RDEL #10: How much does task significance improve performance?

How much does meaningful work improve performance, and how can engineering teams create more meaning?

Welcome back to RDEL! Each week, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership, and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer.

💡 This week, we look at how finding meaning in one’s work translates to higher performance, and apply the research to software engineering teams.

The context:

Many companies put effort into evangelizing their broader impact to their team - whether through new hire orientation or in all-hands meetings. Scholars have long recognized that job performance is impacted by how employees perceive their job, and employees are increasingly focused on doing work that benefits others and contributes to society.

We relate this topic to engineering teams because unlike product or sales teams who work more closely with customers, engineering teams can often be more disconnected from their end-user. This means engineers can lose empathy over time over the significance of their work, particularly those on more internal-facing teams like platform teams. So how does meaning impact performance? We take a look below.

The research:

Adam Grant tackled the impact of task significance in three field experiments. He looked at fundraising callers for two experiments and lifeguards in the third. For this review, we’ll dive into one of his fundraising call experiments.

First, Grant looked at alumni donation callers and broke them into three cohorts: The first cohort read two stories about how the job could make a difference in others’ lives (“task significance”. The second cohort read stories about how the job would make a difference in their own lives (“personal benefit”). Finally, the third cohort received no manipulation as the control group. The cohorts were then measured in the number of pledges and donations they received before and after the treatment.

The results showed that:

• Cohort one, who read stories about the impact of their work, doubled the number of pledges earned and amount of money raised compared to the other cohorts.

• Cohort two (who read about how this will improve their own lives) did not have a significant improvement in performance over the control group.

The application:

This paper gives strong evidence that connecting work with impact has an outsized effect on performance. Simply understanding how one’s work can make a difference has the ability to drive significant, measurable improvements on performance.

For engineering teams, it can be easy to disconnect work from impact when day-to-day development gets in the weeds. Tying the product team more closely to engineering is a powerful way to get engineers thinking more about outcomes, not just actions. For example, if the engineering team is focused on the impact a new feature has on the end user, they will simultaneously build empathy for their users and directly see the meaning in their work. This also improves productivity - in fact, the “P” in the SPACE framework of developer productivity focuses on performance outcomes like customer satisfaction.

A couple more ways that engineering managers can connect meaning to work:

• Share anecdotes from customers: ask the product team to share feedback from customers after feature launches, either in a retrospective meeting or another group discussion.

• Shadow customer success teams: by bringing your engineers directly into conversations with customers, they will build empathy for the experiences that users have on the product. In just a 1-2 hour shadowing session, engineers will have a deeper understanding of how their work solves customer problems and how they can build more proactively for users.

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Thats all for this week - Happy Research Monday!

Lizzie

From the Quotient team