Kasey Harboe Guentert Author

All You Ever Wanted to Know about Herzberg's Hygiene Factors

If hygiene factors are poor → people become dissatisfied.

If they are good → people feel neutral, not motivated.

When I first read about Hygiene theory, I thought, this theory is so obvious that there is no point in bothering with all the research studies to prove it. But after doing my own reflection, I realized how much it could be impacting my own ability to be productive. 

Also, given that Herzberg mostly studied accountants and engineers in the US, this theory applies to you mostly if you live and work in a cushy western-first-world job. 

Finally, as I go through these hygiene factors, keep in mind that for them to interfere with Spark, they have to actively bother you. We all have different tolerances for certain conditions, so something that is a hygiene factor for you may not be the same for someone else, and vice-versa.

Compensation: Are you Paid Enough? 

Do any of these four conditions apply and also specifically bother you? (it doesn’t account if these conditions apply, but they don’t actually bother you). When would monetary compensation not bother someone? I have a friend who made enough money for retirement by the age of 60. To keep herself engaged in the community, she got a part time job in a local winery serving customers. She does not make enough money to survive in the town she lives in, but this is not an issue since she already has enough money saved for retirement. Also, if you have a partner who makes enough money for the family to live, and you choose to work in a job that pays less or as a volunteer, then the lack of compensation would not be a factor. On the other hand, you may be a hyper-competitive or just plain arrogant employee and constantly feels that they should be paid more. If most people wouldn’t be bothered by something, it doesn’t necessarily count as creating an unhygienic environment.

Compensation: monetary value is not hygienic

Your compensation with full time work is not enough to pay your living expenses (including those you care for, such as your children). A job is basically "unhygienic" if you can’t live off the pay after 40 hours per week. 

Compensation: Salary Policies are not equitable

You are aware that someone else is making more than you in the same job (even if the job does not have the same title). I was an intern at a large energy company. My two intern colleagues came from the computer science masters program at the local university, and I came from the IO Psychology Ph.D. program. I was in my third year, they were all three in their second year. They each made 18$ per hour while I made 16$ per hour. I was happy with my 16$ per hour, until I discovered through a casual conversation that their hourly rate was two dollars higher. As a result of knowing this, my job became unhygienic. I spoke to the managers for the program and they quickly fixed the problem and also included back pay for the last two months. In another example, imagine you are a software engineer making $350,000 per year in San Jose, which is a pretty decent salary. Like me, you’d be happy with your salary…until you find out that a guy you work with does exactly the same job but makes $400,000 per year due to having negotiated more restricted stock options at a higher selling price. 

Other examples are when new employees are hired in a stronger economy and make more than you simply based on the fact that they got hired in a better employee market. 

Some people feel that the the overall compensation does not account fairly for the volume or the type of work that they do. For example, customer facing staff are more dissatisfied with their compensation when they deal with rude or difficult customers.

Or, you know that the market value of your job outside the company is higher than what you’re actually making. You have been in a job for long enough to realize that the salary has changed, but your company has not updated pay policies.

Since the salary policy is off, then you might still lack the Spark.

As a summary, pretty much anytime that you feel the pay is not high enough, for any reason, then your job is missing hygiene on the compensation area.

Structural Issues: Late or Missing Paychecks

Do you work for a start up, a small family-owned business, for commission, or client-pay? In that case, if you can’t regularly count on getting paid due to factors out of your control, then the inconsistency could cause a serious issue with your Spark. When I was looking for summer jobs during college, I worked in a telemarketing office. This job may not exist anymore due to replacement with artificial intelligence. My job was to call random people from a list of numbers and try to get them to sign up for a service. I only got paid when I signed someone up. The only way to get better at the job was to call more and more people until you got that one person who agreed to the service. I didn’t last more than two days.

If you live in an expensive urban area, like I do, then the Compensation factor may be an issue due to cost of living, but it’s not necessarily the fault of your employer. Wages are driven by a complicated formula that involves legal minimum wage and benchmarking based on how the same type of work is paid to others doing the same job. I work closely with experts in compensation, and what I’ve learned is that benchmarking against other similar jobs is the main factor. More than location, which can cause issues for people trying to make a living in expensive areas.

