Reimagining how we teach and work together

A large aspect of teaching and working as a group(especially in engineering or office work) is the motivation to work and getting the job done. However, as a student myself, I can say for the majority of students at school and at home, the motivation to work is simply not there. Their ideals aren’t aligned with the teachers who would have lived a relatively academic life compared to their own. Consequently, this leads to students being forced into working or a group being forced into a task/project where all their goals aren’t homogenous and this can easily cascade efficiency as being forced into something you don’t want to do would kill anyones motives to contributing to a task. Moreover, this reduction in motivation is enhanced by the constant comparing between different students/projects/companies. Therefore, this feeds a scarcity mentality onto people in this generation where it becomes very difficult to celebrate success(as we always know there’ll be someone who’s done better) and this can lead to a further reduction in motivation.

So what’s the solution? I have been reading ‘the7 habits of highly effective people’ and in public victories, the author references the concept of win/win, win/lose, lose/win and lose/lose situations. When we evaluate all the things I have stated above, you’ll see that none of them can be summed as a win/win situation, and logically the greatest motivation will comes from a win/win situation. For example, a teacher may threaten a student with a detention if they don’t do their homework: this is a win/lose situation as the teacher may be winning by earning the homework; however, the student doesn’t gain anything from completing his homework and consequently loses. This means he would have little motivation to do the homework properly and as a result, would most likely skim through the homework or more commonly, copy one of his peers. In engineering, a similar thing happens where the goals of a task may only be focussed on one member’s idea or even a governing body who don’t consider any of the employees opinions at all. This would again be a win/lose situation as the the governing body may be winning by delegating the designing process and therefore having it done for them. However, with the lack of involvement, the employees may feel very run over and therefore only half complete the task.

So what is a win/win situation? The following ideas are all from my head so may have their flaws. However, if i were to teach, i would use these ideas and hopefully when i start engineering i will apply some of these concepts: In a teaching sense, applying a reward system to work would promote a better working environment. However, this doesn’t mean adding in an achievement point system as a reward system. Although an achievement point system would help with awarding specific students, this would only promote the comparing between students even more. Moreover, making a reward system as a teacher for students is unfair as the students should truly be the ones deciding what their reward may be. My example was: if you were to have a noisy class who didn’t ever focus during lesson. Tell the class that you’d let them out to break/lunch 5 minutes early. Let’s suppose a talkative class’ efficiency is 50% and the lesson is 40 minutes long and a concentrated class has an efficiency of 90%. Therefore, the talkative class would have effectively have done 20 minutes of work while the concentrated class, while also working for less time, would have had 31.5 minutes of work which is 57.5% more than the talkative class. Moreover, this also is a win/win situation for both the student and the teacher. For the teacher, they have the class progress faster. For the students, they get to be front of canteen queues and they have more time to their break. This would motivate them into working more.

Applying a similar concept to the homework issue I referenced at the beginning. More would need to be done to celebrate the student’s success which means that rather than awarding students for having the most achievement points and promoting comparing, the students who become motivated to work should be the ones who are celebrated and as a result this would motivate them to work. This idea of win/win can be applied to any interaction between 2 people and i believe it is the real way to get people to work together and therefore create real motivation to work.

In engineering, simply having a voice in the business operations would create motivation. Moreover, it would potentially bring new and better ideas to the business while the employees also learning new skills in the process. Altogether, there aren’t any negative aspects to the process- companies like Microsoft have implemented this idea with very large results in productivity. Therefore, i believe if everyone who reads this starts implementing win/win into their ethos when talking to other people and working in a group, their productivity will increase by a considerable margin.