Scan Magazine | Business Profile | Orchard
What really motivates employees? Working in a company has its ups and downs, and many employees are in fact dissatisfied with their work life. By understanding what motivates people at work, and creating solutions to satisfy those motivations, the Danish company Orchard has over the past four years developed a new way of engaging employees and increasing productivity. By Josefine Older Steffensen | Photos: Orchard
In February 2014, ISS, a large multinational company, came to Orchard and asked them to work out a solution for them, as they wanted their employees to feel more engaged in their work. This initial request became the starting point for Orchard, and since then they have worked with companies across the world to create solutions that benefit the individual as well as the business. “Many studies have been done on employee engagement, and the number of disengaged employees is always shockingly high,” explains Kristian Rix, managing director and partner at Orchard. “What 60 | Issue 107 | December 2017
we do is identify why employees are not engaged in very specific behaviours, figure out how to make work meaningful and motivating for them, and then design our digital products around exactly that.”
Starting with people Everything Orchard does is centred on the employee. The whole process starts with thorough anthropological research, where Orchard’s researchers interview and participate in the day-to-day running of the business. By doing this and getting to know the employees and their working habits, they can figure out where the motivations are and what is meaningful
to them, before mapping out the opportunities for a motivational design. “What we found with ISS, for example, was that the motivation for a specific behaviour didn’t stem from wanting to please the managers, but rather from wanting their peers to appreciate their work. This became fundamental for the design of our solution,” says Rix.
Motivational design Once the anthropological research is completed, Orchard creates a digital solution. With Estée Lauder Companies’ employees, Orchard created MoodStories. The employees would be motivated to share their daily mood with the company, but only if their daily mood actually mattered. Therefore MoodStories, a product that contrary to traditional employee engagement surveys makes it rewarding for the employee to participate, was designed to feature a feedback loop so that the man-