Security

You may be in an interesting job that pays well, but keep having this nagging feeling that you may not have a job. Any day now, the whole thing could collapse and you’ll be walking out with your stuff in a box. Most (list %) of people who’ve been in the workforce over 10 years have experienced a job loss unrelated to their own performance.

Do you feel like you have an uncertain future at your company? If you’re missing a sense of permanence or guarantee (at least a little bit of a guarantee) of long term employment, that means your job is less secure. The lack of guarantee may be a result of market or economic volatility, your fear of your own inability to do the job, emerging technology (hello, AI!) or the company frequently restructuring and removing jobs. In all of those situations, it’s not possible to have Spark.

Did you know that the only HR intervention truly proven to benefit shareholders financially is downsizing? I went deep into research on this topic a short time ago, the optimistic part of me hoping that perhaps something really happy (like leadership development!) that I and my HR clients do for their companies could result in hard, clean profits. Even when I look at analysts reports on stock recommendations, the viability of the leadership team has less to do with the quality of the CEO than the corporate governance or structure. Not to say that analysts completely ignore it, but the reality is that unless something goes terribly wrong with leadership (like a collapse or failure, think of Boeing), then other factors matter more. Since shareholder value is ultimately most linked to the difference in holdings versus spendings, the most profitable thing that HR can do in a short-term turnaround is remove costs, and people are expensive for a company. Longer term, however, shareholders don’t look well upon this strategy and prefer selective hiring and caution when building up teams. 

In my opinion, workers are completely tired and exhausted by restructuring. I can show you hundreds of articles that talk about impact of layoffs on laid off workers and the survivors, which include guilt, lack of engagement, low morale, and low commitment to the organization. When employees are aware of pending layoffs, they protect their job security by attempting to find other jobs. 

I imagine that Herzberg would look at frequency of layoffs enacted across the economy, and in spite of what appears to be a thriving economy in 2026, and say that the need for Security is not being adequately met in today’s professional workforce. If workers feel that they are even 20% likely to be laid off at any given time, and that their performance is not a cause or factor (at least not transparently), the feeling of helplessness and insecurity could be overwhelming.

With basic security, it is analogous to being unsafe. In the hierarchy of needs, right after having food, safety is the next level requirement. If you don’t have safety, you can’t even begin to thrive. It’s kind of like living in a war zone and not being able to sleep well at night or live any normal life because you could be bombed at any time. People in that situation do anything they can to leave the war zone. They leave all their belongings behind, they go wherever they can to get away. Those who don’t leave become like zombies, just shutting off their psychological impact as much as they can while they wait it out, perhaps they have invested too much in their country or their home.

Status

Although your rank and job title are part of status, in the case of hygiene theory, it’s about all the parts of your job that give you that feeling of: “I am important to this company”, or “The work I do is valuable”. Every single one of us needs to know that we’re meaningful and doing something somewhat meaningful to be motivated in our job. Here are some examples.

Status: Title and Level. If it’s important to you that your title and level matches your value or worth, and it’s not aligned, then a hygiene factor is missing. For example, if you have responsibility for managing important work in the company, but your title doesn’t show the right level of responsibility, this could cause erosion of your sense of status. 

Status: Inclusion and Communication: You have access to important information and are in the know on important things

Status: Important or meaningful work. Again, if it’s something that you notice and find important, do you have responsibility for work that has an impact on the company and the clients? You’re not just doing busy-work or menial tasks, but being challenged to solve the right level of problems and contribute in a way you feel is meaningful. For me, this has always been a big one. I tend to get my work done quickly, so I’ve been in jobs where I needed more to do. My bosses would scramble to come up with something to keep me busy, and sometimes it was as simple as folding boxes of pizza when I worked at Pizza Hut, or endlessly dusting china when I worked at a fancy gift shop. I would have rather that they gave me something more exciting to do, like evaluating which coupons to offer for next week or re-arranging a display place setting. The equivalent of folding pizza boxes in my current consulting firm is documenting the results of job analyses in very lengthy, structured reports. They need to be done, but it’s always the last resort for consultants in need of billable hours. In another company, when they went through a downsizing initiative, a woman with a job title that had the word “restructure” in the title was not included in planning and organizing the restructure decisions. She quit her role within a year for being left out of the process.

