Is Work Transactional?

Some time around late June and early July 2023, there was this debate in the Indonesian Twitter community which was sparked by a thread by one of the better-known leaders in the Indonesian tech scene.

The debate was about whether work is transactional, where the proponents of the person starting the thread argued that we should simply focus on giving and contributing at work, and the reward should naturally come later. On the other side, people are arguing that work is transactional so for every work we do there should be a clear gain for us.

I have friends arguing for both sides of the debate. While I myself wasn’t involved in the debate, I have a very strong opinion regarding this: work is transactional. But there are nuances to this since not everything in the context of this transaction must be monetary in nature (at least not immediately), so I’m going to talk a bit about this.

Motivations and Goals

As a manager whose job is to ensure that the teams I’m managing are high-performing, I must first start by identifying the motivations and goals of every single member of my team. Why is it important? Because this is where I can learn what I need to give my team members in return for their performance.

It’s fair for people to ask to be rewarded for their work. If doing the work doesn’t benefit them in any way and doesn’t help them to get closer to what they want to achieve, it is understandable if they’re not motivated to do the work. After all, if they feel that they have something they must pursue, doing something that doesn’t help with their pursuit will feel like a waste of their time.

The problem is that what they think as a waste of time might be something that’s really important for the company. If we have someone else with the right capabilities who feels that doing the job will help them get close to their goal and is motivated to take on the job, the obvious solution is to just let the other person do the work instead.

But in a situation where they are the only person in the whole company with the capabilities to do the work, or in a situation where every single person with the right capabilities doesn’t want to do the work, finding someone else to assign the work to is not an option. We’ll need to talk with them to set the expectations and align their goals with the company’s.

The talk should include discussions on:

• Why the work is important for the company
• Why we think they’re the right person for the job
• How working on it will benefit them in the pursuit of their goals

As a manager, what I’m going to do is assure them that I’m fully supporting them in their efforts to achieve their personal goals and I will stand for them. But in order for me to be able to do that, I need strong arguments to stand for their cause and defend them in front of the other managers in the company, and by doing the work they’re going to help me with that.

This only works if what we’re asking them to do is really important for either their personal development or the company, and we can make a strong argument for it when talking with them. If it’s some BS that will do neither themselves nor the company anything significant, making them do it against their will isn’t a good step to take.

Dealing with Unmotivated Personnel

If we have a team member who’s not motivated and doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with us in improving their performance and contributions to the company, we probably need to check if they have problems in their personal life or if they have problems with us or with the company.

If they have problems in their personal life, probably we need to understand that they’re currently in a tough situation and try to work with them to come up with a compromise that will enable them to keep contributing to the company while they’re dealing with the situation. After all, sometimes shit just happens in life. But we need to maintain the alignment of their goals and the company’s, and ensure that both parties are fulfilling their ends of the deal for their mutual benefit.

But there might be times when we couldn’t come up with a compromise that will allow them to both contribute to the company and deal with their personal circumstances. In this situation, we might need to part ways with them, since it might be better for them to find another company that can better accommodate their needs as we couldn’t come up with a setup that allows for both sides to benefit mutually.

If they have problems with us or with the company, probably we can ask if they’re willing to tell us about the problem from their point of view, then see if we can reconcile it. If it can’t be reconciled in a way that’s mutually beneficial for both sides, it might be better for both sides to part ways also.

Note that even when dealing with personnel who has lost the motivation to contribute, it is important to emphasize mutual benefit when exploring possible solutions to the situation. And especially if the person has personal issues with us or the company, try our best to avoid putting them in situations where they feel humiliated or unfairly treated because as a representative of the company we’d like to stay professional when dealing with the situation and as a person we’d like to avoid being an jerk.

Putting It All Together

Managing people involves keeping them motivated, making sure that they’re high-performing, and rewarding them fairly for their contributions. In my opinion, a good manager must see work as a transactional relation where every contribution from our team members must be rewarded with helping them to get closer to what they want to achieve in life.

From what I saw in the debate that led me to write this article, a lot of people who argued against work as a transactional relation consider the transactional nature as follows:

• Defined the transaction as strictly monetary, where people doing good work expect to be financially compensated immediately
• Defined the transactional nature as people doing the bare minimum as the default, where people will always need to be explicitly rewarded for any extra effort they put

So the term “transaction” is quite narrowly defined there. But in reality, work is always about give and take where what the person wants to give and what they want to take always depend on their internal reward system.

Suppose a case where a person is volunteering for a cause. When deciding to volunteer, the said person most likely isn’t expecting to gain monetary reward from it. But does that make it non-transactional? I’d say not really, as they still expect to gain something from doing the volunteer work, but whatever it is that they’re expecting to gain is most likely not something that needs to be explicitly given to them as a reward by the people whom they’re doing the work for.

When deciding to hire people for my team, their motivations and goals are among the most important factors for me to consider. Their motivations and goals tell me what I should provide for them as a return of what they will provide to the team, and whether it is within my power to provide such thing. If it’s not something I can reasonably provide, I usually decide not to hire the candidate because I can’t give them what they’re expecting from the transaction and it’s going to disappoint them.

So as a manager, I try to expand my knowledge and perspectives as much as possible in order to be able to come up with ways to return the favor to my team members that I can arrange for them, while also making sure all of the people working with me have something they can gain from me that will help them achieve their goals in the future. This is pretty hard to do, so I’d say being a manager has been a pretty stressful job for me so far. It’s been a few years since I started doing it, but whenever I have one-on-one sessions with my CTO, I still tell him on occasion that I might not be suited for this role.

Conclusion

Managing people is a human-centered activity, hence knowledge of their personalities and reward systems is crucial to perform the job right.

As rational beings, we’re all expecting something in return when we spend our time and energy doing something. What we expect can be money, mastery over skills, contribution to society, and so on. When we’re managing people, it’s important to know what they want out of the job.

The problem is that not everybody will tell us what they want to achieve in life and what their actual goals are. Sometimes it’s simply because they couldn’t trust us yet, but it’s possible that they still don’t realize what they want to achieve themselves. In this situation, it’s important to be able to read people based on the data points we’ve collected from working with them and getting to know them.

Hence, in one-on-one sessions, I also try to talk about things outside work with people I manage in order to know them better. By doing that, I can see if their goals and priorities have changed from what I previously understood and if I need to start doing things differently.

This makes the job of managing people a very complex one, which requires us to develop a totally different skillset from what we normally require as individual contributors in the tech industry.