Avoid the Dangers of WIIFM

Avoid the Dangers of  WIIFM

Virtually unheard of ten years ago, WIIFM – the acronym for What’s In It For Me – has become a surprisingly popular term in business. Originally coined to focus marketing efforts on customer needs, it has become a key concept in change management and HR. Here, however, it is a double-edged sword and needs to be invoked with care.

On the positive side, WIIFM recognises the individual and looks to address personal needs and expectations. A shift away from traditional command and control thinking, with its philosophy that the employee is simply a resource required to do what they are told, this is clearly progress.  

Unfortunately, it also has three inherent dangers that are not widely recognised.

  1. WIIFM fails to recognise “The Human Paradox.” It only addresses the “selfish” drivers taking no account whatsoever of the “selfless,” or altruistic, drivers stemming from a sense of belonging and/or a common purpose; the things that give us the most satisfaction.
  2. A tendency to consider WIIFM as a means to motivate. This, more often than not, leads down the traditional path of looking at extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, motivators. In turn this, almost inevitably, results in focusing on incentives, which invariably end up as financial incentives or initiatives to improve working conditions. While these may work initially, they ultimately act as little more than a bribe and, as you well know, have very little long-term effect.
  3. Despite its name, WIIFM is all too often a universal approach that fails to address the individual’s needs. This is almost unavoidable and is simply the result of the macro-management of employees and hence the abstraction that I described previously.

Even without recognising these, WIIFM is, at best, only a partial solution. While it appears to address the individual’s interests, the intention (and certainly the perceived intention) behind it remains either or both to:

  • Get the person to do what you want/need them to do;
  • Improve productivity.

Thus the “me” is always coloured by what is best for you or the organisation. Consequently it isn’t quite the shift away from the traditional approach that it first seems. Until it achieves that it will never deliver the full benefits that you expect.

True WIIFM actually needs to go much deeper. It lies in recognising that the individual is actually investing their life, or a significant portion of it, in your organisation. When you recognise this you move beyond seeing people as resources “filling a role” and you lay the foundation for a reciprocal perception of a role as more than a “job.” You are now both working from a standpoint of career development; something that creates a more effective, mutually beneficial partnership.

Only when you achieve this will you be able to avoid the incipient dangers of current WIIFM approaches and begin to meet the intrinsic motivators of each and every employee. You will create a greater sense of belonging and common purpose that will also help you to address the currently missing ‘selfless’ motivators. And you can further strengthen this with my ‘Every Individual Matters Model’ which specifically addresses the ‘selfless’ drivers and provides a catalyst for achieving something way beyond what current WIIFM efforts offer. 

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Comments

  • Great blog Bay. I like your point that the 'me' in WIIFM is coloured by what the organisation wants rather than the individual.
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