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Whether at home or in the office, happiness is a personal thing. But are there any constants when it comes to happiness? What kinds of practices and activities seem to make everyone happy, regardless of where and how they work?

Today we sit down with Jessica Weiss, a speaker and consultant who has spent the last 15 years researching happiness, and working with companies including Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and American Express. We discuss what she's learned about happiness at work, and the surprising commonalities shared by people who really, honestly, enjoy their jobs.

Learn more about Jessica and find her recent TEDx Talk, titled "Happiness: An Inside Job," at: https://jessicaweiss.com/
Key Points

Commonalities in happiness that work for everyone

The business case for happiness, new studies, and metrics

Who's a shining example in the happiness at work universe

Tangible tips to increase your individual and organizational happiness

*What leads to a happy life? What are the various ways to be happy? Happiness means different things to each of us. After doing extensive research, Management 3.0 founder Jurgen Appelo discovered the common thread: Happiness is something we create. It is not something to achieve. It is a path you choose, not a destination to arrive at. So many of us spend our lives in pursuit of happiness. Instead of searching for it, we need to find ways to live, embrace, and implement it into our daily lives. That's why we created the 12 Steps to Happiness at Management 3.0. You can find more information and even download a free poster of the 12 steps at: https://management30.com/practice/
Transcript
*Please note that the transcript has been automatically generated and proofread for mistakes. But remains in spoken English, and some syntax and grammar mistakes might remain.
Elisa Tuijnder: [00:00:00] Whether at home or in the office, happiness is a personal thing. We all have different practices, habits, and pursuits that make us smile, make us feel energized, and allow us to feel satisfied with the lives we lead and the work we do. But are there any constants when it comes to happiness? What kinds of practices and activities seem to make everyone happy, regardless of where and how they work?

Today, we sit down with a speaker and consultant who has spent the last 15 years researching happiness and working with some of the largest companies in the world. We'll discuss what she's learned about happiness at work and commonalities shared by people who really, honestly enjoy their jobs.

Before we dive in, you are [00:01:00] listening to The Happiness At Work podcast by Management 3.0 where we are getting serious about happiness.

I am your host, Elisa Tuijnder, happiness enthusiast and Management 3.0. Team member. In this podcast, we share insights from industry experts, influencers, and thought leaders about what it takes to be happy, motivated, and productive at work. So that loving your job becomes the norm and not the exception. We will be publishing every fortnight on Friday, so be sure to tune in and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Our guest today is Jessica Weiss, a renowned speaker, consultant, and leadership expert who has spent the last 15 years working with [00:02:00] companies including Coca-Cola, Johnson and Johnson and American Express. A recent TEDx talk titled Happiness and Inside Job is now available online and on her website, jessicaweiss.com.

Hey, so thank you so much for joining us today, Jessica.

Jessica Weiss: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Great.

Elisa Tuijnder: Hey,

so we're super excited to talk about your work and what you've learned about happiness over the last 15 years. That's what we are all about. But on the podcast, we always start with the same question, and that is what does happiness mean to you?

Jessica Weiss: Okay, so what does happiness mean to me? So I'm gonna start by saying first what I believe happiness is not, and then I'll go into what I believe it is because I think that there's a lot of stuff floating around in the atmosphere that I differ from. So first, what I believe happiness is not, is people love to say things like, oh, happiness is a choice.

If you choose to be happy, [00:03:00] you're gonna be happy. And that's fine and well and if you can do that's great. But that to me is not what happiness is, and I don't believe that happiness is a mindset. I actually think happiness is something much more tangible. I think that it's something that we can cultivate and grow.

Like we can learn the things that work about happiness and then we can get more happiness in our life. So for me, happiness actually comes down to these three things. The first one is your friendships. Your connections, your family, all of your social connections, whatever that might mean. So for you, if it's all friends, no family for somebody else.

If it's all family, very few friends, whatever social connections that you can foster, that's number one for me. The second one is around our level of engagement and enthusiasm for our life. So in other words, it's how much we are paying attention to everything that we're doing, how much energy we have towards everything that we're doing.

So that's the second one. And the third one [00:04:00] is work. And I think that's the one where lots of people are like, work. What do you mean? Work? But I think work can be a huge source of happiness, as I'm sure you do too.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, absolutely. And it also should be cuz we spend so much time

Jessica Weiss: there. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah.

Elisa Tuijnder: Hey how did you first have become interested in happiness at work? Did you have some kind of personal experience? Did you see a trend that you were like, okay, this area needs more attention? So how did that

Jessica Weiss: happen? So I have always been somebody who's been interested in the topic, just in general.

So even when I was in college and I was an undergrad, it was always something that kind of pulled me in. I was always interested, it always piqued my curiosity. So it was always something that was floating in the back of my brain. My brain on a very personal level. And then, I became a, I went to business school and I became a management consultant.

And a lot of the work that I was doing was around organizational transformation. How can companies become more innovative and more [00:05:00] creative? How can they grow? And oftentimes, once we peeled back all the layers, What was often at the heart of all of that was, how do I get better at my job?

How do I do my job better? And then if you push that one step further, it was, how can I get more enjoyment for my work? How can I have more happiness at work? And when I realized that was the answer, the, or the question to all, that answered everything that was where I was like, oh, this is the spot where we should be focusing.

So all the transformation. All the curiosity, all of that actually comes down to how do we find more happiness at work. Yeah,

Elisa Tuijnder: absolutely. Hey, so you've done quite a bit of research over the years and I just wanna ask you whether you've learned anything that was, surprising or especially valuable or around in this space.

And I know you probably have so much, but. How for you, does it impact businesses and employees?

Jessica Weiss: So what I think is actually most interesting in [00:06:00] terms of happiness at work specifically, is I think that lots of people like to say, why should we even care about this? I'm here to make money this happiness at work stuff like this is very, this is nonsensical.

Why am I even spending time on it? But now we have decades, literally decades worth of research that show that happiness actually impacts the bottom line. I think that as much as we can bring data into this conversation so that we can convince people of how important this is, that's what I think is most important.

And I will say this, there's one piece of data that just came out very recently out of the University of Oxford, which looked at companies that valued happiness at work and really, the way that we say they valued happiness at work. Maybe they were the best. They were voted best place to work.

Or they ranked per, they used this as a value. And they interviewed out of this research, it interviewed millions of employees. And what they found [00:07:00] was the organizations that valued happiness, mental wellbeing, workplace wellbeing, whatever we wanna call it, outperformed the S&P stock market by 30%. Wow. So if you invested a thousand dollars in the stock market, just like regular S&P, I'm not a genius around this, so I'm sure I'm not calling it correctly but you understand the absolutely point of what I'm saying. Absolute. So if you invested a thousand dollars into the stock market on the S&P 500, which is that very okay, I'm just gonna put it in these great companies.

You would get a certain return if you put it in companies that were on best places to work, you got $300 more for every $1,000 that you invested. Oh. So we're outperforming in the stock market, which I feel like you really can't get a better data point than that, right? Yeah. So if CEOs wanna care about something that's going to drive profit, I say happiness at work [00:08:00] should be priority number one.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, absolutely. And I love, actually I don't put that many, that much value on, the metrics and the KPIs and those kind of things, but I know the C-Suite does and the CEOs do so much. Yes. So it's great to have those in our pockets. Hey, look at this. This is, this

Jessica Weiss: really matters. There's a.

Bunch more, statistics that I'm sure you know about but this one is a new one that I really loved. Yeah. So there's obviously obvious statistic. Yeah. There's obviously statistics around productivity and turnover and employee retention, attrition rate and all of that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And all that stuff.

But this one I was like, Ooh, this is a good one.

Elisa Tuijnder: This is a really good one. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna check that one out. Hey, so you've also recently given this incredible TEDx talk and I encourage listeners to definitely listen to it. But I'd love to touch on some of the points that you made there.

So let's start with. Compensation. So many people think happiness at work is as simple like as, hey, you're just making a good wage, and that's fine. And then, it doesn't matter anymore. So in your [00:09:00] experience, did you find that money or more money makes people happier in their jobs? And I know where your answer's gonna be, but I love to hear it from

Jessica Weiss: you.

Exactly. Exactly. The truth of the matter is it's not so clear cut. The answer is actually not clearly Yes and not clearly. No. And I'm gonna explain to you why. In about, I think it was 2010, there was this landmark study that came out and said, Our happiness peaks at $75,000 per year. If you make a dollar over $75,000, you are not going to feel any more happiness than if you make, so if you make 75 or you make one 150 or whatever it is, you're at the same base level of happiness.

Now to me, I have to say that one was always like, really? How is that really possible? Even me who knows lots and lots about money and its impact on happiness, I still had my doubts about it. So that study has now recently been updated and they have, the researchers have actually said, no, it doesn't stop at 75 K.[00:10:00]

But the story is a bit more nuanced and complicated than it's simply boiling it down to a number, right? So I will say this, what we know about money and happiness is, we will never ever get lasting happiness from big things, right? So it will never come from a bigger salary. It will never come from a bigger title.

It will never come from buying a bigger house, driving a fancier car, meeting the right person. That is not a source of happiness. And the reason why that is not a source of happiness is because that's a constant and continually moving target, right? So once you get there, you're like, okay, but how about a little bit more?

Ok, but how about a little bit more? So that's not where we get happiness from. And the interesting thing about money and happiness is this, and this is where I think the $75,000 study is actually interesting and dead on. I think what? The research researchers there were saying is [00:11:00] happiness at 75 K actually cures our unhappiness, right?

We're no longer looking for basic needs, right? We can put food on the table, we can pay the bills, we can pay the rent. All of those kind of very basic needs are satisfied. And I think that's exactly dead on right? So happiness probably is sorry. So compensation is probably more tied to curing unhappiness than driving our happiness.

Very long answer. Sorry.

Elisa Tuijnder: No, absolutely. No. Very good answer. Very well explained as well. Yeah. It's that basic needs fulfillment and but it just becomes less and less important, like Yes, exactly. Yeah. I also liked your point about, you know what they call in positive psychology, hedonistic adaptation.

Once you're exactly living in the fancy house is no longer, yeah. You might wanna fancier house or you might want a better, better,

Jessica Weiss: better car and yeah, no, that's exactly it. And the research shows that the happiness that we, there is happiness to be derived from those moments of success and achievement.

Absolutely. Yeah. But it's very fleeting. At max it lasts six months and not a minute [00:12:00] more. And to be perfectly honest with you, I don't think you get six months out of it, but. That, at maximum six months of happiness

Elisa Tuijnder: because then you get the first car and then it's not as new anymore as well.

Exactly.

Jessica Weiss: And you get used to it. You're bored. You need something. Yeah,

Elisa Tuijnder: exactly. Hey, so you've also talked about some certain characteristics that, that a job must have in order for employees to feel satisfied in their role and, meeting those basic needs financially is one of them. But yeah.

What happens afterwards? How, what are the characteristics for people to feel more satisfied in their

Jessica Weiss: roles? So basically there's two characteristics that we all need in our jobs. And it doesn't matter what you do, whether you are, funding, you're curing cancer or you're doing, or you're, whatever it is, whatever your job exactly to go back to the stock market, whatever it is, your job needs to have these two basic characteristics in order to start to build happiness.[00:13:00]

The first one is this. You need to feel that your success is earned. So that's obvious, right? You can't feel that your job has just fallen into your lap and that you inherited it because you're part of a family or whatever it is. But there's also another way to look at that, that your success is earned.

You have to feel that you're part of an organization where. It's very transparent and clear, and it's not arbitrary how people get their jobs, right? It's very, there's a path. It's very well communicated, so that's the first one. You have to feel that your job has been earned. And the second one is the way that I like to talk about purpose, because purpose for me feels very difficult to nail down.

But when you say it like this, it becomes very personal. Yeah. I think it becomes much more clear. You have to feel that in your job you are doing something for somebody that they would not otherwise be able to do. So whatever that is. You are bringing something to the table that people would not [00:14:00] otherwise be able to do, and that is where we can start to derive happiness.

Our success is earned and we are doing things for people that they could not otherwise do for themselves, and that applies across the board.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah, absolutely. You can find that in any job. You just have to be passionate about a certain part of

Jessica Weiss: it. That's exactly it. You can say, you work in a retail store and you help people look more beautiful every day, whatever it is that you're finding.

But you are the person who are making people, feel better about themselves. Yeah. Whatever it is. But it just has to be something that you feel that they could not do for themselves. And absolutely. It doesn't have to be these huge, lofty goals, although that's great.

Elisa Tuijnder: They're great too.

Those times probably feel a bit more unattainable. I remember being an idealist like that many moons ago. And then being very actually disappointed.

Jessica Weiss: I know. Sold. It's just like a business I know. Yeah.

Elisa Tuijnder: Might have had [00:15:00] gotten more satisfaction from when I was working, on the farmer's market as a kid than from working.

That's true. Absolutely. Cuz I was brightening up people's days like it was way more personal than this lofty goal. Hey, so you've also talked about community in the workplace, and I'd like you to first how do you define community in the workplace? Is that all your friends, work, colleagues?

Like how do you see community?

Jessica Weiss: Yeah. So I really believe that friendship is probably one of the key components to happiness. So I think that lots of people like to say, I go to work and then I have my life outside of work. So when at work I just have the people that I work with. And then outside of work is where I have my friends and I have fun and I do everything.

But my belief is we are spending exactly as you said earlier, we're spending so much time at work, we need to have friends at work. It is a critical component to building happiness, building success, enjoying your job. So I think it begins [00:16:00] there, this idea of community begins with friendship, and it's a little bit complicated because work friends can be a little bit complicated, right?