Working Conditions 

When you have to work in an environment that is either unsafe or causes hazards to your health, then your environment lacks hygiene in this area. I don’t typically count general stress from performance anxiety in this category, however, since that may be related to your level of stress and not be a global condition that impacts everyone. If any of these apply and they bother you, then you will struggle to find Spark.

1. Hazardous physical environments. Do you work in a facility with high injury rates, heat exposure, or insufficient break policies? I dug up some research and found that to 2.4 cases per 100 full-time workers is a typical injury rate for 2023 (https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/work/industry-incidence-rates/work-related-incident-rate-trends/#:~:text=Three%20of%20the%20five%20private,went%20into%20effect%20in%20200) Interestingly, respiratory illness is a significant factor in these statistics. If you feel like your environment does not protect your health, when it is possible to do so, then a hygiene factors is missing from your work. 

2. Excessive workload and extreme hours. Have you heard of the 9-9-6? In China (it’s actually not just in China) some firms were quietly enforcing a schedule of working from 9am to 9pm, six days per week in professional jobs. This is considered extreme because (likely, this is pretty obvious to you) it doesn’t allow someone to have a life outside of work. To me, and I think Herzberg would agree with me, that seems like a company shooting themself in the foot through excessive burnout. If your employees are valuable, why take away the conditions under which they can actually find their motivation? Here in the US, I’ve seen organizations use subtle ways to enforce the 9-9-6. Although it seems like a good thing, serving dinner and not allowing “to-go” containers at an office is one way to pressure employees to stay past 5 or 6pm. Setting up meetings that start early in the morning or late at night is another way. Working for a California-based tech firm, I know that in Bangalore, India, software engineers are supposed to work from 11 or 12 to 9 instead of starting at 8 and working through the evening hours to accommodate the Silicon Valley time zones. Yet, in many instances, I observed them working early morning hours to accommodate meetings taking place later in the US time zone to avoid being left out. Being forced to choose between having input versus sleeping creates a lack of hygiene in the work environment. 

Maybe you can’t predict what your schedule is going to be. This happens a lot when you work “gig” jobs and hourly jobs. If you can’t count of a regular work schedule, and that interferes with your life outside of work and your sense of structure in life, it’s considered an interference to your motivation.

What if your workplace is chronically understaffed? In order to get the job done, healthcare workers or shift workers are forced to pick up extra shifts to cover for people. It may be paid well, but it’s not sustainable over time, and again creates a loss of the condition you need to thrive. Another culprit is travel. If you absolutely must be onsite to do your job in a bunch of different locations, then you’re increasing your work time by a lot of hours either in the car or on a plane. If those additional hours cut into your non-work life and bother you, it’s going to erode your ability to be motivated.

A note about return to office policies. I know that many workers were able to productively complete the requirements of their jobs from home during the pandemic. Some companies promised to allow employees to work in any location and many employees moved as a result. However, in the last few years, companies have been calling many employees back to the office, in some cases reversing a policy that caused someone to move to a new location. Here in the San Francisco Bay, many people I know moved to Texas, Arizona, or other states with lower taxes and cheaper housing during the pandemic. Some moved to suburbs an hour away from the city. Does it create a lack of hygiene in the work environment if the company now requires you to show up in the office three days per week, even if the office is a two hour drive each way? You will need to decide how much this factor interferes with your own ability to be motivated and productive. I know some people who don’t mind sitting in traffic while taking phone calls or listening to podcasts, but I also know others who find it pure torture and are unable to be productive during that time. 

3. Infrastructure issues. Do you have to use outdated, broken, or inconsistent equipment or technology in your job? This could range from not getting needed laptop upgrades, not having access to the right software, or having bad internet connectivity. One of my firms used this awful, outdated expense report and time keeping system that meant it took me up to two hours to get an expense report done rather than twenty minutes. Luckily, I didn’t have to do them enough to have it bother me, but if all our tools functioned that badly, it would be a real issue. Another infrastructure issue is about having a comfortable place to work. Is it quiet when you need it to be quiet? Is it warm or cool enough in your facility? Can you see what you’re doing? Do you show up to a mandatory day in the office three days each week to find that all the conference rooms are booked and you have to hold confidential meetings in a loud, crowded hallway somewhere where you could eek out a chair in a corner? If that’s a regular thing in your job, you’re not going to be able to find your Spark. Another version of this is Administrative dysfunction. Does lack of role clarity, changes across the organization or changes in structure leave you not knowing how to actually do your job? Or are there excessive processes in place where you are blocked from doing your work? If that is the case, it means that you sincerely are willing to follow process, procedures, and guidelines, but even doing so does not result in making progress, even on simple work tasks.

