Lesson Nine: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is Silicon Valley's "secret" weapon
Forget carrots and sticks, think "launch pad"
My career started at a time when the business world was dominated by Baby Boomers. It currently sits in a time and place that is dominated by Millennials. I think we all are sick of the generational jabs and jibes littered around the internet to some degree. That said, I think there is a real distinction to be drawn between these two generations that can illustrate how the conventional wisdom associated with the business mindset can change dramatically and only over a few decades.
Spoiler alert: the Millennial way is better and has already won.
I believe the easiest way to illustrate the divergent philosophical bents of Boomer v. Millennial is to look at the concept of workplace experience. I have many younger cousins with whom I discuss professional development on a semi regular basis. One of these cousins was working for a small company and shared a post by the CEO of her company on LinkedIn.
The post was something to the effect that “People entering the workforce should not be looking for perks, they should do a good job for a while and be rewarded with perks when they have earned them.”
I smiled when I read this because I realized a couple of things. First, my cousin is too vibrant of a young person to actually think this argument makes sense. It really isn't an argument as much as a guy who has run a business a certain way for a long time being convinced that the reason he is having trouble hiring people is because the workforce is spoiled. Like that is going to convince more people to come work for you, dude.
But, second, it made me understand how valuable my employers over the past few decades were to me personally. This wasn't a guy trying to convince people to come work for him with a “take less” sales pitch. It was a guy who has been beaten by a superior method shouting at the wind for blowing through his neighborhood.
My first experience with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was when I was in graduate school, two nights a week and eight hours every other Saturday for 14 months. The very first class was about Leadership and we spent a lot of time investigating the interplay between a leader, their charges and the situations they find themselves in together. We spent a lot of time talking about motivation versus inspiration.
I am going to level with you for a minute, I did not know what I was getting into by going to grad school. It was hard, the first few weeks I wanted to give up because it was stretching me in ways I didn’t expect. Graduate school is about learning to think critically as much as anything else and that means forgetting about what you know in a search for what you do not know. I was comfortable already knowing everything. That all changed when we got to a discussion on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I was so enamored that I decided to write my final paper for the class on the concept and then extended my curiosity by conducting my own experiment about Maslow’s Hierarchy when the class was over.
To put it simply, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a concept developed by Abraham Maslow at Harvard University in 1948. He observed that there are layers of needs that all humans have. There are base level needs of sustenance, like food, shelter and clothing. These are things that you need for physical well being and Maslow called them Physiological Needs.
The next level of the pyramid is Safety Needs. These are things like financial security, personal security and emotional security. If you have enough money, are free from physical violence and your parents don’t make you feel like you don’t matter it stands to reason that you will be in a better place to capitalize on your best attributes, this isn’t rocket science. What makes Maslow’s Hierarchy such an important theory is that each layer builds on the next.
You can’t have any of the things in the Safety Needs layer if you haven’t met the needs in the Physiological Needs layer. These two layers combine to form what Maslow has dubbed the Basic Needs. From there the pyramid continues and you move into Psychological Needs. These needs are expressed as two layers on the pyramid, Belongingness and Love Needs first and then Esteem Needs. The top of the pyramid is Self Fulfillment Needs. This is where people are focused on nothing but being the best human being they can personally be.
By Androidmarsexpress - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93026655
This is really a revolutionary concept because it turns the idea of “perks” on its head. It puts real questions of motivation and accomplishment under a microscope and makes folks uncomfortable because it brings into question long held conventional wisdom. It tells us that participation trophies are actually worthy.
I decided that I would try and find a way to apply Maslow’s Hierarchy to my work life. This wasn’t easy, even trying to figure out how or what to do in order to enact a worthy test of the concept was difficult. I knew for sure I would need to focus on physiological needs. I knew I couldn’t really change the entire way my company operated to focus on my team’s physiological well being on some sustained scale that would be measurable. It took me little time to figure out that the key was to feed people because that was really the only physiological need I was even half way capable of helping provide for other human beings.
I accepted pretty quickly that if I could not run a sustained experiment I’d have to find a way to test Maslow in an intense fashion. I completed the Leadership class in October of 2003 and in November, I saw an opportunity. In my weekly team meeting we had a discussion about the upcoming holiday season and many folks were unhappy that we were going to be working on Christmas Eve, which was on a Wednesday.
After some contemplation and discussion with my wife I settled on a pretty unmeasurable experiment but one that I thought would be a worthy endeavor anyway. I had a waffle iron and food coloring. We could buy a whole bunch of waffle fixings pretty cheaply. I decided that I would be the first in the office on Christmas Eve and that people would walk into the office to the smell of warm waffles, melting butter and maple syrup. It felt like no big deal, but I was going to cook breakfast for any of the few hundred people that worked with me and take care of the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid in an attempt to make it a little easier to be at work when they would rather be home enjoying some winter wonder with their families.
It was a rip roaring success. I made about 250 waffles that morning. I saw a lot of frowns turn into smiles. But oddly, I saw a lot of people working on customer problems in a bright and cheery mood. My biggest worry was that no one would get anything done because they were focused on other things, griping or worrying or whatever. I was afraid that feeding them would piss off my superiors because I was distracting them. Thankfully, none of that happened and I fed my superiors too.
The event was so fun that my former coworkers still bring it up to me on social media more than a decade later. I did it again the following year and other folks pitched in with more types of food. It was really an awesome thing, but I learned years later that it wasn’t even scratching the surface of what Maslow’s Hierarchy was capable of.
When I moved from Yahoo! to Facebook there were quite a few culture shocks. This is to be expected when you move from a well established company with 15,000 or so employees to one ascending to global ambitions with under 1,000. On the surface, there was much that seemed the same.