Whether, it's around, is this a transactional friendship? Is this how much can you do for me? Do I not wanna share too much with people that I work with? But I think, and you don't need many friends at work, but you need to have people at work that you consider to be true friends.

That's where it begins.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. I know a lot of us are working remote teams or hybrid teams, and that can maybe be a barrier to that. So how do you bridge the digital gap? You think it's possible? Is it harder now that it used to be at the water cooler? I

Jessica Weiss: think that it's definitely harder, right?

And I think that this certainly impacts younger workers much more than it impacts people who have been in the workplace, right? Because for younger workers, gen Z, who are just joining the workplace right now to join in a totally remote environment is. If that's all you [00:17:00] know, then it's a very strange place to start from.

But that being said, I do believe that it is still possible to have friends at work. I think you need to be more intentional about it. I think you need to be more deliberate about it. And I think that it shouldn't fall entirely to the individual. I think that the organization plays a role here, right?

So if it's a totally remote, and this is like a very superficial way that we could solve this problem, and there's lots more ways that we can do it, but. If you're working at a totally remote organization, I think it is the organization's responsibility to bring people together for events where they connect.

Where they start to have real relationships whatever it is, whether it's retreats or team outings, whatever it is, you can be remote, but you need to have some point of contact at some point, throughout the year. And I would say it certainly needs to happen more than once a year.

And then I think there are things that, that you can do on a weekly basis that are really very simple and probably a lot of people are doing, like very simply [00:18:00] sharing things at the beginning of a meeting, that are personal things about people so you actually get to know them. I think another thing that people really need to do that we all stopped doing is actually pick up the phone and call people, have a conversation rather than doing a text or a Slack or an email. Have a face-to-face, face-to-face, but on the telephone. I think that really, there are small things that you can do to cultivate friendship, even in a remote environment, even in a hybrid environment, but you need to be deliberate about it.

Yeah,

Elisa Tuijnder: absolutely. My favorite exercise that we did actually we did it this week, was a team retro. And I designed this exercise around gift giving cuz it was my birthday this week, and I, oh, happy birthday. They, I decided that it wasn't just me that needed to get a gift, so we did this really silly thing where they could pick, we get, we did this straw of who could pick a gift for somebody else.

And then they had the whole of the internet right to kinda come up with something. But what [00:19:00] came out of that was really heartfelt actually. It was, it also showed that people paid attention to certain needs of others and that they still remember the conversation that they had a year ago. About how they wanted to go to Switzerland one day or something like that.

Exactly. They gave them a travel to Switzerland and Exactly. All the expenses paid. Yes. And it was such a beautiful

Jessica Weiss: exercise. That's a great exercise. I might need to steal that one.

Elisa Tuijnder: Go for it. Go for everybody. The permission to steal it. I also had a question around, so one of the so I work in a fully remote team and we see each other twice a year.

And those times are great, but sometimes it does get lonely. And I'm, I know for myself that I'm a person that needs some social interaction and bouncing ideas sometimes. Yeah. That my colleagues not too any fault of their own, cuz they're all so super busy, people can't always give me I've also tried to sometimes go and work in like other offices.

You can so almost start making community. They might not be at the same company. Yeah. But it's nice to feel surrounded by people who are working, but also sometimes to bounce an idea to [00:20:00] them like, Hey, I'm working on this. And how do you think it, how does that position. In your thinking around this.

Jessica Weiss: I think that's great and I think that the whole idea that, let's say, if you, whether you're going to a co-working space or you're working in a coffee shop, I think what's really great to do in order to cultivate connections in that way is create a ritual. So maybe. Every Friday at 9:00 AM you go to this place.

Because what will start to happen then is you're all those strangers start to become familiar strangers, right? And you start to see the same people over and over, and it becomes much easier to start to talk to them and to have things that you have in common. Oh, what did you get? Oh, that muffin looks great.

And then it starts to be a real connection. But I think absolutely. And I actually love that because I think that having. Connections. A diverse set of connections Absolutely. Is another key component of happiness, right? This idea that we have relational diversity, we have different kinds of friendship, different levels of friendship, [00:21:00] different people, is a key component to you.

Happiness. So you tapped into something, right? Dead on.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. Yeah. And team health and diversity is a keyword. Exactly. I know. It's a buzzword. Exactly. But it's an important one as I'll add it. Hey so speaking about remote work, do you feel that this new way of working hybrid predominantly hybrid, has it made people happier?

Because I think maybe for some it has, but, or has it isolated people a bit or, yeah. So are we more happy as employees? I feel like yeah, there's different directions we can go

Jessica Weiss: with this. Yeah. Yeah. And so many questions like this, it's so individual, right? Yeah. I think for certain people, hybrid work has been, like life changing.

And I think it's, for working mothers, it's amazing. I think that for those Gen Z people who are just starting their career, I don't know that hybrid working is really the best way to start your working life. So I think it depends on where you are in the stage of your career.

And then I think it [00:22:00] depends upon how the companies actually handle the hybrid situation. So if everybody's coming together at the same time, if you're, when you're together in the office, you're doing meaningful, collaborative, creative work. I think that all that adds to happiness. But I think that we have to be really specific about it.

So I think that there have been studies that have shown that people are, Gallup came out with the study that people actually are happier. With hybrid work because of the flexibility and they don't have to commute and all that stuff. But I think it's very specific to who you're speaking to at what stage of their life they're at.

I think that we really need, sometimes statistics need, like you need to dig in a little bit. Yeah,

Elisa Tuijnder: absolutely. I think so too. And actually it leads me really well to my next question cuz like it's how the company deals with it, right? Yeah. Because if it's a really dry, let's get up in the morning and then you have to be logged in by nine and you have to log out by five.

Yeah. It's a very different type of culture. It's, hey, we're bringing everybody together twice a [00:23:00] year and for the rest you can work flexibly and autonomously. Yes. All of these kind of things. How important is that for you, do you think, for workplace happiness?

Jessica Weiss: Yeah. There was just recently Google was calling everybody back to work and they were saying that they're going to be taking attendance and they're going to use attendance as part of performance reviews.

And I'm like, how on earth is Google doing this, doing that. Yeah. What is happening here. And I, it leads me to believe that there's some kind of ulterior motive there, because they have to know that this is not the way, this is not the way to have engaged employees who are productive. They were the trailblazers.

Yeah. Yeah. Trailblazer. So it was bizarre to me. I think there's this whole movement, right? But there's, Facebook, everybody's calling everybody back to work. And with this kind of mandatory you need to be here butts in seats, that kind of idea. That I'm baffled by.

But I think that other organizations are doing it well, but they need to, they need to exactly in the way that I [00:24:00] said, I think that you need to bring people together on specific days. Like we can't have this idea that people are going into work to sit on zooms because people aren't there.

That's not gonna work. Yeah. We need to come together and do specific kind of work because collaborative work, when people feel that they're part of a team is actually a key component to happiness. So I think that we have to be, this idea that. There was a movement around hot desking, right?

It was like, if you don't have one desk, you'll move yourself all around the office. You'll meet more people. It'll be, and then there was a backlash to that because people were like, oh my God, I hate this. I need to leave my things on my desk. Like I can't be a transient human being in the office.

And I think that this hot desking is now something that's happening as we do a hybrid kind of model. So there's like all new unintended consequences that we need to think about. Definitely

Elisa Tuijnder: and it's, it changes and I think, coming together to really do work together is fantastic.

Yeah. That is really [00:25:00] important. Yeah. But how often when I was in the office before, I love this phrase was I was desk meat. Yeah. It's just sitting there and I was doing the thing that I could be doing anywhere else. No, of course. In a way more inspiring environment.

Jessica Weiss: I also think there is something interesting that's happening with some companies, not all companies, is I think that they are understanding this idea that people are looking for flexibility and people are looking for perks.

But this, the, these idea that the perks are, And everybody says this, right? The ping pong tables, the pizza parties, that's not it. But I do think that we're going through perks 2.0, right? And I think that there are certain companies that are getting creative around this and actually offering perks that are meaningful and actually do bring happiness to work.

Like I saw something, Bank of America is doing a really creative program around sabbaticals. Now that's something that you're like, Hey, I actually would love to work here. Take a sabbatical. Bring that, outside stimulus back into work revived and re-energized. [00:26:00] So that's one thing. I think that other companies, it's around doing perks that are meaningful to people.

Maybe it's around allowing people to do things with their family. So working mothers who are able to pick children up from school and do all the things and still do great at work, but the creativity around perks, and I think that's a post pandemic thing. Is what's really interesting to me.

Extended paid family leave, all that kind of stuff. But it's really around like creativity. It's certainly not ping pong tables and any of that nonsense. We all know that. That's silly.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yeah. And again, that's also leads into a kind of individual preferences. What's great for some person, these extended family leave or whatever, that's great for people who have kids, but it's not great for other people.

So asking people what do they want Exactly. Is a very good one. Not, here's your voucher per year or Exactly. He get you Costco card or something.

Jessica Weiss: Exactly. Exactly. I don't need a Costco card. I'm one person. Exactly. Exactly.[00:27:00]

Elisa Tuijnder: What leads to a happy life? What are the various ways to be happy? Happiness means different things to each of us. Yet after doing extensive research management 3.0, founder Jurgen Appelo, discovered a common thread. Happiness is something we create. It is not something to achieve. It is a path you choose, not a destination to arrive at.

So many of us spend our times in pursuit of happiness, yet instead of searching for it, we need to find ways to live it, embrace it, and implement it into our daily lives. We created the 12 Steps to Happiness at Management 3.0. You can find more information and even download a free poster of the 12 steps at management30.com/practice.[00:28:00]

So you've been working

in this field as a consultant for quite some time and I had always liked to ask people with this wealth of experience. What did you see was really effective at cultivating employee happiness and maybe also what actively got in the way of happiness because we also like to learn

Jessica Weiss: from failures sometimes, right?

Yeah. So there are certain companies who value, right? They value and everybody calls at something else, workplace wellbeing, happiness at work, mental health, whatever it is. So there are certain companies that really value it and do it very well. I think that, One of the companies that I think is doing it really right now is actually Microsoft.

Yeah. In this post pandemic world, what they're doing now is instead of looking at engagement, they're looking at how employees thrive. How are they energized and empowered to do their work? And I think that they're really, that's, to me, that's the necessary creativity that we need to look at it.[00:29:00]

There are other companies, Lego is doing a brilliant job, but they've been doing a brilliant job for years, right? Oh yeah. They value creativity and play and all of that is essential building blocks to happiness at work. But what's interesting is everybody's doing it a little bit differently. Microsoft is looking at how do we have our employees instead of languishing, we want them to be thriving.

Lego is looking at creativity and play. Then there are other organizations, Southwest is lives by their values and has that at every single point of connection that they, you know, beginning with your interviews if you weren't nice to the flight crew, you're getting a demarcation, on your interview process.

You can't just be nice to the person who's interviewing you. Southwest believes that value should be from the moment you know how you live your life. So everybody hits at it from a different angle, but I think those companies right now, and there's loads more are doing it really well. [00:30:00] Yeah. Zappos had something really interesting that they were doing.

Zappos is the icon for happiness, the icon, the, yeah exactly. But one thing that I love that they did was they paid people to quit. So they said, in the onboarding process, if you've decided that this is not the right place for you and you know you don't wanna work here, you made a mistake.

We'd rather let you go now than investing all the time and money. And they paid people to quit within a certain period of time, which I thought was a very interesting and empowering way to look at it, because you do make a mistake. How many times have you walked in somewhere and you're like, oh lord, I definitely got this one wrong.

And it happens almost instantaneously. You're like, oh God. But I love it's vibe. Different vibe.

Elisa Tuijnder: Yes,

Jessica Weiss: exactly. Looking for Exactly. But Zappos did that real, that's another thing. So I feel like everybody hits at it from a different angle, but those companies are doing it particularly well right now.

Elisa Tuijnder: I did have a very interesting conversation with an L&D expert [00:31:00] the other day who was like, yeah, but companies like, in this fast paced environment, especially in agile frameworks, et cetera, it's so fast that we don't even know whether this employee is gonna be there next week.

We don't even know whether the company's gonna be there next week. She said nobody's interested in providing training anymore. We didn't. She was working with it for a big company. Yeah. They, because we don't know whether we can retain these employees or whether the company's still gonna be there.

I'm like, That is such a hard view, but I can understand where some of these people come from.

Jessica Weiss: My initial reaction would be like, what? How is that even, possible. I understand that we're all moving at a fast pace and the pace of business is quick and we need to adapt and be agile and I get all of that.

But I think that none of us. Whether we're an organization, whether we're an employee, whether we're a manager, no one wants to flame out, right? We want that. We wanna be able to sustain it. You wanna be able to adapt to a situation, but still sustain it. And for [00:32:00] me happiness and wellbeing and all of that is the key to being able to sustain things. We never wanna burn people out. That's the thing, I understand. Moving fast. I'm a New Yorker. I fully believe in moving fast. It's the way I live my life. But I also believe in being adaptable. That's really the key. Fast and adaptable, being able to change so that you have longevity long term, all that.

So I would disagree. I,

Elisa Tuijnder: I most definitely disagreed. I thought it was a very it almost made me sad. Hey. So here on the podcast we're big fans of tangible practices. So we always want to leave them with something that they could start implementing tomorrow. So I wanna ask you in that, in in two, in a two fork way, one is a more on an individual level.

Sure. So what kind of things can they do? Can they do we do at work that. Increases our happiness each day. Sure. And then we'll move to the

Jessica Weiss: second. Yeah. Organizational level. Yeah. Okay. So [00:33:00] as individuals, there's a whole bunch of stuff we can do. So the first one is really easy, very superficial and very doable.

