 All right. Good afternoon everybody and welcome back to Big Talk for Small Libraries 2014 and our final presentation of this amazing and amazingly long day for most of us. Thank you to everybody who has been here with us for the last, I don't know, eight hours or so. We have been inspired by every one of our presenters today. I don't want to say almost all of them. Every one of them has inspired us. And now what we have saved for the end of the day is how we can inspire others based on what we've learned. And in general, in these hard times, we have motivating library employees in tough times presented by Samantha Hines, the head librarian. The Missoula College Library at the University of Montana. She writes and presents widely on issues of online library services, information literacy instruction and library minimal management. And is the author of Productivity for Librarians published in 2010. Samantha, take it away. All right. Well, thanks for having me and thanks as well for me for all of you for sticking around. I have to apologize in advance. We have a bit of a blizzard going on in Missoula today. So I'm at home on a computer that I don't use very often and my children and husband are upstairs since there's no school. So we'll see if everyone can stay quiet and calm and the computer can cooperate. But I have a good feeling. I think we'll get through it. So I am the head librarian of staff of two and a half at Missoula College. So we've got to do a bit of motivation as everyone else does from big to small. But I've got a lot of personal interest in this subject from my perspectives as a supervisor and just as a general researcher in the field of library management. So what I want to share with you today are some current thinking on the motivation of employees. I'm going to look at specifically Dan Ariely and Dan Pink, their recent works and writings on the topic. And then I'm going to talk about how to apply these theories that these fellows have discussed broadly onto our situations in the library and then end with some takeaways for us in particular. Hopefully we'll get some nice questions at the end. I know it's been a long day, but hopefully this will motivate you as well to talk a little bit about the topic. So why should we worry about motivating our employees hopefully beyond the obvious that we want to have a nice place to work? We want to provide for the common good of our employers, our employees. For society in general, we want to be a happy functioning group. The number one thing that people say is that hiring new people costs money. You want to retain the employees that you have, especially if they're any good. It's going to cost a lot more to hire somebody, as we probably all know, than to keep the people we have now. And it's not always about money, though, when it comes to retaining employees. A lot of times we get stressed out if our reports ask us for a raise, because we know how the budget situation works in libraries. And meriases are just not possible a lot of the time, or they're very small. But motivating employees is not all about money. So there was a recent survey by McKinsey Quarterly that talked about a group of intermediate managers that what they would need to be more motivated in their jobs. And their responses illustrated that they would like to get more attention from their supervisors, one-on-one conversations, praise, especially as motivating the chance to lead projects, the chance to see results from what they're doing. Those were the three things that were more motivating, in fact, than cash incentives like raises or bonuses. So incentives work beyond the financial. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. And the first person that I want to look at is Dan Ariely. He is a professor at, where is he at now? Duke University, it says right on the slide, he's at Duke. He studies management issues. He's written a number of really brilliant pieces on motivation and the way people make decisions generally. But the TED Talk that's mentioned here is particularly useful for our topic today. He cites seven insights into motivation at work. And the talk, which is about an hour long, illustrated each one of those in a lot of detail. And I'll just kind of summarize for you, but if you do have an interest in this subject, I would really recommend checking out this talk. It's great. So the first one is seeing the fruits of our labor. And this makes us more productive. That came up in that study that I mentioned just a moment ago as well. His particular study had college students building little Lego figures, and they were paid decreasing amounts for each figure that they created. One group's creations were stored in a little box, and the others were taken apart right in front of them as soon as they were built. Even though there wasn't a huge meaning to building little Lego figures, they were getting paid no matter what. The group whose creations were treasured, at least for a while, and weren't destroyed directly in front of them, obviously were long motivated to keep building. They made more of the little figures than the second group where they were destroyed right in front of them. So obviously we can draw upon this in a few different ways in libraries. We do a lot of great work and keeping in touch with our users, finding out statistics of how much things are circulated, getting information on programs attended. Things like that can really demonstrate that what we're doing makes a difference, and it's less isolated. And this