, the Obama 2008 campaign field program, Sunrise Movement, and others.

Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model

The five characteristics are:

Skill variety: Is the volunteer doing the same thing repeatedly, or are they using different talents and skills?

Task identity: Is the volunteer slotted into an unending flow of tasks, or are they completing a “whole” piece of work with a beginning, middle, and end with visible outcomes? 

Task significance: Does the volunteer know the impact their efforts have on the lives or work of other people—whether in the team, the organization, or the broader community?

Autonomy: Does the volunteer have freedom, independence, and discretion to schedule the work and to decide the procedures to be used in carrying it out? Does the volunteer have the support to make the right choices?

Feedback from the job itself: Does completing the work provide the volunteer with direct knowledge of how well they performed the task? Feedback from the work itself is better than feedback from a supervisor.

How to apply the model to volunteer roles

There’s no one right way to design every job, but we can evaluate any job using the five characteristics and then improve it.

Let’s look at an example of volunteers working at a phone bank—either in person or in a Zoom meeting—to encourage people to vote, attend an event, donate money, or something else.

Skill variety: Is the volunteer only making calls? Or are they doing a range of tasks? 

Skill variety can be increased by having volunteers debrief with each other at the end of the shift to evaluate what went well and what could have gone better in their conversations. Debriefing requires the volunteers to shift from doing the thing to assessing their performance and creating new approaches. These post-shift debriefs can also meet people’s innate need to feel connected to other people.

Organizers can also increase skill variety by promoting volunteers into leadership roles like training other people, running Zoom calls, or providing one-on-one tech support.

Task identity: Is the volunteer just calling and calling until the shift ends? Or is there a defined beginning, middle, and end of the shift with visible outcomes? 

There are a couple of approaches to increasing task identity. The easiest tweak for most phone banks is to report on progress throughout the shift and report back on the number of dials and positive responses at the end of the shift. 

Organizers can also increase task identity by having phone bankers call people in one neighborhood, precinct, or state with a goal for the number of commitments. After they complete one section of turf, they can pause and feel like they’ve completed one whole piece of work from beginning to end with a visible outcome (the number of commits) before moving on to the next section of turf.

Task significance: Does the volunteer know how their slice of work fits into the larger strategy? For example, do they know that they are identifying supporters now that will be contacted again later to turn out to vote? Or are they just doing the work because someone told them to?

Autonomy: Is the volunteer told to follow the script word-for-word instead of given the flexibility to use their best judgment? 

Volunteers can experience more autonomy if they are taught why the script is written the way it is. For example, “we ask people their plan to vote because studies have shown that asking someone to create and discuss their plan is more effective than only encouraging them to vote or asking them if they intend to vote.”

When people know the rationale behind the script, they may internalize those reasons, increasing their feeling of autonomy.

Feedback from the job itself: Does the volunteer know how well they are doing? The best kind of feedback comes directly from the work itself, not from an organizer. We can improve someone’s experience of feedback by encouraging them to jot down the number of contacts they have and the number of “yeses.” 

Not all turf is the same, so the organizer can share their experience with the turf to help people calibrate their expectations. For example, “I usually get six 'yeses' in a shift, but this is tough turf we’re calling tonight, so I’m setting a goal for myself of four 'yeses.'”

If you can only change one thing, change this.

If we gave a score for each of the five factors to determine the Motivating Potential Score (MPS), the formula is:

Skill variety, task identity, and task significance all have the same level of importance.

Autonomy and feedback have a higher impact on the score, so my recommendation is to put most of your energy into increasing autonomy or feedback characteristics.

Giving people greater autonomy (with support) makes the person feel more personally accountable and responsible for the results of the work they do.

Giving people more feedback increases their knowledge of how effectively they are performing the job and may lead them to want to get better over time.

These two factors support people to take on more responsibility and leadership over time.

Written by Randall Smith

Randall helps organizers design and build people-powered campaigns as the founder of PowerLabs.

Organizations he has worked with include Courage California, Forward Together, Free Press, IfNotNow, Movimiento Cosecha, MPower Change, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Sunrise Movement, and United for Respect.

He has also taught staff at Chinese Progressive Association, National Domestic Workers Association, the Pilipino Workers Center, SEIU, Voces de la Frontera and other organizations to be more effective organizers by applying insights from psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and other fields.

Previously, he provided strategic support to user-generated campaigns on Change.org's platform. His work at Change.org helped people win life-changing (and life-saving) victories including freeing loved ones from prison and changing the policies that govern lung transplants for kids.

Prior to Change.org, he led the digital program at Corporate Accountability, a global NGO that protects people and the environment from corporate abuses. Randall has also worked as a direct action trainer during the global justice movement, a tenant organizer, and the operations director of an immigrant-led human rights organization.