Be sure if you are working not in a remote situation, let's say if you're working in a hybrid or you're back at work a certain d few days a week, be sure that you are sitting next to someone who is a high performer. By sitting next to someone who is a high performer, you raise your level of performance by 15% just by sitting next to someone who's a high performer.

And if you sit next to someone who's a low performer, you can imagine it goes in the opposite direction. So that's a super easy one, right? Sit next to someone who's a high potential.

Elisa Tuijnder: I used to do this in the library when I was writing papers. Oh, that's so funny. That would make me more busy as well. It make me more

Jessica Weiss: focused.

Yeah. It was inspiring you in some way, right? Yeah, exactly. So that's the first one. The second one is, This one takes a little bit more, this is a little bit more of an internal kind of thing. [00:34:00] Key to having a good day at work is having this sense of progress, right? Feeling like you're getting stuff done.

There's nothing worse than spending a day at work and being like, what the hell did I do all day due today? Yeah, I just answered emails and what did I accomplish? So it's very important that we feel a sense of progress every single day. So how do you tap into sense of progress? Sense of progress can be easily accessed by celebrating small wins. So if you have a big goal, break it down into small digestible chunks and really celebrate the small wins. So that is another way that you can take like a crappy day and make it a good day. So we're sitting next to high performers and we're tapping into small wins.

Another one is around designing your day. And it goes along with this idea of small wins and this sense of purpose and sense of accomplishment is that we need to have the opportunity to do deep work, right? We need the opportunity to have quiet, [00:35:00] undisturbed focused work that actually brings you happiness.

So you need to design that into your day, whether it's 30 minutes, 90 minutes, two hours, whatever works for you. But it has to be blocked on your calendar. It doesn't even necessarily need to be every day, but it certainly needs to be as much as you feel you need to tap into that deep work. I like for me, I love to write.

I need to do it every single day in order to feel that sense of accomplishment. I know once I've done that, I'm like, okay, now I can answer my emails. I can do, you can do all the other stuff. Stuff. So that's another one. Another one is, this actually came out of a study and I'll stop talking in a minute no, don't worry.

I apologize. Keep

Elisa Tuijnder: going.

I love

Jessica Weiss: these. No. Another one, one is people need fresh air. So you need to give yourself a break. You need to go outside. You need fresh air is critical to focus and productivity. And the other thing they have found is green spaces. So put a plant on your desk.

These are [00:36:00] subliminal messages, but they raise your level of happiness. So I think those are good starts. I have loads more. Those are amazing Starts. Yeah, I have loads more but let's go with

Elisa Tuijnder: those. Yeah. I love how we are actually, as you mix, we're like very complex house plants, aren't we?

We need to be watered and some fresh air and some sunshine. Exactly. Exactly. And then, yeah let's tackle it on an organizational level as well. Then you can

Jessica Weiss: throw a bunch. Yeah. Yeah. So on an organizational level, I think that in order to. Foster this idea of happiness.

Let's start with this. So on a team level, how do we start to get our teams to feel an increased level of happiness? And Dan Coyle wrote a great book about team happiness and sort of culture and how you elevate high performing teams and all of that kind of stuff. And he spoke about this one concept, which I love, and it's called Deep Fun.

So I know that it sounds, that sounds a little contradictory and what on earth are we talking about? [00:37:00] But it's, it, this is goes back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago around this idea about perks. And having perks that are meaningful. So no teams do not wanna have pizza parties and ping pong tables.

That's not gonna be it. What he's talking about when he's talking about deep fun is creating activities that the team, and ideally it's a cross-functional team, right? So it's people from all throughout the organization are engaged in something that has meaning to them. So it's not some kind of silly activity, but it's not something very deep either.

Like it can be something as simple as we wanna have great coffee in the office. Let's make a let's have a project around investigating, researching, bringing in great coffee in the office, right? And as a team, you guys decide together, no, I like this coffee machine. Ooh, let's do a taste test.

Whatever it is. But that's the idea of deep fun, right? Yeah. So it's not super deep, like we're not pondering the meaning of life, but it is around an activity that has meaning, right? It's [00:38:00] something that's impactful the team to you. Yeah, exactly. And that will raise team happiness. And then of course there are rituals that you can do.

I think that. A huge mistake that organizations make specifically when they're onboarding people is they just leave people like, okay, go ahead, figure it out. Welcome. Figure it out. Yeah, exactly. So I think that a great way, and this is beginning your journey is give everybody, I call it, this is my own personal thing, is an onboarding Sherpa.

It's your guide. It's the person that you can go to and you can ask questions and not feel stupid and not feel repercussions and be like, Hey, where's the pencils? You know what I mean? And not feel stupid asking them that. Absolutely. So I think that is a ritual that organizations really, they need to be much more conscious around onboarding and all that kind of stuff.

But I have that that I feel like that's a good start for organizations. He move slow. Very good. So let's give them

Elisa Tuijnder: them. There's hey Jessica, people want to get in contact with you to hear more of these, or, there's an [00:39:00] organization that is just super inspired by it right now, or they just wanna go listen to your TED Talk, which I mentioned, which we mentioned a few times.

Where do they go?

Jessica Weiss: Okay, so the TEDx talk is on. YouTube and it is called Happiness. It's an inside job, so please check that out. I would very much appreciate it. And it has some really great tangible stuff that you can start to do, like the minute after the talk is over. So 15 minutes later you can start to be happier.

And then I am at jessicaweis.com. So basically if you go to my website, you can get everywhere from there. So from there you can get to my Instagram, my TikTok, which o. Dear God, good luck with that. And exactly, and my LinkedIn. So just, jessicaweiss.com gets you, can see my writings and all that kind of stuff and my videos.

So that's the best place to, to find me. And then of course, if there are any inquiries around coaching and speaking, all of that can be done through the website. Great.

Elisa Tuijnder: That's where it all branches [00:40:00] out from. Exactly. So Perfect. Jessica, I really enjoyed our high energy conversation.

Yes, too. It was my perfect it's a Friday night here when we're recording it. It was my perfect, start of the weekend. I really enjoyed this. Perfect. So thank you so much for coming

on

Jessica Weiss: the show. Thank you for having me. This was really a lot of fun. I appreciate it.

Elisa Tuijnder: Okay, great. Thanks so much again.

You've been listening to The Happiness At Work podcast by Management 3.0 where we are getting serious about happiness. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you enjoy our shows, don't be shy. Write us a review. Share the happiness with your colleagues, family or friends. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn under Management [00:41:00] 3.0.

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What Really Makes People Happy at Work? - Management 3.0 Podcast

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Whether at home or in the office, happiness is a personal thing. But are there any constants when it comes to happiness? What kinds of practices and

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Is it my imagination or are volunteers less forthcoming these days? - Mumsnet

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Have name changed. My youngest has left school now but I still get the odd call to 'help out'. Now when they were at school I was more than happy to h...

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By the Rt Hon Stuart Andrew MP, Minister for Civil Society

Volunteers have stepped up again and again over the past few years, in a myriad of ways. When moments of celebration and crisis have arisen, volunteers have played an important role. Tens of thousands kept us safe during covid-19 by delivering supplies and helping to administer the vaccine. People opened their homes to those fleeing war in Ukraine.

These are incredible acts of generosity and kindness, but volunteering does not only occur at times of immense need. It is a part of many people's day-to-day lives, whether they volunteer themselves or receive support from a neighbour or a volunteer-involving organisation.

We want volunteering to be a positive experience for everyone, everywhere. Timely, useful and accessible research can help us achieve that. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) commissions the Community Life Survey, which provides official statistics related to volunteering, charitable giving and community engagement. It captures vital information including the proportion of people who volunteer each year, showing 25 million people in England volunteered at least once in 2021/22.

However, it is research like NCVO's Time Well Spent that provides a unique opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the volunteer experience, beyond what we can learn from the Community Life Survey. This is why we're proud to support this research and report.

These latest findings from Time Well Spent make for essential reading. It's great to see that volunteers on the whole have a good experience. They see the difference they make, and feel positive towards the organisations they volunteer with. When it comes to formal volunteering, this is a credit to the organisations and volunteer managers who help make volunteering a worthwhile and rewarding endeavour.

The report also highlights volunteers' motivations, along with barriers and enablers to volunteering. I take particular interest in the findings about equity, diversity, and inclusion, which highlight the essential work that needs to take place to ensure that anybody can and does volunteer.

Research such as Time Well Spent and the Community Life Survey provides crucial information for government and all sectors involving volunteers, to help us develop a positive way forward. The world around us is constantly changing, as is our society. We must make strides to adapt to those changes in how we involve and support volunteers.

This is especially important as we continue to work together through initiatives like the Vision for Volunteering. This 10-year, sector-led strategy, aimed at making sure volunteering is fit for the future, must be based on evidence like we see here with Time Well Spent. We look forward to continuing to support the Vision, and to supporting the voluntary sector to create and embed necessary changes to make volunteering rewarding and accessible for all.

Volunteering is critical to a vibrant and resilient civil society. We hope that the data and insights in this report will help you to help volunteers get the best from their roles and make an even bigger impact in their communities. I wish you all the best with your volunteering endeavours.

The Rt Hon Stuart Andrew MP
Minister for Civil Society

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NCVO shares findings from its latest national survey on the volunteer experience.

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Time well spent: impact of covid-19 on the volunteer experience

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All the information you need, all in one place. We're still working on some exciting features, so you won't be able to login or pay online just yet. But don't worry! All of our amazing content is open and you can make payments as you usually would.

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Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Teresa's research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life - the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivation that people experience as they react to events at work.

Teresa has presented her research in many venues, including TEDx Atlanta. Visit the speaking page to watch the TEDx video. In 2011, Teresa was ranked 18 on the Thinkers 50, the definitive listing of the world's top business thinkers.

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Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance.

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Introduction

In most countries, motivation for school clearly declines throughout school time (Martin, 2009; OECD, 2016; Scherrer & Preckel, 2019) with individual heterogeneity in changes depending on specific motivation constructs across academic domains (Gaspard et al., 2020; Scherrer & Preckel, 2019). Given this undesirable decline and the fact that motivation can be targeted by interventions, motivation has long been a central focus of educational psychology. The influence of motivation on achievement is well-documented (Burnette et al., 2013; Gottfried et al., 2013; Greene & Azevedo, 2007; Valentine et al., 2004). Yet the reverse relation is also often found, as achievement can affect motivation through experiences of success or failure (Garon-Carrier et al., 2016; Guay et al., 2003; Jansen et al., 2013). A common view is that both the "motivation → achievement" and "achievement → motivation" links exist and that motivation and achievement influence each other in a reciprocal manner over time (Huang, 2011; Marsh & Craven, 2006; Marsh & Martin, 2011; Möller et al., 2009).

Researchers have been studying this reciprocal relationship between motivation and achievement for at least 20 years (Marsh et al., 1999). However, further insights into the nature of the relationship are currently lacking; features such as the direction of causality, behavioral mediating pathways, possible effect of the time scale, and generalizations to different motivation constructs and population groups are currently not well understood. These issues are important not just from a scientific viewpoint, but also from a practical viewpoint. To be able to design the most effective interventions aimed at improving achievement and motivation, we need to improve our understanding of the reciprocity to identify the best timing, duration, content, and appropriate target variables of such interventions, as well as other contextual factors contributing to their success.

Our objective is to summarize the current understanding of motivation-achievement interactions (drawing mainly from the academic motivation literature) and to identify the theoretical and methodological challenges that could inspire further advances to understand such specific features of this reciprocal relationship. While an exhaustive review of the literature is beyond the scope of the current paper (see the Special Issue on Prominent Motivation Theories: The Past, Present, and Future on Contemporary Educational Psychology, edited by Wigfield and Koenka, 2020), we start with a summary of how influential theories of academic motivation have conceptualized reciprocity between motivation and achievement, and the types of empirical evidence that have been found in support of the reciprocal relationships. In our current understanding, we have found areas of consensus, but have also identified sizable gaps. This leads to a recommended research agenda for future empirical studies on the reciprocal relations between motivation and academic achievement and suggestions on how these insights could inform future interventions.

Reciprocal Relations in Theories of Academic Motivation

Commonalities Between Theories

Individual differences in academic achievement are partly the result of differences in motivation for learning (Arens et al., 2017; Burnette et al., 2013; Eccles & Wigfield, 2002; Guay et al., 2003; Huang, 2011; Marsh & Craven, 2006; Marsh & Martin, 2011; Robbins et al., 2004; Seaton et al., 2014). This robust finding has spawned a wealth of theories on academic motivation and how to stimulate it. These theories differ in both substance and focus, but also have many common elements. Figure 1 represents an attempt to synthesize, for the purposes of this paper, some of the commonalities of well-established theories that have had an impact in the field of academic motivation (leaning strongly on the seminal review of Eccles & Wigfield, 2002 and adding theories that have gained traction since). Our goal is not to comprehensively review and synthesize the existing theories (although this is an urgent task, Koenka, 2020), but rather to illustrate how the commonalities between the theories suggest a framework in which the reciprocal relationships between motivation and achievement can be studied and understood.

The motivation-achievement cycle, a summary model of motivation-achievement interactions, capturing some of the commonalities within prominent theories of academic motivation. Blue boxes denote motivation constructs, green (dotted) arrows behavioral intermediaries (quality of learning and quantity of learning), and yellow boxes and arrows denote achievement-related constructs (flow and perceived performance). Gray arrows denote outside influences that are themselves not part of motivation-achievement interactions (e.g., cultural and social influences that affect both expectancies and values)

Motivation has up to 102 definitions (Kleinginna & Kleinginna, 1981), but is often seen as a condition that energizes (or de-energizes) behaviors. In many theories, motivation results from what can be called an appraisal of the behavior that one is motivated to perform (the word appraisal is rarely used with regard to motivation, but the processes described are akin to those captured in the emotion literature). In that appraisal, two elements are combined (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002): the value attached to the behavior and its outcomes, and the expectancy of the likelihood of certain outcomes of the behavior. These two sides, expectancy and value, are explicit in expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002, 2020), attribution theory (Graham, 2020; Weiner, 2010), control-value theory (Pekrun, 2006; Pekrun et al., 2017), and Dweck's integrative theory (Dweck, 2017).