Company Policies

When you work in a company and feel bothered by how they handle systematic, company-wide decisions, then the Company Policies lack hygiene. Do any of these apply to you?

1. The talent systems are nonexistent or inconsistent. Someone just got let go for “low performance”, but it’s not clear to anyone else, including them, what went wrong. Likely, the decision was a result of retaliation for a small infraction or a blow to someone else’s ego. It could also be a result of laziness; the organization had to make cuts for financial reasons, and looked down a list of folks to lay off based on how much money they could save in salary costs. Alternatively, performance evaluations are based on random or little data-driven criteria, so nobody has any clue how to improve or how they did. This can apply to any kind of company rules, systems, or procedures. In one company I worked with, they were inventing important policies on the fly as the issues came up. The policy team would be alerted of a safety issue on their consumer platform, and quickly write up a policy to cover it. Then, they would find out that the new policy contradicted a previous policy. Instead of gathering together and figuring out a central mission and philosophy to guide all policies, they kept trying to patch up the leaks little by little. The customers were aggravated, confused, and lashed out at the front line representatives, who were told to simply follow the policies which made no sense in each new situation. We worked together to craft a set of guidelines which customer facing employees could use to guide their own decisions for each unique situation, thereby challenging them to solve problems independently with clear philsoophies and guidelines. It wasn’t perfect, and they didnt’ always come to exact same conclusion, but they could always point to a clear principle that guided them. If this situation regularly occurs for you, then you are at risk of unhygienic environment.

2. Your company’s main business or mission is something you consider unethical. 

Here’s where your own sense of personal business ethics strongly applies. Not everyone is bothered by the same things. To each his own violation of what is an ethical and not ethical business, right? Do you remember the satirical movie from 2005 “Thank you for Smoking”, where three lobbyists comfortably represent the tobacco, gun, and alcohol industries? In the case of the movie, the three lobbyists bonded over their lack of concern for the products they represented. For them, the company’s product or mission would not fall under the hygiene violation. I consulted to a tobacco company ages ago and found the culture to be welcoming, positive, and inspired. Snack food and sugary drinks that happen to be addictive and cause diabetes in children? Also, a highly mission-driven corporate environment focused on how to create more opportunities for fun in life. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but to me, the cultures and the mission between the tobacco and snack foods were quite similar. Their presentation of the products at the time didn’t bother me, nor did they bother the employees, so it wasn’t a violation of hygiene. I’ve worked for slaughterhouses, mining companies (energy and minerals), pharma companies, and fast-fashion. Being a consultant means that my beliefs about humane treatment of animals, ecological considerations, abuse of third world resources and land, and sweat-shops have to be put in context of the bigger picture mission of my work; which is to create a better workplace for everyone. Practically speaking, working for a multi-national organization as a management consultant is pretty much impossible if you want to hold everyone accountable to every single variety and flavor of good ethical practices. Maybe you think Nike, Apple or some shoe company that donates a shoe for every shoe sold is better because they do a better job of marketing how ethical they are, but you’d be disappointed to learn that actually controlling and enforcing US ethical values across the large platform and supply chain of work that happens to bring all these products back to us is incredibly difficult. I applaud leaders who try, though. I want all of them to keep trying, and I appreciate an organization that puts Ethical Business Practice and Innovation as a top leadership competency.   

Instead, I’ve focused my energy on the fact that they care enough to hire HR consultants that ensure they create a positive people-environment. They train leaders to reflect on ways they can inspire and motivate a productive and happy team of employees, as well as be future-oriented and slowly move the needle on better environmental, inclusive, or humane practices. One of my favorite conversations during a job analysis back in the early 2000’s was when a supervisor in a large meat production facility shed tears when he talked about pulling bullet holes from hogs brought for processing. I had to ask him the dumb question of why there were bullet holes in hogs. Because, he explained to me, random people driving around the farming towns got bored on Saturday nights and shot at them for fun. This abuse was so distressing to him that he had created a program for local communities to educate and prosecute animal cruelty. He was an active member in associations dedicated to the humane and painless slaughter of farm animals. Does this appease PETA and the vegetarians of the world? No, it’s not perfect. Of course it’s preferable that we let hogs run wild and live a free life. But in the constraints of today’s society, I felt proud to be associated with one company that was doing its part to make things better.