ties in with the second point as well. The less appreciated we feel that our work is, the more money we're going to want, the more motivation you might need. So he had another experiment with college students where they had to find pairs of identical letters on a sheet of random letters. So the students circled the letters on a piece of paper and were offered money when they completed it. Students who were acknowledged at the end of each worksheet, researchers smiled and said thank you and put this paper neatly in a stack. Worked harder than the students whose papers were just accepted with a grunt and shoved into a pile to be shredded. Pretty obvious stuff, but it underscores that we need to share feedback, appreciate our employees publicly if we can, to add a motivational piece. We need to make sure our work is appreciated and that our employees' work is appreciated. The third one starts to get a little bit more interesting for you folks hopefully. The harder a project is, the prouder we're going to feel about completing it. And the particular study that the researcher did here was making origami forms, little shapes out of origami. They weren't incredibly beautiful, it says, actually specifically, it says they were ugly. But some instructor or some participants got harder instructions than others. And the ones that had the harder instructions, the students who created them put a higher value on them. They were asked at the end of the experience how much they would charge if they were selling their origami figures in a shop. So the evaluation of our own work is directly tied to the effort we put into it. So keeping this in mind, challenging our employees, challenging volunteers, for example, or challenging yourself will help you feel more connected with your work and more proud of it. The fourth element is knowing that our work helps others will increase our motivation. And this is pretty obvious in libraries for sure we have an edge on helping others. The particular research piece that they cite in this was a call center where a student that had benefited from the scholarships that the call center was calling about spoke to the callers for 10 minutes before they started calling. And the control group didn't get this motivational speech. So the ones that had gotten the speech increased their fundraising by 171%, an amazing increase. The interesting note is that the callers didn't realize that they were motivated by the speaker. They just thought, oh, the student coming in and talking about scholarships, this is really nice. But they didn't connect that that would benefit their motivation, that they would work harder. But it obviously helped. So keeping in mind our mission, for example, in the library, which almost always has a component for helping others, even though we may not actively realize it, will motivate us knowing that our work is benefiting the community. So the fifth point is the promise of helping others makes us more likely to follow rules. So this is called pro-social behavior, and it motivates us to do the right thing. The example they used was doctors and nurses washing their hands more when they had signs up that mentioned that patient health is boosted by doctors washing their hands. This one is a little different, but it applies to us as well. You know, we in libraries deal with a lot of material that's expensive and worthwhile, but we don't usually steal the best sellers and take them home with us. So to motivate us to do the best jobs we possibly can, we can rewrite our job descriptions to emphasize how we help others and keep that in the forefront. The sixth one, positive reinforcement about our abilities may increase performance. This is a pretty obvious one as well. But the upshot here is if you're in a stressful situation, like maybe those of us who work at the front lines who deal with a lot of complaints or angry people sometimes, knowing that our supervisors or our coworkers respect us, hold what we do in a positive light, and outwardly express that will increase our motivation and our performance in these stressful times. And finally, the idea that images trigger positive emotions and can help us focus. This is the infamous kitten study that you may have heard of that students who did a task involving dexterity and thinking did better after they looked at pictures of baby animals. So there were a lot of articles when this came out saying that we should all just watch YouTube videos of kittens at work and we'd do great. But I think the real upshot of it is if we have a nice pleasant place to work, tidy, well maintained, looking as nice and professional as it can, we will work harder, we'll work better. So some pretty obvious insights, but hopefully useful. Like I said, the TED Talk is wonderful. And oops, let me pause this. The next person I want to talk to is Daniel Pink. I don't know why they're both named Dan. Maybe that has something to do with motivation. But he is, he calls himself a free agent. He doesn't have a academic title such as Dr. Raleigh does. But he's turned from a speechwriter and a lawyer to a behavioral researcher. And he has written one of the best books about motivation called Drive, which I strongly recommend. And this video, which I'm going to try to show to you, I hope that the organizers can let me know if there's technical problems. But this really sums up his book in a brilliant way. And so let me see, let me try hitting play. If it doesn't work, I can summarize for you, but if it works, it's really just