Many other theories focus either on the value attached to behavior or on expectancies. Theories on the values side of the ledger (goal theories, flow theory, self-determination theory, individual differences theories, and interest theories) focus on interest, goals, needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Theories on the expectancy side, notably self-efficacy theory, control theories, social-cognitive self-regulation theories, and the process-oriented metacognitive model, focus on how students' beliefs (or perception) about their competence and efficacy (i.e., academic self-concept, see below), expectancies for success or failure, and sense of control over achievement affect motivation. Different constructs have been studied that tap into these beliefs underlying one's expectancies, such as academic self-concept, self-efficacy, locus of control, and perceived control.

A motivation construct frequently used to study the reciprocal motivation-achievement relationship is academic self-concept (hitherto, ASC, discussed in further details in section "Different motivation constructs" below) which is how individuals evaluate their ability specifically in an academic domain (Marsh & Craven, 2006; Marsh & Martin, 2011; Shavelson et al., 1976). ASC is a component distinct from physical, social, and emotional self-concepts within the multidimensional, hierarchical model of self-concept (Marsh & Craven, 2006; Marsh & Martin, 2011). ASC is itself also multidimensional and usually measured by the Self Description Questionnaire (Marsh et al., 1999; Marsh & O'Neill, 1984); its academic subscales tap into general academic self-concept, math self-concept, and verbal self-concept. Much empirical research on motivation-achievement interactions operationalizes motivation as ASC in a certain academic domain, most often in mathematics and verbal subjects such as language and reading (Guay et al., 2003; Seaton et al., 2014); for meta-analyses and reviews, see Burnette et al. ( 2013), Eccles and Wigfield ( 2002), Marsh and Craven ( 2006), Marsh and Martin ( 2011), and Robbins et al. ( 2004).

It is worth noting that many theories posit that beliefs about the self (including self-concept and self-esteem and mindset/implicit theory of self attributes) are important causes of human behavior and learning (Bandura, 1997; Carver & White, 1994; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Molden & Dweck, 2006). Although the idea that ASC or other beliefs about the self affect achievement has been challenged (see the discussion in Marsh & Craven, 2006), there has also been much empirical research in support of it (Burnette et al., 2013; Gottfried et al., 2013; Greene & Azevedo, 2007; and the meta-analyses of Huang, 2011; Valentine et al., 2004). One suggested pathway is that positive self-beliefs can lead to self-affirmative, self-regulatory, academic behaviors (or achievement behaviors, see below) such as exerting effort, demonstrating persistence, and selecting goals that are conducive to the achievement of academic goals.

The appraisal of values and expectancies can also trigger academic emotions, such as pride in achievement, hope, boredom, and enjoyment. Control-value theory (Pekrun, 2006; Pekrun et al., 2017) describes how such emotions codetermine what are termed achievement behaviors-behaviors that are conducive to the achievement of academic goals. In line with dominant theories of emotion (e.g. Frijda, 1988; Lazarus, 1999), Pekrun ( 2006) assumed that an appraisal of control of the learner and the value of learning activities lie at the basis of academic emotions. For example, if a learner values an academic outcome and believes it is somewhat under his or her control, he or she may feel the emotion of hope. While it is not certain that the same kinds of appraisal lie at the basis of both motivation and academic emotions, it would seem plausible and parsimonious. Indeed, Pekrun ( 2006) suggested that this is the case, though he cautioned that more research is needed.

Pathways from Motivation to Achievement and Vice Versa

While it is generally accepted that motivation affects achievement, it is not completely clear how. Theoretically, two routes can be discerned (see Fig. 1). The first is the quantity (frequency and intensity) of academic behaviors aimed at achievement (such as effort, persistence, etc.) (Cury et al., 2008; Dettmers et al., 2009; Doumen et al., 2014; Marsh et al., 2016; Pinxten et al., 2014; Plant et al., 2005; Trautwein et al., 2009). As a second route, higher levels of motivation could also be associated with higher quality of academic behaviors; for example, by adopting effective learning strategies, adaptive meta-cognitive strategies, spaced practice, elaboration, retrieval practice, interleaving, dual coding, and so on. Several theories of academic motivation support the idea that higher motivation leads to higher quality behaviors. Both intrinsic motivation (self-determination theory, Deci & Ryan, 2000) and interest (interest theories, Alexander et al., 1994) have been linked to deeper learning (Alexander et al., 1994; Schiefele, 1999; Scott Rigby et al., 1992). Positive academic motivations have also been suggested to facilitate creative learning strategies (control-value theory, Pekrun, 2006), and incremental implicit beliefs (growth mindset) to facilitate mastery-oriented strategies (Burnette et al., 2013).

Effects of achievement on motivation may also take two routes. The first is through perceived achievement. Many theories, such as self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1997), expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), control theories (Skinner, 1995), and attribution theory (Weiner, 2010) explicitly suggest that past achievement leads a learner to experience feelings of self-efficacy and perception of control. What matters most in this regard is the learner's own evaluation of this outcome, for which we use the term perceived performance in Fig. 1. High perceived performance will thus change the expectancies of learners (i.e., make them trust that good outcomes are attainable), but it may also alter the value attached to learning activities. For example, in self-determination theory, the feeling of competence (strengthened by positive perceived achievement) is a basic need that increases the intrinsic value of learning.

The second route from achievement to motivation is central to flow theory (Csikzentmihalyi, 1990). An activity in which the learner is holistically immersed can generate a feeling of flow, which is rewarding in its own right and alters the value attached to the academic behaviors.

External Factors Affecting Motivation, Effort, and Achievement

Figure 1 suggests a positive feedback loop, with motivation feeding achievement, and achievement feeding motivation-an idea that is alluded to in some theories (Cleary & Zimmerman, 2012; Eccles & Wigfield, 2002; Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020). Most explicit in this regard is the self-regulatory account of motivation (Cleary & Zimmerman, 2012) where the pathway between self-regulation and achievement is a cyclical feedback loop. Schunk and DiBenedetto ( 2020) suggest an iterative process between perceived progress, self-efficacy, and goal pursuit. Bandura's social cognitive theory also stresses the reciprocity of the interactions between behavioral, environmental, and personal factors (Bandura, 1997). Crucially, this raises the question of how such a positive feedback loop could get started, and how, once started, it could lead to any other outcome than either perfect motivation and achievement, or negative motivation and failure. The answer to those questions may rest in the external influences on motivation and achievement. These are indicated in Fig. 1 by the gray arrows:

Extrinsic rewards and requirements tied to achievement, e.g., schools or parents, may change the value attributed to academic behavior, and so change motivation. Although this has been described in self-determination theory as potentially detracting from intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000), it may also jolt a motivation-achievement cycle that would otherwise not start (Hidi & Harackiewicz, 2001). Supporting autonomy and creating relatedness are other ways in which external actors can increase the value attached to learning, increasing motivation and achievement (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

Cultural norms (described in control theories and control-value theory, Pekrun, 2006; Skinner, 1995), social learning, and verbal persuasion by others (social cognitive theory, Bandura, 1997) can alter the expectations, values, and attributional processes of learners (expectancy-value theory, attribution theories, Eccles & Wigfield, 2020; Graham, 2020), and therefore keep a motivation-achievement cycle going that would otherwise falter or not start up.

Effort is not only a result of the learner's motivation but also of outside requirements (e.g., deadlines and exams set by the educational institution, Kerdijk et al., 2015). Such outside requirements can lead to achievement in the absence of strong motivation.

Quality of learning is not only affected by motivation but also by the abilities of the learner and the quality of teaching, instructions, and study materials. Thus, achievement can increase in the absence of stronger motivation, because of better support for learning.

Perceived achievement is not only determined by true achievement but also by elements of educational design, such as the form in which feedback is given (e.g., a grade that either accentuates the ranking of the student or the degree to which the study material was mastered, or feedback on effort instead of performance, De Kraker-Pauw et al., 2017). Perceived achievement is also subject to interpretative, comparison, and attributional processes (described in attribution theories, Graham, 2020; Weiner, 2010). This means that true high achievement can still fail to support motivation (e.g., when a sibling performs even better), or low achievement can be viewed in such a way so as to not be detrimental for motivation.

Such external factors are not only important for a complete causal understanding of motivation-achievement interactions (i.e., highly relevant for educational researchers) but also because they offer entry points for interventions that enhance motivation, achievement, or both (i.e., highly relevant for educators).

What Avenues for Empirical Research Have Been Explored?

Figure 1 shows that theories of academic achievement imply a reciprocal relationship between motivation and achievement. A comprehensive review of studies is beyond the scope of this manuscript (see narrative reviews and meta-analyses) (Huang, 2011; Marsh & Craven, 2006; Scharmer, 2020; Valentine et al., 2004; Valentine & Dubois, 2005), but we will review the kinds of evidence that have been brought to bear in support of such reciprocal relationships. Analyzing this evidence allows future directions on the field to be charted.

More recent studies showcase impressive efforts of researchers to use large sample sizes and longitudinal data of up to six waves, allowing changes in motivation and achievement of students to be tracked across their school career (e.g., Marsh et al., 2018; Murayama et al., 2013). A recent meta-analysis (Scharmer, 2020), which includes such studies that were published between 2011 and August 2020, showed that overall, the pooled effect of achievement on motivation was twice (β = .12) the pooled effect of motivation on achievement (β = .06), though both are what is conventionally considered a small effect. These findings are in line with Valentine and DuBois ( 2005) who found that academic achievement had a stronger effect on self-belief than vice versa. In contrast, Huang ( 2011)'s meta-analysis found a slightly larger effect of self-concept on achievement than the other way around. Valentine and DuBois ( 2005)'s findings were also more similar to Scharmer's ( 2020) in terms of the size of the effects (achievement on self-belief: β = 0.08; self-belief on achievement: β = 0.15). Huang ( 2011), however, found considerably larger ranges of effects overall (achievement on self-concept: β = 0.19-0.25; self-concept on achievement: β = 0.20-0.27).

There have also been interventions and randomized controlled field studies in which either self-concept or other motivation constructs were manipulated (e.g., Savi et al., 2018; Vansteenkiste et al., 2004), thereby allowing for causal inferences. The meta-analysis of these studies by Lazowski and Hulleman ( 2016) showed that, while interventions targeting motivation usually led to positive outcomes on achievement (medium effect size; average Cohen's d of 0.49), it did not matter which theory was at the basis of the intervention- all theories of motivation performed about equally well. However, experimental studies that look at the reverse causal path, manipulating achievement (or the perception of achievement) to affect motivation, are scarce. One example is an intervention study by Betz and Schifano ( 2000) where students were ensured of successful completion of a task followed by affirmation of their accomplishments with applause and verbal praise. This resulted in an increase in self-efficacy (a motivation construct highly related to ASC, Bong & Skaalvik, 2003). Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, few studies have done both: combining experimental manipulation and longitudinal design to investigate reciprocal motivation-achievement relations (an exception that we are aware of is Bejjani et al., 2019 which will be discussed later).

Research Agenda

The overview given above suggests that empirical evidence for reciprocal relations between motivation and achievement exists. However, several features of such relationships are still poorly understood. Also, some doubts about the robustness of the effects have recently surfaced (which we discuss in detail in section "Choice of appropriate statistical models" below). In other words, there are still unanswered theoretical and empirical questions about the reciprocal relationship between motivation and academic achievement. Below, we outline these issues and a research agenda for future research that can answer these remaining questions. These are organized into questions pertaining to theoretical lacunae, methodological challenges, and questions about the scope of theories and the generalizability of empirical results.

Theoretical Lacunae

Multiple Motivation Constructs

First, as we presented above, many motivation theories have implicitly or explicitly conceptualized the relationship between a plethora of motivation constructs and achievement as reciprocal. However, to date, a large amount of empirical research on reciprocal motivation-achievement interactions has mainly studied ASC (Arens et al., 2019; Brunner et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2013; Dicke et al., 2018; Gottfried et al., 2013; Grygiel et al., 2017; Guay et al., 2003; Guo et al., 2015; Möller et al., 2011; Niepel et al., 2014a, 2014b; Retelsdorf et al., 2014; Viljaranta et al., 2014; Walgermo et al., 2018; for meta-analyses and reviews, see Marsh & Craven, 2006; Marsh & Martin, 2011; Valentine et al., 2004; Valentine & Dubois, 2005). This raises the question of whether findings generalize to other motivation constructs that are related yet could also have a distinctive reciprocal relationship with academic achievement.

Moreover, although the studies involving ASC were groundbreaking attempts to show reciprocal relations, there are several reasons why future studies should contemplate using different motivation constructs other than ASC. First and foremost, ASC and achievement are highly intertwined, as items in ASC questionnaires usually ask students to report on their achievement (e.g., "I get good marks in most academic subjects," "I learn quickly in most academic subjects" (Marsh & O'Neill, 1984). Fulmer and Frijters ( 2009, p. 228) in their critique of how motivation is measured in educational psychology also made the point that "self-report measures confound the measurement of motivation with other variables, such as ability and attention."

Second, a meta-analysis investigating mean-level changes of a number of important motivation constructs concluded that the decline in motivation shows non-trivial differences across these constructs (Scherrer & Preckel, 2019). An important implication of this finding is that more attention should be paid to differentiation among multiple motivation constructs in future empirical studies.