Okay, so I’ve wrestled with my own corporate ethics demons over the years. What are yours? Here is an opportunity to write down the things you find unethical, and then consider if your company is violating them. Although it’s not ideal, some people realize what their ethics standards are only after seeing it happen at their company. That counts too, but it’s more powerful if you had that ethical belief to start with and then observed your company doing it.

Before you think I’m just like those lobbyists in the Thank You for Smoking film, I’ll share that I do have a pretty long list of ethical violations that would erode my sense of motivation. I’ve declined job and consulting offers when they are violated. But that’s not the main point of this book, so if you’re curious to learn more, check out my website and I’ll send you some useful research on corporate ethics. 

Supervision quality

To be minimally productive, a company environment requires some level of decent leadership. Minimally decent leaders provide feedback and coaching, help their team members progress, differentiate objectively between high and low performers in their decisions. 

Disrespectful or toxic supervisory behavior 

The top reason people leave jobs, based on exit interviews, is poor management. Why have we made such great careers out of leadership coaching and development? It’s lucrative because there are so many leaders in need of help! Micromanagement is one of the top complaints we hear about in management consulting. I see a violation of giving employees free space to do their jobs on every other 360 feedback report. If you’re working for someone who does not let you make decisions or even suggest solutions, you’re probably being stifled in your job and will find it tough to progress and thrive. There are a thousand ways a manager can be generally toxic and create an unsustainable work environment. They can belittle you, ignore you, be too-involved, be incompetent, or retaliatory and petty. If any of these apply, you definitely have a hygiene situation happening.

Absent leaders

I worked on a project team for a woman who simply never gave anyone a sense of direction. In her head, (at least I think), she had some sense of what she wanted to do and how to manage the client, but she never got to the point of explaining this out loud to others. I then figured out this trick to getting her tell us what to do. I would have to make a suggestion, and then she would disagree with my suggestion, and tell us what we should do instead. It wasn’t necessarily great for my self esteem, but it was the only way I could get her to come out and say what she needed. Having a leader who does not take the time to lay out a plan for others to follow and clear instructions on what to do is lack of hygiene. That’s why one of my clients has two entire competencies dedicated to these ideas on their leadership model; Clarity (being able to clearly present the plan to people) and Execution (having a clear plan that connects back to a firm organizational strategy). I love both of these competencies and both are ones that a lot of leaders do badly. The good news is that they can often improve on them through self awareness, motivation, and coaching. The sad part is that if you work for someone with that problem, you’re likely not the one who will help them improve.  

interpersonal relations

Maybe your manager is okay, but what if you work with a bunch of jerks? I don’t want to pick on anyone here, but for some reason whenever I review 360 feedback reports from Supply Chain  and Legal teams I have to brace myself, because they literally always are a full point lower on the 1-5 scale compared to all the other company teams. There is something really rough about these folks, and the environment that they create appear to be quite a bit more punitive, intensely competitive, or less collegial. If I’m wrong, and you work for with the kindest, most fun group of Supply Chain people, please write to me and tell me all about them, because then I’ll go ahead and change this paragraph in my next version. With all of these hygiene factors, this is one where you have to determine what your own personal threshold is for  the peers and general interpersonal culture. I once coached a leader in a financial firm who wanted to be left alone to just do his job. He didn’t want to attend company events, he didn’t want to have social lunches, and didn’t want to put any investment into his relationships at work. He wanted to keep his work and social life entirely separate. For him, the ideal environment meant that he did not have any social activity at work. His ability to be motivated was in constant threat from the pushy social culture in the organization he worked in. For most of us, though, we do want to have a few friends at work and opportunities to build bonds outside of just getting work done. How much does the relationship culture in your work match what is ideal for you? Do people care about you personally? Do they express gratitude when you help out with things at work? Is it interesting to talk to them in those few minutes of chit chat before the meeting starts? Needing that, and not having it, is critical for hygiene.