Truth 15. Professional Workers Go for the Flow

Can you think of times in your life when you’ve been so deeply involved in something that nothing else seems to matter? The task consumes you totally and you lose track of time. Most people can. It’s most likely to occur when you’re doing a favorite activity: running, skiing, dancing, reading a novel, playing a computer game, listening to music, cooking an elegant meal. This totally involved state is called flow. Managers should look to flow as a particularly effective way to motivate professional employees.

Research finds that the flow experience itself isn’t necessarily a time when people are happy. It’s a period of deep concentration. But when a flow task is completed, and the individual looks back on what has happened, he or she is flooded with feelings of gratitude for the experience. It’s then that the person realizes the satisfaction received from the experience and how it made him or her happier.

Are there conditions that are likely to produce flow? Yes. When people describe flow experiences, they talk about common characteristics in the tasks they were doing. The tasks were challenging and required using a high level of skills. The tasks were goal-directed and provided them with feedback on how well they were performing. The tasks also demanded total concentration and creativity. And the tasks were so consuming that people had no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant or to worry about problems.

Here’s something that might surprise you: The flow experience is rarely reported by people when they’re doing leisure activities such as watching television or relaxing. Flow is most likely to be experienced at work, not at home!

If you ask people whether they’d like to work less, the answer is almost always yes. People associate leisure with happiness. They think if they had more free time, they’d be happier. Studies of thousands of individuals suggest that people are generally wrong in this belief. When people spend time at home, for instance, they often lack a clear purpose, don’t know how well they’re doing, get distracted, and feel that their skills are underutilized. They frequently describe themselves as bored. But work has many of the properties that stimulate flow. It often has clear goals. It provides people with feedback on how well they’re doing—either from the work process itself or through a boss’s evaluation. People’s skills are typically matched to their jobs, which provides challenge. And jobs usually encourage concentration and prevent distractions. The end result is that work, rather than leisure, more clearly mirrors the flow that people might get from games, sport, music, or art.

What are the managerial implications from flow research? Work, itself, can be a powerful motivator. It can provide a feeling of happiness that most leisure activities can’t. So, where possible, design jobs with challenging, creative, and consuming tasks that allow employees to utilize their skills, and ensure that these tasks have clear goals and provide employees with feedback.