Furthermore, the heavy focus on ASC may reflect an emphasis on a cognitive, intrapsychological theoretical view of motivation while losing sight of social, contextual, historical, and environmental factors that arguably also play important roles (see the Special Issue on Prominent Motivation Theories: The Past, Present, and Future on Contemporary Educational Psychology, edited by Wigfield and Koenka, 2020). Last but not least, ASC is mainly self-reported and, despite the availability of well-constructed measures, it suffers from all the caveats inherent to self-report measures (see section "Alternatives to self-reports" below).

Given that there are other well-studied motivation constructs such as achievement goals, self-efficacy, interest, and intrinsic motivation (Scherrer et al., 2020; Scherrer & Preckel, 2019), further research with multiple non-ASC motivation constructs included as concomitant predictors of academic achievement is therefore much needed. In recent investigations of the reciprocal relationship between motivation and achievement, motivation constructs other than ASC have started to be included (e.g., self-efficacy in Grigg et al., 2018; Schöber et al., 2018; achievement goals in Scherrer et al., 2020; intrinsic motivation in Hebbecker et al., 2019; and interest in Höft & Bernholt, 2019). Yet, these studies are still small in number. Twenty-four out of 41 studies included in the meta-analysis of Scharmer ( 2020) still used ASC as the main motivation construct of interest.

Behaviors as Mediating Factors in the Motivation → Achievement Link

However, there is a relative paucity of empirical research and especially longitudinal studies that include measures of such regulatory processes. Usually, when studies found reciprocal relations between ASC and other motivation constructs and achievement, they left unanswered which pathways mediate the link between such beliefs and achievement (Marsh & Martin, 2011). To our knowledge, initial attempts to study mediating processes in longitudinal designs (Marsh et al., 2016; Pinxten et al., 2014; Trautwein et al., 2009) yielded mixed findings with regards to the role of effort in the relationship between ASC and academic achievement. This may be due to the fact that there are multiple operationalizations and evaluations of the construct effort (Massin, 2017), which may have varying relations with academic achievement. Specifically, Marsh et al. ( 2016) and Pinxten et al. ( 2014) measured subjective effort-i.e., students were asked to rate their own effort expenditure. Students might perceive that having to try hard (i.e., expending a great deal of effort) is indicative of a lack of academic ability (Baars et al., 2020). Subjective effort, as opposed to objective effort, might therefore have a very different relation to motivation and achievement.

In non-longitudinal studies looking at the relations between academic motivation and achievement, the evidence on behavioral mediators also shows differentiation related to how effort is measured. When effort is measured as quality of learning (e.g., selecting adaptive goals, adopting higher-quality learning strategies, etc.), there is some evidence for a positive link between academic achievement and effort (Trigwell et al., 2013). However, when effort is measured as a quantity of learning (such as study time, practice time, time-on-task, persistence, etc.), this relationship seems either weak or only significant after controlling for quality of learning (Cury et al., 2008; Dettmers et al., 2009; Doumen et al., 2014; Plant et al., 2005) or even negative (the labour-in-vain effect, Koriat et al., 2006; Nelson & Leonesio, 1988; Undorf & Ackerman, 2017). This provides suggestions for future attempts to parse the mediating factors in the motivation → achievement link in reciprocal relations between these two constructs. It is most fruitful to measure subjective and objective measures of quantity and quality of learning (and use triangulation of methods, as strongly suggested by Scheiter et al., 2020) and compare their effects on academic achievement.

Irrespective of what operationalization is chosen, it is important to note that it is not trivial to evaluate and conceptualize effort (see extensive discussions in Baars et al., 2020; Scheiter et al., 2020). Is effort the allocation of cognitive control, i.e., mental effort (Kool & Botvinick, 2018), or the intention to think deeply, regardless of the amount of time spent (Haynes et al., 2016), or a preference for thinking hard (Beck, 1990), a decision process rather than a capacity or resource that is physically limited (Gendolla & Richter, 2010)? Yet, only by measuring regulatory processes that mediate the motivation → achievement pathway, we can make progress in understanding the underlying mechanism of mutual influences between motivation and achievement.

Mutualistic Perspective and the Network Approach

Next, studies have typically investigated relations between one or a small number of motivation constructs (e.g., ASC and interest, Walgermo et al., 2018). The discussion above and Fig. 1 show that multiple motivation constructs are linked to academic achievement, which may also all be mutually related. Like many topics in psychology, there is a huge overlap in terms and variables in the literature on motivation and achievement; the same construct may have different names, or different constructs go under the same name (this is known as Jingle-Jangle fallacies; e.g., Marsh et al., 2003). One possible solution to the Jingle-Jangle fallacies with regard to motivation was proposed by Marsh et al. ( 2003), who presented a factor model with two higher-order factors (dubbed learning and performance) that explained relations between motivation constructs. In this approach, assumptions on the number of factors and factor structure are necessary.

The network approach is different; it does not assume an a priori structure of motivation factors. Instead, it uses the (bidirectional) partial correlations between variables in empirical data and in doing so clusters of variables which can be interpreted as constructs may emerge. The idea of a network of mutual relations to model psychological constructs was introduced by van der Maas and colleagues (van der Maas et al., 2006, 2017) as an explanation for the positive correlations (the positive manifold) between intelligence sub-test scores. This led to a productive area of research with applications in many areas of psychology (Dalege et al., 2016; Robinaugh et al., 2020; Sachisthal et al., 2019, 2020; Zwicker et al., 2020). The general hypothesis in psychological network models is that correlations between observed behaviors, such as cognitive functions, psychopathological symptoms, and attitudes (or, motivation constructs), are not due to unobserved common causes, but to a network of interacting psychological, social, and/or biological factors. These observed behaviors are the nodes in the network and the partial correlations are the edges.

In sum, these works exemplify how network approaches can be used (1) to model distinctive but highly related motivation and achievement constructs simultaneously and map their relations and (2) to derive hypotheses about which included constructs may be efficient targets for interventions (see Borsboom, 2017, for an overview). Moreover, the fact that network analyses found different central variables in different populations also showcases how such an approach can flexibly capture interactions between motivation factors in real life. Last but not least, at a more abstract level, a mutualistic network approach can potentially solve the question of the mechanisms of the impact of motivation on achievement (also raised in Hattie et al., 2020 as an important avenue for future research). Specifically, how clusters of motivation constructs, behavior, and achievement interact with one another can be modeled, and how reciprocal relations between them arise over time. This can only be achieved when multiple motivation constructs are measured in one single study (as argued above in section "Multiple motivation constructs").

Time Scale of the Interactions (Short vs. Long Cycle)

Another gap in the literature that we identified is that much research on the reciprocity between motivation and achievement has been done with data collected at large time intervals, which reflect changes that happen over months or years (e.g., Harackiewicz et al., 2008; Marsh et al., 2005, 2016; Nuutila et al., 2018). For example, it is common for studies to include data collected per academic semester or year (e.g., Gottfried et al., 2013); sometimes, other time intervals have been used, such as weeks (e.g., Yeager et al., 2014). However, theories of motivation such as self-determination theory or expectancy-value theory are not formulated with an explicit time scale, and the interactions they describe seem framed in terms that suggest that the effects of motivation constructs happen without delays (i.e., on a time scale of seconds). Recent accounts of motivation are situated ones, which also call attention to fine-grained, moment-to-moment fluctuations that occur during learning engagement (Schunk & DiBenedetto, 2020). This raises the question how such fast dynamics can be captured if constructs are measured with large time lags in between.

It is possible that there are interactions between motivation and achievement at both short and long timescales, and that these are qualitatively different. We will refer to these hypothetical interactions at different time scales as short (or fast) and long (or slow) cycles between motivation and achievement. Some constructs may change in slower cycles (e.g., achievement goal orientation, mindset, academic self-concept) than others (e.g., autonomy, or even faster: emotions). In research focusing on interest and achievement emotions, for instance, a stable, so-called trait level (e.g., individual interest) is often distinguished from a shorter, task-dependent state level (e.g., situational interest) (see Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Renninger & Hidi, 2011 for interest; Pekrun, 2006 for achievement emotions). Nesselroade's ( 1991) model of within-person psychological change also distinguishes between state and trait. The former is rapid and potentially more easily reversed than the latter. Developmental processes are thought to underlie trait constructs, for instance suggesting that the repeated experience of a positive state (i.e., enjoyment) will lead to a positive trait value. While it has been suggested that reciprocal relations play a more central role on the trait level-e.g., explaining the stronger relations between emotion antecedents and emotions (Bieg et al., 2013), studies investigating reciprocal relations are still missing at a state (or task) level. Furthermore, the difference between slow and fast change is also more salient for certain constructs than for others. For example, in one rare study where the within-task changes in multiple motivation constructs was studied, researchers found that while students' self-efficacy generally grew throughout the progress of a task, interest did not (Niemivirta & Tapola, 2007). This suggests that when studies do not consider fast vs. long cycles of constructs, the effects of a faster changing variable on a slowly changing variable can be missed.

A related but distinguishable issue is the stability of the reciprocal relation between motivation and achievement. Whether or not reciprocal effects of motivation and achievement are stable across school careers is a question with significant theoretical and practical consequences (Marsh et al., 2018). Two recent studies found motivation declines to be associated with particular academic stages, for example some constructs such as achievement goal orientation specifically dropped in the transition to secondary school (Scherrer et al., 2020). The Scherrer et al. ( 2020) data are however among the first longitudinal attempts that can reveal how such declines could potentially impact the reciprocity between motivation and achievement. Theoretically, one could assume that the impact of motivation on achievement is low early in a new environment (e.g., a school transition) where learners experience considerable uncertainty regarding their competence and academic standing (Eccles et al., 1993; Valentine et al., 2004). When the learning environment is stable, the impact of achievement on subsequent motivation might be more substantial. Some support for such a pattern is provided in Scherrer et al. ( 2020) who found the reciprocal effects only in later time points and not in earlier time points after transition into secondary school. However, these studies were not designed specifically to test the transition vs. non-transition contrast, prompting the need for subsequent longitudinal studies that focus on the effect of school transition (to our knowledge, Rudolph et al., 2001 is among the first but only has two waves of data).

Methodological Challenges

Causality

When extant research finds the relationships between motivation and achievement, the interpretation with regards to causal relations remains difficult due to the lack of experimental manipulation (Granger, 1980; Holland, 1986; Marsh et al., 2018; Mega et al., 2014). In almost every study investigating reciprocal motivation and achievement relations, the need for experimental designs in which either motivation or achievement is manipulated is raised as a suggestion for future research (Marsh et al., 2016, 2018; Mega et al., 2014; Pinxten et al., 2014). The term "effect" in many existing studies is used only in "conventional statistical sense and standard path analytic terminology, as representing a relation that is not necessarily causal" (Marsh et al., 2018, p. 268).

Research that aims to establish causality in the reciprocal relationship between motivation and achievement would need to meet three preconditions. The first precondition of causality is order, that is "x must precede y temporally" (Antonakis et al., 2010, p. 1087). Causality of reciprocal effects requires both orders (x precedes y, y precedes x), as well as alternations of x and y (x precedes y, which is again followed by x). The pale blue (with solid outline) squares in Fig. 2 show this alteration of measurements of motivation and achievement. The top pale blue rectangle starts with motivation, whereas the bottom starts with achievement. The second precondition is correlation: "x must be reliably correlated with y (beyond chance)" (Antonakis et al., 2010, p. 1087).

Representation of three types of study designs that can investigate the relationships between motivation and academic achievement. (1) The gray box shows that to establish that motivation causes academic achievement (top) or vice versa (bottom), experimental manipulation is needed, intervening on the predictor at time point 1, which influences the outcome at time point 2 and so on. The straight thin arrows are the cross-lagged relations and the curved arrows the autoregressive relations. (2) The light blue boxes (top and bottom) illustrate the types of design where reciprocity but not necessary causal effects between motivation and achievement can be established. (3) The green boxes (top and bottom) show the type of design that can investigate both reciprocity and causality between motivation and achievement (i.e., a study where experimental manipulation is included and reciprocal relationships are measured). t time-point, M motivation, A achievement

Several studies with high quality and quantity of longitudinal data meet these two pre-conditions (e.g., Arens et al., 2017; Bossaert et al., 2011; Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2013; Collie et al., 2015; Dicke et al., 2018; Grygiel et al., 2017; Hebbecker et al., 2019; Höft & Bernholt, 2019; Marsh et al., 2016, 2018; Miyamoto et al., 2018). In these studies, autoregressive paths (the curved arrows in Fig. 2, which go from measurement of a variable at one time point to the measurement of the same variable at the next time point) and cross-lagged paths (the straight arrows in Fig. 2, which go from measurement of a variable at one time point to the measurement of a different variable at a later time point) are found. In other words, autoregressive paths represent the direct effects of variables on themselves over time and cross-lagged paths the direct effects of two variables on each other over time. Such cross-lagged paths show the reciprocity between the variables but not necessarily causality in these relations (Usami et al., 2019). Correlation between different variables, measured at different time points, is a necessary but not sufficient requirement of causality in mutual relations. Establishing causality of reciprocal effects requires the experimental manipulation of at least one of the two variables.

