The 85% Rule – How to Manage Effort and Motivation Levels to Optimise Performance in the Workplace

Finding the perfect harmony between motivation, effort and comfort is perhaps as important as it is ignored. Both within and outside of the workplace we are given the overarching message to work “as hard as possible” and to give “110%.” It’s no secret that working at maximum capacity all the time can lead to burnout, but is it even the most effective state of mind to be in to facilitate maximised performance and output? The 85% rule would suggest otherwise.

What is the 85% rule?

The 85% rule is a psychological concept that was conceived within the sport and fitness industry. It explores the idea that to operate at any higher than “85% effort” for a task will start to reach a point of diminishing returns in terms of quality, finesse and form. This phenomenon is applicable for learning, day-to-day work-life, relationships and sports. One of the first (and most famous) examples of this is 9-time Olympic gold medallist, Carl Lewis. He was seen as one of the greatest 100/200m finishers in world athletics and was a notorious slow-starter to every race. It became known that he was in fact only ever operating at 85% of his effort levels the whole time. Even for a sporting event that would appear to be all about high intensity and extreme effort, Carl Lewis yielded the best results consistently throughout his career by coming off the “gas pedal” to ensure a higher quality of precision, execution and form.

The lesson here is that room must be left for quality execution of tasks in order to achieve the best results. Within elite sports and competition, the 85% rule can be compared to what’s known as a flow state, defined by Headspace.com as “that sense of fluidity between your body and mind, where you are totally absorbed by and deeply focused on something, beyond the point of distraction. Time feels like it has slowed down. Your senses are heightened. You are at one with the task at hand, as action and awareness sync to create an effortless momentum. Some people describe this feeling as being “in the zone.” However, in the world of office working, there are more elements and considerations at play for achieving peak performance.

Using the 85% rule in the workplace

Stepping off the athletics track and into the office, how do we utilise the 85% rule to improve our output at work? Primarily it is simply to aim for 85% of our maximum all the time. Once we feel ourselves getting close to our maximum effort, likelihood of mistakes are increased, our ability to fully be engaged in our tasks is compromised, and with it our risk of burnout, heightened. A 2019 study by Robert C. Wilson et al (2019) looked at this phenomenon, but in a far more quantifiable way than ‘effort.’ In this study, they measured the ‘error rate’ for learning new tasks, and they found evidence supporting the 85% rule in a learning capacity, stating “In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and where learning progresses most quickly. […] For all of these stochastic gradient-descent based learning algorithms, we find that the optimal error rate for training is around 15.87% or, conversely, that the optimal training accuracy is about 85%.” In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and where learning progresses most quickly. Although this study only analyses the learning and development side of the 85% rule, it is still a key indicator of the importance of finding the ‘sweet-spot’ for maximum effectiveness.

Incorporating the 85% rule into your management style

The other question we have to look at is: as a manager, how do we use the 85% rule? We can approach this in 2 ways. Firstly, the ultimate objective of a manager is to get the best out of their team. There is an inescapable ‘bottom-line’ element to motivating your staff in that it must result in matrimony of high quality and high quantity output. Aside from the previously mentioned negative impact of over-working your workforce (may push them above that 85% sweet spot), you are also more likely to see members of your workforce suffer from burnout. Job burnout is defined by Maslach & Leiter (2006) as “A psychological syndrome that involves a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job.”

The 3 key dimensions of this burnout response are:

• Overwhelming exhaustion
• Feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job
• A sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment

Symptoms of burnout within a team will have a detrimental impact on both the productivity and the harmony of a workforce.

The second approach we can take to this as a manager is a more compassionate and human approach. Our employees’ health and wellbeing is extremely important, and managers have a moral obligation to ensure that our workforce is happy, and certainly not at risk of burnout and overworking. A University of Warwick study by Oswald, Proto & Sgroi (2015) found happier employees are 12% more productive, and that lower levels of happiness are systemically associated with lower productivity. We, at The Survey Initiative, recently released a blog on the effects of stress in the workplace [link] and the importance of managing it for a productive and harmonious work environment.

In conclusion…

By using the 85% rule as both a personal tool to achieve in the workplace, and as a management point when considering motivation levels within a team, we give ourselves opportunities to make improvements in longevity of productivity as well as quality and quantity of short-term output.