Employee engagement continues to be an elusive outcome in many organizations. A Blessing-White study on employee engagement shows that only about 31% of employees in organizations are considered “engaged”.

Organizations have poured considerable time, effort, and money into solving the engagement problem. Yet, there has been little to show for the effort.

In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely might have found a key to increasing engagement – avoid what he calls the “Sisyphean” condition. Sisyphus was a king from Greek mythology. His punishment in the afterlife was perpetually rolling a stone up a hill. Each time he neared the top, the stone rolled back to the bottom. In other words, Sisyphus’ curse was never to see his work produce any results.

Ariely explored this idea with a simple experiment. He paid two groups of people to build objects (“bionicles”) out of Legos. Each time an individual would finish building, he or she would be offered the chance to build another object for slightly less money than the prior one. The participants could choose to stop whenever they wanted. There was one difference, however. In one group (called the “meaningful” group), once the object was created, it was taken away and a new set of parts was provided. In the other group (the “Sisyphean” group) once the object was completed, it was immediately disassembled in front of the participant (while the participant was working on his or her next object).

So, what was the difference between those people who saw their work undone and those who didn’t?

People whose work was undone stop producing much sooner.  They built three fewer bionicles and earned three dollars less for the task. This reinforces that point that money is not enough to motivate performance.  The people in both conditions had the same earning potential. The demotivated workers chose to stop working and forego the extra income.

Incidentally, Ariely also found that in the meaningful group, there was a high correlation between how much someone liked playing with Legos and their output. Yet, in the Sisyphean group, there was no correlation. His experiment effectively sucked passion out of the participants.

In a follow on experiment using a different task, Ariely went one step further. He divided his subjects into three categories:

• Those who would get a positive acknowledgment for doing their task
• Those who would get no acknowledgment
• Those who would get no acknowledgment and, as with the Sisyphean Lego group, would see their work destroyed.

Not surprisingly, the acknowledged group was the most productive (competing the task 9.03 times on average). The Sisyphean group was the least productive at 6.34. That’s also not surprising.  What may be surprising is that those in the ignored condition didn’t perform much differently than those in the Sisyphean condition (6.77).   In other words, it’s not just negative feedback that lower performance.  A lack of positive feedback also demotivated people.

Ariely concluded:

“This experiment taught us that sucking the meaning out of work is surprisingly easy. If you’re a manger who really wants to demotivate your employees, destroy their work in front of their eyes. Or, if you want to be a little subtler about it, just ignore them and their efforts.”

You might be thinking that you don’t literally destroy people’s work in front of them. However, you might be destroying more than you think. As a leader are you guilty of creating Sisyphean conditions for your team?

• Does the way you deliver feedback “destroy” their work? Do you overly reshuffle, revise, re-edit, and rethink what they did?
• In your desire to add value, do you take out their thoughts and replace them with your own?
• Do you allow their work to go unacknowledged so that they never know what came of it?
• When assigning a task on a contentious issue, are you mindful of people who have been burned in the past putting in long hours on projects that wound up getting cancelled or deferred by people higher up?
• Are your people so far removed from the end user or end customer that they never actually see the impact they have? (creating a ‘line of sight” diagram on a Powerpoint slide doesn’t count)
• Do you (or does your organization) require a lot of non-value added administrative work, HR or compliance processes, committees, and other work that takes people away from the work that stirred their passion and attracted them to the job in the first place?

While you might not literally put someone’s work through the shredder, your actions and inactions might be having the same effect.

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Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.