great. Well, the three big points in his book that the video goes with it really just, it's excellent. You just really need to check it out is that there's three approaches to motivating, three basic approaches. The first is providing greater autonomy to employees. Can you provide employees with more choice and more control with regard to their tasks? How they do them, what they do them, or why they do them, when they do them, with whom they work. And the second is mastery. And this means basically getting really good at something is just motivating in and of itself. If you're really good at working with people, if that's something that goes really smoothly for you, you're going to enjoy it, you're going to want to do more of it. And that'll be motivating for people who really like to work with the public, for example. And the third point of this is purpose. And we've talked about a lot about this in Dr. Ariely's research, was knowing that your work has a purpose. So connecting your employees with that purpose, with the larger values inherent in the librarianship can be incredibly motivating. And this is essentially the idea of intrinsic motivation. So we already talked a little bit about extrinsic motivation, which is things like money or maybe less financial things like more vacation time, or nicer furniture, really top-of-the-line computers or fancy chairs at the reference desk. But the idea of this ingrown motivation is what really can hook our employees into doing more work, better work, working harder, enjoying their jobs more, sticking around. Another approach that has been gaining some traction is using games as a motivating factor. And in librarianship, we mostly have focused on using games in motivating our users to do certain things. I come from an academic background and there's tons of articles coming out now on how to gamify library instruction or get students in the library using games. But there's ways we can do this with our employees as well. There's a couple really nice books out about this topic. The first that I've read is called Reality is Broken by Dr. Jane McGonagall. And she highlights, again, the concept of intrinsic rewards. And she has four components for an intrinsic reward in the workplace. The first is that the work is satisfying, which means you have clear goals, actionable next steps and tangible results. That you have a sense of success is the second component. That there's an element of social connection is the third and that there's some greater meaning, which is the fourth. Again, these are things we've heard already from our two researchers. But she also points out in this book that these four components are things that you find in games. And she uses a lot of video games as an example that you would do some sort of satisfying work, meaning there's clear goals, next steps and results that lead to success in a video game. A lot of games have social connections now on online gaming or reader boards, leader boards, showing who's ahead in the scoring. You can share things on Facebook, that sort of social connection. And that there's a larger purpose within the game's story usually. So another book that's come out recently by Adam Penenberg is called Play at Work. And this offers a lot more specific examples of ways to inject games into a work situation. And one of the key ways that might be useful in librarianship when we look at our employees and motivating them, that's a little bit less cheesy than maybe like a reader board of who's answered reference questions or worked with the public the most or something, is a system called Badges. And we are starting to see this in a lot of online games where if you do certain things, you earn a particular badge. It's a lot like Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. But you get a little pin or virtual badge that you can put on some sort of website. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a website thing. You could get an actual badge or an actual pin for particular things that are of interest and relevance for your workplace. It doesn't have to be terribly expensive. It doesn't have to be super public. I know a lot of us would have concerns with having some sort of leader board showing employees ranking them in a particular way. But having a little pin that employees could put on a name tag or on a lanyard or something like that wouldn't be obtrusive and it would be a way of rewarding. And if you had a collection like you need to work through all the steps to get various pins or badges, it could be particularly motivating if done right. So there's a few elements there. And I'm getting to this summing up point since my little video kind of crashed things for us here. I wanted to talk about more of the applications and then I wanted to see if there were some questions or thoughts from the attendees. But first of all, applying what we've learned. We have heard a lot of the same things coming from these researchers on how to motivate employees, which isn't surprising. Hopefully they would find the same results. And to sum them up, I've got about six or seven points here that really work well with boosting motivation without paying money. The first and one of the most basic ways to motivate workers is to provide clear expectations. So this is a fundamental principle of management that you should provide clear expectations to your workers. But a lot of workplaces seem to be lacking this. I know in my particular job I often run into the muddy expectations where I'm not sure what I