Importantly, to our knowledge, no studies of the mutual relations between motivation and achievement also satisfy the third precondition of causality, that is the manipulation of x has an effect on y at a later time point, followed by (a) repeated measure(s) of x (and y) (Antonakis et al., 2010). In Fig. 2, manipulation is indicated by the thick arrow. In the upper panel of Fig. 2, the manipulation of motivation affects achievement in the gray (with dash outline) part of the figure. If the manipulation is followed by an alteration of the variables with cross-relations, the findings would support causality of motivation in reciprocal relations between motivation and achievement. We searched for such studies in meta-analyses of interventions (Harackiewicz et al., 2014; Lazowski & Hulleman, 2016; Sisk et al., 2018), in the latest meta-analysis of longitudinal studies (Huang, 2011) and Scharmer ( 2020). We encountered two studies that contained both an experimental manipulation of a motivation construct and subsequent multiple, alternate measurements of motivation and performance. Cohen et al. ( 2009) found that structured writing assignments to prompt African American students to reflect on their personal values (i.e., self-affirmation interventions) resulted in improved academic achievement (GPA), as well as self-perception and an increased rate of remediation, in the following school year for low-achieving African Americans. Yeager et al. ( 2019), in a large-scale mindset intervention, also had more than one wave of manipulated motivation and measurement of achievement. Although the authors discuss the role of a recursive process Yeager & Walton, 2011), neither of these interventions modeled reciprocal effects between motivation and performance (Cohen et al., 2009; Yeager et al., 2019).

In the lower panel of Fig. 2, the arrow indicates manipulation of achievement. A manipulation of achievement that affects motivation, which is again cross-related to achievement, would support a causal effect of achievement in reciprocal relations between achievement and motivation. However, it is hard to manipulate achievement independently from motivation. For example, manipulations of instruction, modeling, practice, and self-correction may all affect achievement, but they may do so partly by making the material more appealing, raising motivation at the same time or before achievement is raised. New manipulations are needed that raise, for example, perceived performance without raising performance per se, as a way to circumvent such issues. For causal inferences, experiments would ideally include (double-blinded) random assignment, which is possible in the lab but poses important practical problems in the classroom (cf. Savi et al., 2018). In sum, future research with the types of studies that can investigate both reciprocity and causality between motivation and achievement would be highly valuable.

Choice of Appropriate Statistical Models

Although the existence of the reciprocal relationship between motivation and performance is generally agreed upon, there are also empirical works that fail to establish such a relationship (Fraine et al., 2007) or cast doubts on the robustness of the reciprocal effects (Burns et al., 2020; Ehm et al., 2019). Such studies most importantly also point out that the choice of sophisticated statistical models to investigate such relationships can have implications for the conclusion drawn (e.g., Burns et al., 2020; Ehm et al., 2019). Ehm et al. ( 2019) specifically found that although a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) supported reciprocal motivation-achievement relations, other models did not-such as the random-intercept CLPM, which Hamaker et al. ( 2015) showed to be more effective than CLPM in explicitly modeling within- and between-individual changes across time. In addition, as Usami et al. ( 2019)-in their comprehensive unified framework of longitudinal models-demonstrated, it is important to identify the existence of third time-varying or time invariant variables (such as stable traits) that can have a causal effect on the longitudinal relationship but are yet accounted for in a model. Substantial knowledge about such confounders will help researchers select the correct statistical model. Again, this issue is closely related to the short vs. long cycle of the constructs discussed above.

Alternatives to Self-Reports

Most recent discussions of motivation-achievement interactions emphasize the need for alternative methods to self-report questionnaires. These alternatives include experience sampling, daily diaries, think-aloud protocols, observations, and structured interviews (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020). These alternatives have their strengths, but some limitations remain, such as the subjective nature of these measures and a possible high demand on research participants' cognitive resources when a large number of measures are administered during a session. In addition, some demand frequent small breaks during a task to report internal states, which may interfere with the flow of the task.

Several alternative methods are available to observe and measure motivation or engagement "online" during learning, for example by using frequent choices of learners or video observations (Järvenoja et al., 2018). With the development of new technologies, it is now also possible to collect such data longitudinally on a large scale. For example, MathGarden, an online math learning tool, provides access to math learning data of thousands of students. Motivation is indexed by the frequency and length of voluntary, self-initiated practice, and can be linked to learning and performance (Hofman et al., 2018). Other promising process-oriented measures are eye-tracking and facial emotional expressions (D'Mello et al., 2008; Grafsgaard et al., 2014, 2011; Nye et al., 2018; van Amelsvoort & Krahmer, 2009).

Another process-oriented approach uses physiology for high-frequency and non-interfering measures of motivational states. We will briefly discuss the use of autonomic nervous system (ANS) and central nervous system (CNS) measures. ANS techniques can be used to measure arousal, which is defined as higher activation of the sympathetic relative to the parasympathetic system. Motivated and effortful behavior is accompanied by increased arousal, and thus ANS techniques can provide an index of motivation. Popular techniques are electrodermal activity (EDA), electrocardiograms (ECG), and impedance cardiography (ICG). Sympathetic arousal measured with EDA has been associated with emotion, cognition, and attention (Critchley, 2002). Sympathetic arousal can also be measured with pre-ejection period (Tavakolian, 2016)-which is the time in between "the electrical depolarization of the left ventricle and the beginning of the ventricular ejection" (Lanfranchi et al., 2017, p. 145). One shared challenge with EDA and ECG is that arousal is a "fuzzy" construct, meaning many things, yet nothing specific (Mendes, 2016). A common factor that elicits EDA is subjective salience or motivational importance. Pre-ejection period is often used as an index for effort mobilization in studies investigating motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989). Suppression of parasympathetic activity, which can be measured as reduction in high frequency heart rate variability, has been associated with effortful control (Spangler & Friedman, 2015) and emotion regulation (Beauchaine, 2015), but a recent meta-analysis supports a more general role in top-down self-regulation (Holzman & Bridgett, 2017).

A CNS measure of motivational states can be provided by electroencephalography (EEG). Higher mental effort/workload has been associated with attenuated parietal alpha activity (Brouwer et al., 2012, 2014; Fink et al., 2005), higher frontal theta activity (Cavanagh & Frank, 2014; Klimesch, 2012), and a higher theta/alpha ratio. Another useful EEG index of motivation is asymmetrical frontal activity, which has been proposed to index motivational direction. Approach and avoidance motivation are respectively related to greater left and right frontal activity (Kelley et al., 2017).

Measuring Achievement

Scope of the Theories and Generalizability of Findings

Studies investigating motivation-achievement interactions have often studied the development of these processes separately during childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. It is therefore unclear whether results can be generalized across developmental stages. Furthermore, as in many subfields of psychology, the majority of research in this area has been conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies (Henrich et al., 2010), where, for example, rates of schooling are much higher than other places (e.g. the Global South). Here, we outline considerations of generalizability across developmental stages and ethnic and sociocultural settings.

Generalization Across Developmental Stages

Childhood and adolescent development is characterized by rather different trajectories for academic achievement (with a general pattern of improvement with age) than for academic motivation (with a general pattern of decrease during adolescence, as well as diversification in sources of motivation) (Scherrer et al., 2020; Scherrer & Preckel, 2019). As a result, we can speculate that the reciprocal relationships between motivation and achievement will change with age. Below, we first highlight findings on changes in motivation across development, and next describe the consequences of developmental differences on reciprocal relations between motivation and achievement, as a function of age, developmental, and academic stages (such as puberty or school grade).

The way in which value guides goal pursuit transforms profoundly from childhood to adolescence to adulthood (Davidow et al., 2018), and is reflected in changes in reward sensitivity and cognitive control. At the individual level, motivational beliefs related to competence, control and agency, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and subjective task value undergo significant changes throughout the lifespan (Wigfield et al., 1998, 2019). Social cognitive accounts often postulate that the development of more sophisticated cognitive capacities with age allows adolescents to improve performance but also to be more aware of their own abilities and those of their peers (Dweck, 2000, Scherrer and Preckel, 2019). As children go through school, previously held optimistic beliefs on competency become more realistic or even pessimistic (Fredricks & Eccles, 2002; Jacobs et al., 2002; Scherrer & Preckel, 2019; Watt, 2004). A meta-analysis by Scherrer and Preckel ( 2019) found a small but significant overall decrease in several motivation constructs including academic self-concept, intrinsic motivation, mastery, and performance-approach achievement goals over the course of elementary and secondary school. However, for several other constructs, including self-esteem, academic self-efficacy, and performance-avoidance achievement goals, there was no consistent developmental trend across empirical studies. Overall, this heterogeneity in developmental patterns of various motivation constructs suggests that the reciprocal interactions with achievement may also follow different trajectories across development and still need to be investigated.

Beyond the individual level, social influences on learning and motivation within the family, peer, and school contexts (see Fig. 1) also play a significant role in the changes in motivation and achievement (Nolen & Ward, 2008; Wigfield et al., 1998). Sensitivity to social context continues to develop through childhood and adolescence, transforming through the different school stages (Ladd et al., 2009). Broadly speaking, motivation for academic activities decreases between childhood and adolescence, and motivation reorients toward social and novel situations (Crone & Dahl, 2012). According to the stage-environment fit account, the decline in academic motivation in adolescents is driven by a mismatch between their newly developed needs and their social settings (Scherrer et al., 2020; Scherrer & Preckel, 2019). Specifically, the transition to middle and high schools is usually accompanied by changes in peer relationships, friendship, and teacher-student relationships, an increase in normative and performance-focused evaluation and a decrease in perceived autonomy. Adolescence is especially characterized by heightened social influences on motivation (Casey, 2015): social interactions become increasingly important and peer affiliation motivation peaks (Brown & Larson, 2009).

Indeed, peer relationships show a stronger influence on academic self-concept for seventh graders, compared to fifth graders (Molloy et al., 2011). As children transition into middle school, there is increased competition for grades and typically a larger pool of peers that serve as a reference group (Molloy et al., 2011). During adolescence, same-aged peers in school can motivate academic achievement to a larger extent, and a stronger focus on performance rather than mastery goals is sometimes empirically observed (Maehr & Zusho, 2009, but see Scherrer et al., 2020; Scherrer & Preckel, 2019 where meta-analytic findings point to declines in both mastery and performance goals).

Generalization Across Sociocultural Settings

The reciprocal relationship between motivation and achievement may also take different shapes across contexts, as students belong to different ethnic, gender, socioeconomic (SES), and cultural groups. However, the majority of current research on the reciprocal relations between motivation and academic achievement has suffered from what can be considered a sampling bias problem (Pollet & Saxton, 2019), i.e., conducted using homogenous samples in terms of ethnicity (Marsh & Martin, 2011) and cultural background (Henrich et al., 2010). In the meta-analysis by Valentine et al. ( 2004), which showed that samples from non-Western countries tended to have larger effect sizes than those from Western countries, there were only four non-Western samples out of a total of 60 samples. In her meta-analysis of Scharmer ( 2020), 90% of samples were collected in WEIRD countries (Australia, USA, and Western Europe, with fully half using German samples). This is problematic, given that even within WEIRD samples, motivation of students from different groups (e.g., African Americans vs. European Americans) is influenced by different factors, and may contribute differently to their academic achievement (Cohen et al., 2009). Ten years later, the remark of Marsh and Martin ( 2011) thus still stands that it is premature to conclude that the reciprocal relationship between motivation and achievement is universal.

Demonstrating this across diverse populations is important for three reasons. Firstly, even the same motivation construct might contribute differently to achievement across groups. For example, Chiu and Klassen ( 2010), using PISA data and a very large and diverse sample ( N participant = 88,590, N country = 34), found a positive link between mathematics self-concept and mathematics achievement, but this relationship was moderated by cross-country differences in cultural orientations (specifically, degree of egalitarianism, rigidity in gender roles, aversion to uncertainty). As mentioned above, Sachisthal et al. ( 2019) also showed that across populations different motivation constructs are central in the network of constructs.

Such findings suggest differences between sociocultural contexts are not just gradual but also likely to be qualitative. This would threaten the generalizability of findings (Henrich et al., 2010). Note that many of the empirical studies cited in this section are non-longitudinal. Reciprocal relationships between motivation and achievement may look different from what we currently know when representative samples are included. It is thus highly relevant for future motivation research to increase ethnic, and other group diversity in their studies. This can be done by better sampling within geographical boundaries (Pollet & Saxton, 2019) and by reaching out to under-researched territories such as in Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and South America.

Diversifying study populations can be tough, but is essential for new understanding of human universals and specifics in motivation. For example, collecting experimental data across countries offers alternative perspectives to experimental set-ups and findings, which subsequently prompt researchers to rethink the constructs of interest and their operationalizations (Vu et al., 2017). Nevertheless, there are innovative solutions to overcome practical difficulties, including collaborating with researchers who reside in places where certain specificity and universality in motivation constructs can be expected (as outlined in some of the examples above) and making use of networks of researchers such as Psychological Science Accelerator to get access to multiple laboratories and populations across the world ( https://psysciacc.wordpress.com/).

Discussion and Conclusions

We have summarized theories of motivation and analyzed these specifically with regards to how they conceptualize reciprocal interactions between motivation and achievement. This led to a summary of pathways between motivation and achievement, depicted in Fig. 1. The common denominator between theories suggested reciprocal positive influences of motivation on achievement and vice versa, which has been supported by much previous research. We reviewed the strengths of the underlying data, but also limitations and gaps in the evidence. This led to a research agenda consisting of the following recommendations for future studies on the relationship between motivation and performance: (1) include multiple motivation constructs (on top of ASC), (2) investigate behavioral mediators, (3) consider a network approach, (4) align frequency of measurement to expected change rate in intended constructs and include multiple time scales to better understand influences across time-scales, (5) check whether designs meet the criteria for measuring causal, reciprocal inferences, (6) choose an appropriate statistical model, (7) apply alternatives to self-reports, (8) consider various ways of measuring achievement, and (9) strive for generalization of the findings to various age, ethnic, and sociocultural groups.