Yahoo! had a cafe, Facebook had one. Yahoo! had wide open spaces within the campus with sport courts and the cafe was used as a big gathering space. Facebook did, too. There were obvious differences. Facebook had no cubicles, Yahoo! was a sea of cubicles. The VP of my team at Facebook sat about 15 feet from me in a wide open area, Yahoo! was way into hierarchies of the non Maslow variety.
But the very first revelation about just how different the companies were struck me on my second day and, while it didn’t involve waffles, it was all about breakfast. Like most suburban fathers, my mornings were always a blur. I had things to do in the office, traffic to fight on my way to those things and my primary job as “Dad and Husband” to squeeze in as I could. A lot of times this meant rushing out the door with a granola bar in hand, spending the morning rushing from task to task and watching the clock to see when I could eat lunch.
On my second day at Facebook I followed the same pattern. My boss had given me a list of folks to meet and learn about and my second day was basically a wall of meetings. I was also just trying to get my arms around what needed doing, searching for an early win to help my new teammates out right off the bat and trying to figure out how to best fit into a new environment that I knew was the biggest opportunity I had ever been afforded.
I set up all of my meet and greets on my first day (it was tough there were close to 50) and booked conference rooms for the discussions. On my second day, as I walked into the conference room and found it empty despite the guy I was there to meet accepting I was a bit miffed. My company issued iPhone started ringing with a call from a number I didn’t recognize and I figured it was a “Sorry I am late call.”
When I answered the guy on the other end said, “Oh, hey! I just noticed you booked a conference room but you should come meet me in the cafe. I got us a good spot.”
I got to the cafe and waited in line to grab some eggs, bacon and fruit. I looked around and saw the guys I was supposed to meet with and headed over to him, a little disgruntled that he had changed the place of the meeting without asking me. I sat down, introduced myself and started to ask about work projects.
He cut me off, furthering raising my hackles, to say “Forget about work for a minute, tell me about why you are here?”
We had a wide ranging conversation about the future of Facebook, the mistakes he had watched other new people make and we agreed on a good way to work together in general. He noticed that I was a bit antsy and asked why. I started to say I had another 1:1 meeting to get to and we hadn’t really covered any specific work projects. He smiled and said something like “I still have 15 minutes with you.”
I was stunned. I had eaten breakfast, had a substantial discussion and made a good connection in my first 1:1 and all of it had happened in 15 minutes. I went back for more food. We didn’t talk about any specific work projects because my new coworker spent the next 15 minutes telling me how he used the gym benefit, where to go and get a laundry bag so that I could drop off my laundry for it to be washed, and he even walked my by the IT Helpdesk so I could get some headphones to help me stay focused in the wide open work environment.
It was there that I realized that, from a certain point of view, was a massive experiment in the power of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I was calm and focused after this meeting whereas when I was at Yahoo! I may have been a little more focused on what the next Power Point I needed to build looked like and skipping breakfast altogether because I didn’t want to pay for it.
And while this might sound like a whiney tech employee complaining about his lack of privilege, the network effects of happy people who were not trying to figure out if they should spend money on a way better breakfast than the granola bar he grabbed on the way out of his house was obvious everywhere I looked. I walked through the day meeting people in casual, low stress discussions that still got to the heart of what needed to be done in order to make those Power Points look great, just without the need to make the Power Point.
As I was there longer, and the various layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy were addressed in new and deeper ways it was obvious that the reason companies like Google and Facebook were so adaptable to the moment was because they understood this concept. If you want the most out of your employees, you have to give them what they need to focus on nothing but the mission at hand. Suddenly, everyone having two massive screens on their desk seemed less an over the top perk and more like addressing a psychological need to avoid distractions.
It is true that this can be overdone. When I moved to Square I found much of the same support mechanisms were in place but my favorite one by far was that we had a really awesome coffee bar. It looked a little like a science lab with all the containers set up to make pour over coffee and it was like a rite of passage to learn how to make your own single cup of pour over coffee. We also had baristas on staff if you would rather have an espresso drink made by somebody who knew what they were doing.
One of my favorite moments at Square was when we moved to a new office and it was under constant remodeling for a period of time. There was a massive staircase that was being built and it required the baristas and cool science experiment looking set up for single pour coffee to move up a few floors. When this was announced at an all hands there was a bit of a groan that ran through the crowd.
I smiled ear to ear as the lady who ran this program frowned and then said, “Oh, get over it! I am sorry you all have to walk a little further for your organic, artisanal coffee drinks!”
Most of us understood what a privilege it was to have this available and the room erupted into applause. I still think about that moment when my kids are whining about how hard it is to walk to the kitchen and throw a frozen waffle into the toaster. There is danger in making it too easy for everyone, but it is certainly outweighed by the positive effects of satisfied, happy people focusing on the work at hand and nothing else. The best way to avoid letting these support mechanisms become overindulgence is to do what our awesome lady did at Square, call it out swiftly and directly and move on.
The lesson here is twofold. First, for the employee, understand that these support mechanisms are meant so that you can focus 100% on what the company needs you to do. In Silicon Valley, people are hired for their minds and experience, there is an expectation that you will dream up new ways to do even mundane tasks. It is a privilege to have Maslow’s Hierarchy taken care of as a part of your everyday work experience, treat it as such.
Second, for the leader, this isn’t about coddling or spoiling people. It isn’t about making sure the employees don’t leave the office for lunch and stay in front of a screen all day. It is about building an empowered workforce. So if you want a workforce that is both ready and willing to change the game, look at Maslow’s Hierarchy and think of ways to build support structures that minimize how much any employee has to think about the bottom layers. Build a launch pad.