should be doing in a particular situation or what my goals are, and in order to motivate employees to do their jobs well, these expectations need to be clear. It's just primary, basic human resources management. So the ways you can do this are performance reviews, even if you don't have the opportunity to give raises, continue to do performance reviews formal and informal. Going beyond the sit down once a year, meet with your employees fairly regularly, give feedback, share expectations, have them share expectations with you, make sure that the vision and mission of the library is clear, because this is really what frames the expectations and provides a sense of purpose. A second one is to offer recognition and reward in some organized manner. So that badge system that I just mentioned, that's more of a game where you meet certain standards and you're awarded with a result. That's one way of doing recognition. A less formal way would be taking staff out to lunch or buying donuts. One that I thought was particularly clever that I read about was if a staff member has a particular skill, asking that staff member to do some sort of education session for the rest of the colleagues or maybe at a library conference in the region is a great way of recognizing that employee, giving them a great boost and recognition for what they're doing. So keeping that feedback loop going especially though is a great way to recognize, whether you're having these open conversations, you're thanking employees for what they do, you're aware of what they're doing, you let them know you're aware, let them know how it feeds back into the library's mission and how you're just really glad they're there and working with you. So another good PR, not PR, HR move is to keep your employees informed. Keep them in the loop. This is really another basic thing that some libraries don't do so well. Keep your employees knowledgeable as to the financial status of the library especially. This can help if there is a desire for more money and your employees know what the situation is. That knowledge that you're doing as much as you can but the financials just aren't there, can help with the morale and can help with the motivation. But just generally keeping staff informed as to what challenges the library's facing overall can keep them feeling valued. And this also goes along with keeping them in the loop for organizational goals and how the library's meeting them, getting their feedback and input as to what these goals are. You really can't over communicate is the bottom line. You really can't. That's one of the most motivating things is for your employees to know the situation, know what's going on, know where the library's succeeding, and even to know where it needs to catch up. Having a positive work environment is one that's a little fluffy but it's incredibly motivating. It's a lot more fun to come to work when you want to be there as we all know. And this mindset goes all the way from the top of any organization down to the bottom. So the people at the top need to be positive, full of thankfulness and praise for their employees. Having a place that recognizes achievements, honors milestones like numbers of years, worked at a particular place. All these things can make work a little bit more fun. And this ties in again with the idea of gamification. If you can inspire some sort of friendly competition in your staff or your employees or your volunteers or yourself, maybe even if you're a solo librarian, this can make your workplace a lot more fun. You can also consider some perks that might be a little more alternative than raises. I mentioned a couple of them already, things like extra vacation days. That still has a financial impact. But flexible schedules might be something that can be done or increasing educational opportunities in some way. You've got to be kind of creative in this area to think of some perks. I've read of a library that somehow worked out a discount with a local coffee shop. So if you can get some sort of employee discount in that way, I don't know exactly what they did in exchange. Maybe the workers at the coffee shops didn't have overdue fines or something like that. But accessing your community, seeing what kind of alternative perks you could find that aren't financial are a good way to show your employees your thinking of them, that you're trying to appreciate them and give them a little bit more. And then the final one is to ask your employees. What might lead you to feel more valued here? What would motivate you more? What besides money would show you that we care? You might get some surprising answers back. Some people wanted to do a quiz night at a bar at a library. And that made them really happy to have a library team. But to think a little bit outside the box and ask the people that are working for you, what would be motivating? So those are my bullet summaries. Money isn't everything. And there's lots of other things you can do to keep your employees motivated. So I'm hoping that a few of you stuck around and maybe have some questions about particular situations or maybe you have your own things that you've done to motivate. That would be interesting to discuss. All right. Thank you for that. And I realized we kind of cut a 10 minute video out of your presentation there. So we've got plenty of time for discussion and questions. I did have one comment I see here on Twitter saying, Diana says, I live for intrinsic rewards. That's why I'm a librarian. Ah, yes, yes. We're not in it for the money. Exactly. I don't think we're going to have too much trouble justifying to ourselves why we're not taking home six-figure incomes. We do find the work satisfying or else we tend to migrate elsewhere for sure. Okay. We do have a comment. Thanks. This will work for volunteers too. But how do you motivate yourself if you are a solo or the one in charge? That's a good question. Yeah, I am, for all intents and purposes, a solo librarian myself. I have found a lot of motivation in gamifying a bit, competing with myself to do certain things. I have to, I'm an academic. I have to publish. Can I get two more publications out this year than I did last year? Can I get another conference presentation beyond what I did the year before? Setting goals is a big motivating factor for me personally. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a competition thing either. You could just have a goal of, this year I'm going to attend three conferences because conferences can be pretty motivating. Or this year I'm going to write that strategic plan for the next five years. Setting these goals can really help, especially if you write them down. Definitely don't just do it all in your head. If you have some method of accountability, that's pretty important with goals as well. Sometimes having that goal with your boss can be incredibly motivating. Sometimes it's a little too much. But if you had a colleague elsewhere in the community or in librarianship, you could buddy up and say, this is my goal for the next six months. I'm going to try to accomplish these things. And your colleague can say, well, these are my goals and you can check in with one another and motivate that way. Great. Crystal? One of our previous presenters said our music teacher is greatly known as the chocolate lady. She always shares chocolates, but only with the staff, no students. Our elementary math teacher is the community coffee pot person. Those are great, yeah. Food is incredibly motivating for sure. Here we have a comment, birthdays as a holiday, great perk. Yeah, I have worked at places where if it's your birthday, it was understood you would take the day off and you would do things just for you. At the library I worked at prior to this one, there was a monthly celebration of everyone's birthday at the start of the month who had a birthday in that month. So all the May birthdays would get together on May 5th and there'd be treats and you'd kind of sit and chat for half an hour with everybody. Just honoring things that are milestones like that, even if they're not necessarily professional, really show an appreciation for the people you work with. Here's someone who says we have a chalkboard in the staff break room where we just write whenever we see someone doing something great. Sometimes just noticing it works and motivates them. Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah, just noticing these things and I kind of like how that's a little bit anonymous but open to everybody and visible for everyone. So it's less formal than a lot of systems that I've seen, but that could be very effective. The people at Gallup have a whole structure of sending little notes to one another. They're drop shaped like raindrops or whatever. And they send whatever anybody does something nifty and you actually collect them and show them to one another. But, oh, you need motivation to do polling. But it works because it's their status. Yeah, any sort of feedback loop that you can get and just showing that appreciation is really worthwhile. Now, here's somebody who says we give gift cards, but just we're told that these rewards have to be reported as 1099. Have you heard this? Oh, I haven't. No. I mean, imagine if they're over a certain amount they would be. My understanding is somebody who's gotten like, you know, speaker fees and things like that. If it's under $600, they're not going to issue a 1099. Yeah, yeah, it would have to be pretty significant. Whether or not you're technically supposed to legally report it as income anyway, that's probably true. Yeah, yeah, at the university, we signed an agreement that says if we get anything above $25 in value, we have to report it in some way. Yeah, that's something that I've heard too is 25 is the cutoff. So if it's something less than that, you're okay. And someone else just said the same thing. We used to get gift cards for $25 and HR said they had to be reported as income. So interesting. There is some things that check your local laws. Right, yeah. Final answer, I think. Yeah. And someone is asking, how do you gamify or report a very small staff without being spooky? Yeah, that was the question I kind of had when I was reading some of the gamification research because they were talking about especially department stores where you have employees of the month or way back in the day when I worked retail, we had a little leader board of who had the most credit card applications every month. And we had a huge staff of almost 100. So it was a little exciting, but with like a staff of two or three. The badge idea really struck me as something that could be doable even with a small staff. You could have badges for particular tasks, perhaps mastering a task. Like we have a, to give a kind of silly example, our door when we lock it is it's really an endeavor because we have to turn off the handicap access with a long stick that's on the top of the door. You have to turn the key in a particular way. So I could see that as being kind of a welcome to the club sort of