We argued that the strongest support for causal claims on motivation-achievement relations would be studies manipulating either motivation or achievement at one time point and studying the effects on motivation-achievement interactions across subsequent time points. Such studies do not yet exist to our knowledge. Many studies do show effects of manipulations affecting motivation thereby having an effect on achievement, but these studies have not looked at longitudinal interactions. The other pathway (i.e., achievement → motivation) has not been studied extensively, because of difficulties identifying manipulations that would directly affect achievement but not motivation.

A way to work around this problem is to manipulate perceived achievement, instead of true achievement (our lab study, manuscript in preparation). In this experiment, participants perform a learning task that lasts an hour. Their motivation and achievement are measured at multiple consecutive time points. Halfway through the experiment, a manipulation of perceived feedback is introduced: participants receive rigged feedback that their achievement has dropped to below peer average. The causal relations between motivation and achievement can be examined because manipulated perceived achievement leads to corresponding changes in motivational beliefs, to changes in motivational behaviors and eventually, to changes in actual achievement across multiple consecutive time points. Another example of manipulation of achievement can be found in Bejjani et al. ( 2019) where they used a feedback manipulation (a competence-threatening IQ score) to study its effect on subsequent motivation and learning.

Furthermore, we have argued that motivation can best be seen as a constellation of highly related, multidimensional constructs, and manipulations of motivation may directly or indirectly influence achievement and vice versa. An innovative method to study the motivation-achievement relationship can be a network approach, where observational and interventional data are used to estimate a causal graph. The idea is that to estimate causal relations, one variable can be manipulated at a time, and its effects on other variables can be observed. The network approach is also beneficial in the classroom context where there are many variables to take into account which cannot be independently manipulated (Yeager & Walton, 2011).

In conclusion, this view of a cycle between motivation and achievement, as shown in Fig. 1, has intuitive appeal and fits well with theories of academic motivation. However, empirical evidence for a cycle is far from complete. The research agenda we have presented contains important challenges for future research aimed at elucidating how motivation and achievement exactly interact, and whether a cycle and a network of constructs are good ways of conceptualizing these interactions. As academic motivation typically drops considerably in adolescence and may be lower for some groups (e.g., through the effects of SES, stereotype threat, and the likes), such evidence is necessary for gaining knowledge on how to best intervene in the cycle, and bring out the best in each student.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sibel Altikulaç, Abe Hofman, and Simone Plak who participated in our Expert Workshop in Motivation-Performance Cycle in Math Learning in Amsterdam in June 2019 where we discussed ideas for this paper. We would like to thank Milene Bonte, Wouter van den Bos, Camila Bosano, and Bruce McCandliss who are members of the advisory board for the Jacobs Foundation project of which the subproject to write this manuscript is a part. We also want to thank Asmar Isilak who helped with the first database search for empirical studies on the motivation-achievement cycles in learning.

Funding

This work was supported by the Jacobs Foundation Science of Learning pilot grant to Nienke van Atteveldt and Brenda R. J. Jansen [project number 2019 1329 00]. Nienke van Atteveldt was also supported by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC, grant #716736). The funders had no role in study design, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

1. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

TuongVan Vu, Nienke van Atteveldt, Tieme W. P. Janssen, Nikki C. Lee, Maartje E. J. Raijmakers & Martijn Meeter

2. Research Institute LEARN!, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

TuongVan Vu, Nienke van Atteveldt, Tieme W. P. Janssen, Nikki C. Lee, Maartje E. J. Raijmakers & Martijn Meeter

3. Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1690, USA

Lucía Magis-Weinberg

4. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Brenda R. J. Jansen, Han L. J. van der Maas & Maien S. M. Sachisthal

Contributions

Apart from the first four authors and the last author, the rest of the authors is listed in alphabetical order.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to TuongVan Vu.

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Vu, T., Magis-Weinberg, L., Jansen, B.R.J. et al. Motivation-Achievement Cycles in Learning: a Literature Review and Research Agenda. Educ Psychol Rev 34, 39-71 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09616-7
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Keywords

Learning

Motivation

Academic achievement

Reciprocal

Review

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Motivation-Achievement Cycles in Learning: a Literature Review and Research Agenda - Educational Psychology Review

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The question of how learners' motivation influences their academic achievement and vice versa has been the subject of intensive research due to its theoretical relevance and important implications for the field of education. Here, we present our understanding of how influential theories of academic motivation have conceptualized reciprocal interactions between motivation and achievement and the kinds of evidence that support this reciprocity.

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Do the systems, procedures and tools we have allow us to do our best in the smoothest and most efficient way possible?

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Do the systems, procedures and tools we have allow us to do our best in the smoothest and most efficient way possible?

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Rebels at Work, a movement for empowering every day people to challenge the status quo and stand up for positive change at work.

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@garius: One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything going on at Twitter...…

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People sometimes ask me where I find the subjects of all the remarkable, verifiable history threads I do.

There's no trick to it. I just hunt out books and primary sources that DON'T just tell the same stories.

Because over time those stories grow or dilute in the telling /1

https://twitter.com/Agrbez/status/1587029193929408512

John Steele at Sainte Mere Eglise is a classic example of a story that has managed to do both.

It has become, to all intents and purposes, a meme. It is a thing 'everyone knows' and thus it gets elevated to a story that must ALWAYS be told.

As Adam says, there's significant evidence it never happened. At least not to the level of 'historical meme' it has become. Certainly enough to cast doubt on it.

Yet history, to a lot of people, is a comfort blanket of warm knowledge. They want the same stories but better.

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People sometimes ask me where I find the subjects of all the remarkable, verifiable history threads I do. There's no trick to it. I just hunt out books and primary sources that DON'T just tell the same stories.

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The Triple Burden: young people balancing volunteering with work, family life and mental health (report)

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The Triple Burden: young people balancing volunteering with work, family life and mental health (report)

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Young charity volunteers risk being overwhelmed by a "triple burden" of work, family life and poor mental health, the government has warned.

The report, which is called Volunteering Journeys and was published yesterday by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, says events in the UK and around the world "were affecting confidence and emotional security" in volunteers aged between 16 and 30.

Volunteers mentioned the climate crisis, war in Ukraine and the Black Lives Matter movement as issues that affected their mental health and, as a result, made it harder to engage with good causes.

The report, prepared for the DCMS by the Institute for Community Studies, drew on survey responses from more than 2,000 young volunteers.

"The way global and national events were affecting confidence and emotional security for young people, particularly in the older, post-18 years age groups, was striking," it says.

Several interviewees "referred to mental health as a factor affecting their engagement in volunteering. This was referenced across all life stages, with the past two years of the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbating impact for many," the report said.

It found that "a 'triple burden' exists for the younger age group, namely balancing volunteering with their work, family life and mental health", which led many volunteers to say they feel burned out.

The report says that "coupled with burnout is a level of guilt that can occur with volunteering, particularly if you're overwhelmed due to other factors in your life and despite wanting to volunteer are unable to".

It recommends voluntary organisations include "wider structures of support, including mental health services and mentoring, into the volunteering offer".

The paper also argues that, while there has been growing interest in more informal volunteering in recent years, "fluid and informal models were not exclusively sought".

It says: "In fact, both the under-15 data and the 16- to 30-year-old data showed there is interest in volunteering through formal organisations, and for young people to take what could be called 'high-impact' roles in organisations and centres supporting some of the most vulnerable in society."

The research comes in the same week that the National Council for Voluntary Organisations released its own analysis, which found "an elevated level of anxiety and fatigue among pandemic volunteers as well as their strong sense of guilt".

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Young charity volunteers risk being overwhelmed by 'triple burden', report concludes

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Young charity volunteers risk being overwhelmed by a "triple burden" of work, family life and poor mental health, the government has warned. The report, which is called Volunteering Journeys and was published yesterday by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, says events in the UK and around the world "were affecting confidence and emotional security" in volunteers aged between 16 and 30.

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‘Motivating factors’ are linked to what you are doing

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‘Motivating factors’ are linked to what you are doing

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- Is it satisfying?
- Does it give you a sense of achievement?
- Do you feel that the work you are doing is acknowledged and recognised?
- Is there scope for you to learn and develop?
- Are you given an appropriate amount of responsibility?

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Every organisation has a purpose: a sense of why it exists and what it serves through that existence. For schools, this is perhaps obvious. The school exists to serve its children: to keep them safe, to help them to learn, to gain the best qualifications possible, and to prepare them for the world (add others Continue reading "Thriving Teams #2: Purpose and Goals"

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Every organisation has a purpose: a sense of why it exists and what it serves through that existence. For schools, this is perhaps obvious.

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Photo credit: 123RF.com/ andreykuzmin

Key points

Bad or destructive leadership isn't subtle; it can be readily identified if you know what to look for.

Bad leadership is associated with negative - and potentially costly - consequences for individuals and organizations.

To address bad leadership in your organization, consider taking a multifaceted approach that accounts for both organizational environment and individual factors.

Investigating the links between destructive leaders and organizational outcomes

A meta-analysis by Birgit Schyns and Jan Schilling found clear relationships between destructive leadership and various individual and organizational outcomes. Because of the snapshot nature of the majority of the 57 studies included in the meta-analysis, (they were cross-sectional studies), we cannot say destructive leadership certain outcomes, but we can look to see if they are related.

Before going deeper into the outcomes, though, let's first take a closer look at what destructive leadership is.

What is (not) destructive leadership?

Before you can address the challenge of destructive leadership, it is important to understand what it is and what it is not. That can be a little tricky given that researchers have conceptualized "bad leadership" in a host of ways - such as petty tyranny, abusive supervision, as well as despotic and tyrannical leadership.

In their work, Schyns and Schilling argue that destructive leadership is different from non-leadership or ineffective leadership. By this definition, it seems possible that someone can be lousy at the job of leadership, without being a destructive leader. Destructive leadership should also not be confused with other forms of misbehavior (e.g., drinking at work) or having an occasional bad day when no one wants to be around you. Those are unfortunate, but not necessarily destructive leadership.

Rather, destructive leadership relates to a person's abuse of formal power to achieve specific aims. This behavior occurs continuously over an extended period, and importantly, is perceived as hostile by those on the receiving end of the leader's actions.

Turning a blind eye to destructive leadership may be risky business

The strongest associations found by Schyns and Schilling were between perceptions of destructive leadership and negative attitudes towards the leader - no surprises there! However, the shadow cast by destructive leaders can be quite far-reaching, with potential negative influences on how people view their jobs and even on how they view the organization overall.

[Schyns and Schilling found several associations that were at least moderately strong, (i.e., they are likely to be noticeable to someone who is looking for them). These included: Increased perceptions of destructive leadership were associated with decreased job satisfaction, motivation and dedication, as well as reduced perceptions of organizational justice ; increased perceptions of destructive leadership were also associated with increased intention and counterproductive work behavior.]

A bad apple - or a systemic problem?

When faced with a destructive leader, your instinct may be to view that person as an anomaly - the so-called "bad apple". You may feel that firing or working with the individual to change the troublesome behaviors will solve the problem.

This may well be the case.

However, given that destructive leadership involves sustained, abusive behavior rather than a one-time event, it might be worth considering systemic factors that might allow such behaviors to take hold in an organization. Researchers offer two models that illustrate how this might happen.

Mary Mawritz and colleagues suggest there is a trickle-down nature to abusive leadership behavior - i.e., the bad behavior of a supervisor is related to the bad behavior of a manager, which is related to interpersonal issues in work groups.

In their toxic triangle model , Art Padilla and colleagues suggest that destructive leadership is not simply the work of particular individuals, but rather results from a complex mix of factors related to leaders, their followers, and the overall organizational environment.

Takeaways for your practice

Given that destructive leadership could impact your organization at some point, you may benefit from preparing for this challenge. To do so, you may want to:

Increase your awareness: Various studies indicate that people know destructive leadership when they experience it (see and .) Leadership assessments, performance appraisals, or general employee satisfaction surveys may be helpful to flag leaders that could benefit from follow-up related to their behaviors towards staff (see and ).

Have a plan: Develop a clear response to destructive leadership when it is identified, focusing not only on the leader (e.g., coaching, training, development plans) but also supporting employees (see ).

Know thyself: Leaders should consider how their behavior and tactics may affect staff. (See .) In addition, leadership teams may benefit from discussions of acceptable and unacceptable behavior - what types of behavior are you willing to tolerate amongst colleagues at the leadership level? Is this the type of behavior you would like imitated throughout the organization?

Consider your context: Addressing the behavior of the destructive leader is just a start. Consider the aspects of your organizational environment or culture that may enable or allow destructive leadership to take place, as suggested in the models referenced above.

We critically evaluated the trustworthiness of the study we used to inform this article. We found that the design of the study was moderately appropriate (70% trustworthiness level) to demonstrate a causal relationship, such as effect or impact. This means that there is a 30% chance that alternative explanations for these results are possible, including random effects.

ScienceForWork is an independent, non-profit foundation of evidence-based practitioners who want to #MakeWorkBetter.

Our mission is to provide leaders and decision-makers with trustworthy and useful insights from behavioural science.
Did you like this Evidence Summary? Share it with your network by clicking on the buttons below!
Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to receive the most trustworthy scientific research summarized in less than 1000 words!

References

Mackey, J. D., Frieder, R. E., Brees, J. R., & Martinko, M. J. (2015). Abusive supervision: A meta-analysis and empirical review . Journal of Management , 0149206315573997.

Schyns, B., & Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly , (1), 138-158.

Tepper, B. J., Duffy, M. K., Henle, C. A., & Lambert, L. S. (2006). Procedural injustice, victim precipitation, and abusive supervision. Personnel Psychology , (1), 101-123.

