From financial bonuses to extra time off, supervisors are always looking for ways to motivate employees to be more creative and share ideas. Adam Grant has an outside-the-box suggestion: Find ways for your water and sewer maintenance crews to grab some face-time with their customers, as well as with their colleagues in other departments.

An organizational psychologist and professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Grant has studied what motivates employees. His findings indicate that when workers meet and talk with customers and colleagues, and realize that what they do benefits real people, that spurs creative thinking.

“A lot of people have jobs that really make a difference in the lives of end users,” Grant says. “All products and services are ultimately designed to benefit someone. But not many jobs are designed to connect workers with end users.”

Ironically, the isolation of workers from those they serve is driven by efficiency, says Grant. Organizations generally discourage such interaction under the assumption that it makes people and processes less efficient. And modern technology makes it easier to work with minimal face-to-face communication.

“Sure, minimizing distractions can increase efficiency,” Grant says. “But some distractions can be incredibly motivating and provide information about how to do a job better.” Grant’s interest is largely driven by his own experience. He noticed that while some people always came in early, stayed late, and volunteered for projects, others would do the minimum.

An experiment

To help determine what motivates employees Grant conducted a research study in 2008 at a large water treatment operation in the southeastern United States. It centered on employees at 30 to 40 sites with a wide range of responsibilities.

“There were many people working in fragmented locations, so they weren’t in contact very much,” Grant says. “We wanted to find out what could be done to encourage more idea and knowledge sharing.” Employees were asked to fill out online surveys that measured things such as job perceptions, levels of intrinsic motivation, and relationships with co-workers. Supervisors were asked to rate the employees’ creativity.

One finding came as no surprise: Employees who are intrinsically motivated and curious about new ways of doing things come up with lots of great ideas. But for the most part, those concepts were typically impractical to implement.

“On the other hand, the most novel and useful ideas came from employees who were most adept at taking the perspectives of others — thinking about their work from co-workers’ points of view, or understanding a supervisor’s goals or a customer’s needs,” Grant says. “It’s that active perception-taking that allows them to filter through ideas and select the ideas that are the most practical to apply.

“People who can do both — be intrinsically motivated and put themselves in someone else’s shoes — end up becoming the most creative employees and add most to the knowledge they share with others.” According to the study, creative ideas included techniques for preventing equipment failures, new pollution-control methods, and new work processes and safety protocols.

Meet and greet

So what can supervisors do to increase creativity and idea sharing? Grant says they need to think more broadly. “The upshot for supervisors is that they often think about how to make work more interesting for employees, whether it involves giving them more autonomy to do a job, or provide learning opportunities to heighten their interest in work,” he says.

“Studies suggest that those are valuable things, but we need to take some additional steps to translate ideas to others, like hiring more employees who naturally tend to take the viewpoints of others.”

Supervisors can accomplish this by asking specific screening questions during job interviews, or by having job candidates perform short tasks that would indicate an aptitude for considering others’ viewpoints.

For current employees supervisors should nurture more interaction by enabling employees to meet with the beneficiaries of their work or, at the very least, foster more employee empathy by communicating to them the urgency of problems that customers or co-workers face.

“You also can train people — get them in the habit of walking in other people’s shoes more often and more effectively,” Grant says. “One way to do that is through job rotation. Doing various jobs for a couple weeks at a time allows employees to see all the tasks an organization does, and it also creates more interaction between people whose work is interdependent.

“Too often we do work without a full, complete and vivid understanding of how people benefit from it. There’s a lot we can do to humanize work and make employees understand how their ideas can affect people around them.”