badge when you finally figure out how to lock the door at night. You know, you could, you could just find sort of silly, but they still include people. They show that you recognize that they've got some sort of achievement. And it doesn't have to be super obvious to the public what it was, but it could have, you know, like a little picture of a door on it and they can stick it on their lanyard if you guys have name tags on lanyards or something like that or just keep wherever. I say learn to embrace the hokey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with gamification, especially it's kind of hard to have a serious game because then you lose a bit of the fun aspect. Here says someone who says it means everything to be recognized for going out of my way to do something strong customer service. Yeah, it would because yeah, customer service is sort of a risk environment. You know, you have to feel empowered to do things without a manager over your shoulder necessarily you have to feel empowered to make decisions that will be the best for everyone involved and that requires a lot of critical thinking. Yeah, if you're in a frontline situation, those are key people that keep motivated keep happy. Let them know when they're doing because most of the time they are usually only hear about it as a manager when things go wrong. So yeah, definitely. Here's what I have staff who make lists of daily goals and then figure the percentage completed and reported on Facebook. So they managed to turn that into a K. Yeah, that's an excellent way of doing it. I don't know that I could get that nitty gritty about it myself, but I could see some people who are really like catalogers, especially for some reason come to mind. I could see very detailed oriented people doing that as a little, yeah, leaderboard sort of style game. That's great. I'm definitely a to do list person and like being able to have gotten through my list for the day. Now I do know how to postpone also that that's a very easy keyboard command. Yeah. So other comments or questions from the audience. I'm looking at a blank list. All right. Well, thank you, Samantha. That was wonderful. I will, like I said, we'll definitely work out the editing there with the glitch in the middle. Oh, thank you. My apologies. Oh yeah, no, not a problem. In fact, you still you're getting I think we start to get tomorrow. So awesome. Yeah, it's heading it's heading this way. So Samantha, thank you once again for that. We really appreciate it. And I think we ended that on a really wonderful and inspiring note. So for just a few minutes here, folks, I'm going to go ahead and take back control and just do a little bit of housekeeping to finish up the day here. You should be seeing momentarily the big talk from small libraries website, which pretty much most of you have already been at at least once, if not to find out about the conference but also to go through and register. We have the art. Oh, we have a final comment that I just want to make so that Samantha knows someone just said, thank you for mentioning my suggestions and questions that they typed in. It motivated me. Yay. We realize as we go through the day with our schedule we have not been able to get to every individual question that we've gotten but they did get sent in. And on the website as we have done in the past two years, we have been recording all of these sessions. And we will need to do some editing. So we are not going to post a nine hour video file we will break that up. So bear with me it will take a little bit of editing time to process all that video. We will be collecting all of the PowerPoints presentation files and PDFs from our presenters and we will be posting them here on this site under the presentations link which I could click there now but there's nothing there yet. And come early next week we will also be sending out an evaluation form. We have a survey monkey survey to all of the people who are at least logged in once today. So, they get one point we saw about almost 300 people logged in simultaneously. And we have over 400 people register. So we'll post some statistics and things like that, as we gather all of that information up next week. So that Laura Krista you have anything else you would like to add for the benefit of the day. Okay, that's right. I wanted to say thank you and I wanted to say too, next year, you know, we'll come around. And I'm sure a lot of people who attended today probably have some great stuff going on in their library so think about presenting. I hope our presenters would tell you that this has not been a painful experience. And we'd love to hear from you. Yep. And generally we already looked at February 20 next year is a Saturday so it will not be on February 28. We'll figure out another day and we generally put out the call for presentations shortly after our own state conference which usually will be around the end of October or early November. So keep an eye out for that. Like I said, basically just say subscribe to the Facebook page or to the RSS feed for this website. And we'll get all the information as we post it as we have it and as we look forward to planning next year's presentation. So with that, I want to thank all of our presenters one last time. I want to thank my voice for holding out as good as it has. And I want to thank all of you. Yeah, and I want to thank all of you who have attended today. It's been wonderful. And thank you much for attending. And that's our show. Bye bye. Have a good weekend and keep warm.