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Ignoring Bad Leadership May Be Risky Business * ScienceForWork

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Photo credit: 123RF.com/ andreykuzmin Bad or destructive leadership isn't subtle; it can be readily identified if you know what to look for. Bad leadership is associated with negative - and potentially costly - consequences for individuals and organizations. To address bad leadership in your organization, consider taking a multifaceted approach that accounts for both organizational environment and individual factors.

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Meet volunteers’ motivations

Make it as easy as possible to volunteer

Value volunteers’ contributions and time

Offer volunteers development opportunities

https://www.ncvo.org.uk/help-and-guidance/involving-volunteers/supporting-and-managing-volunteers/keeping-volunteers/#/

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The best way to keep volunteers is to make sure what they do meets their motivation for giving their time.

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- more flexibility: one-off opportunities, able to pick up/put down, convenience
- positive experience: easy to volunteer, time and skills valued and used effectively, sense of development, impact highlighted

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Dominic Pinkney's World of Volunteering

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If this sounds like one of those deliberately provocative 'clickbait' headlines, then I'm sorry to have to say this is a real question being asked in the voluntary and community sector. Only this week I got an email from someone struggling to recruit volunteers for an event who told me, 'volunteering is a dying trait'.
Without volunteers there is no voluntary sector.
This is, of course, the bleeding obvious. It is so obvious, it seems, that it is completely forgotten and taken for granted.

Volunteering is the lifeblood of the voluntary and community sector. From informal gifts of time through helping a neighbour or at a community event through to formal roles such as Trustees, volunteering is ESSENTIAL to the sector functioning.

If volunteering is dying, then the result is the sector is dying. If the sector is dying, then communities are weakened and unsupported increasing demand on public services that are either already at capacity or do not exist as that is what our sector does. Bottom line, if volunteering is dying then everyone should be worried.

All across the UK, towns, cities and rural areas are reporting significant drops in the levels of formal volunteering:

Volunteer Now published their findings on the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on volunteering in Northern Ireland in December 2022 stating, 'The emphasis and frequency with which volunteer recruitment was raised by interviewees was concerning.' They also report the negative impact this is having on the mental health of volunteer managers.

Volunteer Scotland has been carrying out some great research into volunteering and how the cost-of-living crisis has impacted Scotland's volunteer involving organisations (VIOs). Their February 2023 report has some important analysis and I would direct readers to the Key Findings on page 12 of their report.

NCVO, the umbrella body for the voluntary and community sector in England, in December 2022 also reported a lot of its members are having issues and problems recruiting and retaining volunteers.

I co-chair the London Volunteer Centre Network and members across London are reporting issues around volunteer recruitment and retention. The Hammersmith & Fulham Volunteer Intelligence Report (Mar 2023) also highlights that the biggest issue affecting local VIOs is recruiting new volunteers.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of evidence, but hopefully enough to convince that there is a real decline in formal volunteering and that this is causing real problems for charities and the communities they serve.

The cost-of-living crisis is clearly a large contributing factor, but to think volunteering issues will disappear once that has passed is to misunderstand the situation.

Volunteering has serious structural and systemic issues which have been exacerbated by the cost-of-living crisis but will remain, or be worse, once the crisis over:

1. Trends for volunteers and VIOs moving in opposite directions - this has been happening for a few years and was accelerated by the pandemic. VIOs are increasingly more safeguarding conscious with long on-boarding processes to train and support volunteers to carry out their roles. As a result, they are naturally keen to have volunteers who will commit to giving significant amount of time over a long period. Whereas those interested in volunteering increasingly want to do it on their terms, when it is convenient for them, on an ad hoc basis and as soon as possible. Although VIOs are making some efforts for more flexible volunteer roles, they have a long way to go.

2. Post-pandemic volunteering is different. As well as the cost-of-living, there are many factors that have impacted volunteering, such as:
(i) Many older people who volunteered in-person have not returned to their volunteer roles;
(ii) Perception that the pandemic is over and so volunteers not needed so much;
(iii) Fatigue and burnout of volunteers who have already given so much of their time;
(iv) Desire to volunteer remotely and/or less inclination for in-person volunteering

3. Lack of funding to support volunteer programmes - to manage effective volunteer programmes that recruit and retain volunteers well you need good volunteer management resources. The economic squeeze of VIOs over the past 10 or more years has led to a reduction in these resources and, in many cases, managing volunteers is tacked onto existing roles rather than it being a dedicated roles.

4. Voluntary sector infrastructure funding has reduced in real terms. The Feb 2023 360 Giving report highlights how VCS infrastructure funding, in the last 12 years has reduced, in real terms, compared to the rest of the sector.

5. Weak national bodies - the national agencies which represent and champion volunteering and volunteer infrastructure do not have the clout and influence to persuade national and local government to invest in this area.

6. The economic value of both volunteering and the infrastructure needed to keep it prospering and responding to needs is not understood. Obviously, local authorities and funders do understand it has a value, but they do not understand what they receive, in monetary terms, for their investment. Because of this, investment has reduced and, in some areas, has ended (for example, very sad to hear of the closing of Volunteer Centre Swindon)

The Value of Volunteering?
If we can solve the issue of understanding the value of volunteering this will go a long way to help solving the other issues.

There is an often-used quote in our sector by Sherry Anderson, "Volunteers are not paid; not because they are worthless, but because they are priceless." As much as I love the sentiment behind this, it is also extremely unhelpful as we live in a society where only things with a clear economic value are supported, developed and invested in.

The benefits of volunteering for the individual and communities are, I hope, well known. As well as the actual impact of the volunteering, for individuals, volunteering helps mental health, builds social and professional networks, develops skills and is fun. For communities, people giving a little of their time formally or informally makes them resilient, cohesive and nice places to live. However, the economic value for these benefits is unknown.

Martin Brookes, the CEO of London Plus (which champions charities and community groups in London), highlighted a useful example that illustrates this issue in a short article ' A better way to value and think about charities '. To summarise, it describes how volunteers from Good Gym stepped in to deliver prescriptions during the pandemic, as the private sector did not want to do this, not only did this volunteering activity not count towards calculating our GDP, it reduces it, whereas when the private sector carries this task out, it increases GDP. It is just one very real example which shows that as well as the value and impact on our society and economy of volunteering is not being measured or counted, when it does happen it can create a negative effect on the financial measures currently used.

Although the article does not mention it, as it was not relevant for the point being made, but it was the infrastructure organisation Voluntary Action Camden who facilitated the connection between the GPs/pharmacies and Good Gym who provided the volunteers. This clearly shows the benefits of infrastructure organisations, but the monetary value of this very important facilitation and brokerage is also unknown.

Therefore, those who work in the sector, whether it local, regional or national infrastructure, need to quickly come up with some measures of value to demonstrate the importance of volunteering. If we do not, then it could lead to decisions being made to stop investing in volunteer infrastructure with the inevitable consequence of having to re-establish it again later which not only costs more in the long run but takes time to do and weakens the whole sector whilst this happens.
What can we actually do?
The reality of volunteering right now in the UK is not good and looks quite bleak given the structural and systemic issues, but we are not in an impossible situation. Understanding what the problems are is definitely part of being able to create a solution.

Waiting for the cost-of-living crisis to end is not the answer. We need to tackle the issue on multiple fronts and we all have a part to play in the solution.

Showing economic value of Volunteering
Even if they are imperfect, we need to start estimating the economic impact of volunteering and volunteer infrastructure. In his article referenced above, Martin Brookes states, 'The Law Family Commission on Civil Society offers a large number of very practical recommendations about data. They offer the prospect of improving how we measure the value and contribution of people like the runners of GoodGym in Camden.'

Young People
Pro Bono Economics wrote an article in December 2022 asking, 'Is 2023 set to be the year of the volunteer?' highlighting that there could be a wave of new volunteers stating, '1 in 6 young people, aged 18-34, plan to start volunteering. At the time of writing (March 2023), we are not seeing a lot of this yet and some of the structural issues of volunteering, particularly lack of flexible volunteering, are likely holding this back. However, having said that, one Hammersmith & Fulham VIO reported ' we need volunteers and have less applications from adults and more from young people. ' So, as well as making volunteering more flexible we need to make changes so that more younger people can get involved.

Increased Awareness of Need of Volunteering
When people think there is a real need or crisis, they step up to volunteer. This has been proven. Right now, in general terms, no one really knows that there is a real need for volunteers.

Although many volunteer infrastructure organisations do very well with social media and communications, none of them have a loud enough voice for this current situation. These organisations need help from others with bigger voices such as local authorities, national bodies and the government to significantly raise the profile of the ask for volunteer support. For example, a national promotion but locally delivered would be very impactful. However, these need to be coordinated between national and local bodies to be effective as the poorly thought through Big Help Out has shown.

Local authorities can play a stronger role in amplifying the messages of volunteer infrastructure organisations and if they can work together on dedicated campaigns it can reach more people who could volunteer.
Conclusion
Volunteering is not dying, far from it, but it is injured. The need for effective healthcare, i.e. local and national volunteer infrastructure, has never been stronger.

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If this sounds like one of those deliberately provocative 'clickbait' headlines, then I'm sorry to have to say this is a real question being asked in the voluntary and community sector. Only this week I got an email from someone struggling to recruit volunteers for an event who told me, 'volunteering is a dying trait'....

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‘Hygiene factors’ don’t motivate us, but they do lead to dissatisfaction/satisfaction

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‘Hygiene factors’ don’t motivate us, but they do lead to dissatisfaction/satisfaction

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- Salary
- Processes, tools and procedures
- Relationships
- Management and supervision
- Role and status

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An introduction to Herzberg & his work (British Library)

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An introduction to Herzberg & his work (British Library)

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This year is certain to have more than its fair share of political, economic, and social change. But we've also entered a year of choices, challenges, and opportunities.

Our latest Road Ahead report analyses major trends and issues for 2024 to help chart a path through the year.

As well as helping you and your organisation to make decisions, this analysis also demonstrates how we at NCVO deliver - and adapt - the support and guidance we offer to our members and the wider voluntary sector.

It will come as no surprise that we're predicting another year of considerable change for both our sector and our society.

We believe our sector will play a big role in this transformational year, particularly by raising our collective voice about the issues that matter and the realities facing our communities. This can be seen in the work we are doing with our partners at ACEVO to develop a voluntary sector manifesto which will be presented to all political parties.

We expect the resilience and innovation of the voluntary sector to shine through once again in 2024. But we also need to see a renewed partnership with government to tackle the issues facing our society. This requires greater collaboration in the voluntary sector to navigate the challenges ahead and create the most impact for the people and communities we support.

It's no secret that we're expecting a general election in 2024 that will likely lead to a change in government, if we rely on current opinion polls.

This will have wide ranging implications for our sector, including the potential for a better relationship with government - Keir Starmer recently told a voluntary sector audience that the sector is 'essential' to Labour's vision for Britain and for a 'society of service'.

There are also local and regional elections taking place this year which will be important to our communities and to charities delivering local services.

All voluntary organisations must consider the wider impacts of an election year. For example, it's highly likely that an election will cause delays in decision-making for contract tendering processes and organisational finances.

There will also be increased focus on what charities are saying and campaigning about. Organisations should consider the potential risks of engaging in campaign or advocacy work - particularly where an issue may be likely to cause disagreement - and make sure to follow electoral and charity law.

This increased scrutiny will almost certainly play out on social media, so it's important organisations follow available guidance and make sure of organisational buy-in on the issues shared through these channels.

We are clear that the voluntary sector shouldn't shy away from raising our voices on the issues that matter to the communities we support during this important year. You can read our support and guidance on campaigning, developed in partnership with ACEVO, here.

Politics isn't the only game in town in 2024. We know the economic situation is a far more pressing concern for voluntary organisations navigating the continuing Cost of Giving Crisis. Keeping vital services going is the priority.

We predict the current tough economic climate for charities will continue through 2024. Both high inflation and interest rates will present challenges for organisations already juggling increasing operating costs and record demand for services.

Increased pressure on household budgets will negatively impact charitable giving - which makes up almost half of the sector's income - while the dire situation in local government across the country will have knock-on effects for charity contracts and public sector funding.

Its unlikely we will see much economic respite in 2024, and this makes collaboration more vital than ever - between funders and voluntary organisations, but also between voluntary organisations.

The challenging nature of the current climate means many people are looking for positive alternatives and ways to build a brighter future and better communities.

We anticipate charities will be at the heart of renewed efforts to shift power beyond voting in elections and into the hands of communities. We support greater local decision-making and community empowerment, and our sector will need to keep pushing for increased funding of local government and civic infrastructure.

Encouraging greater local participation will mean adapting how people can get involved in voluntary action. This includes increasing the flexibility and accessibility of volunteering. The 40th anniversary of Volunteers' Week and return of the Big Help Out offer fantastic opportunities for organisations to engage their communities.

Voluntary organisations will also need to adapt to the once-in-a-generation shifts being created by AI and the climate crisis. Here, our sector will have a vital role in advocating for a greener and equitable future for everyone.

AI will continue to reshape how we live and work. Developing plans and strategies to make sure your organisation gets the maximum positive potential from these and other technologies will be crucial.

Similarly, the continuing climate crisis is already having a direct impact on the work of voluntary organisations - both in terms of the impact on the communities they support and the design of services. Organisations must continue to adapt their operations and consider how they are contributing to the achievement of climate targets.

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The Road Ahead 2024: Opportunities and challenges for the voluntary sector

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Our latest Road Ahead report analyses major trends and issues for 2024 to help chart a path through the year

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"We had such a great time last night..."

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"We had such a great time last night..."

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"What are you doing at Brownies this week? It always sounds so exciting!"

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What do you experience here which you can’t get anywhere else?

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What do you experience here which you can’t get anywhere else?