Having Skin In The Game

This article is from a publication called BedTimes. That title piqued my curiousity as the article was about employee engagement. It transpired that BedTimes was a publication for the sleep products industry. I don’t know what else I thought it might be. And it was a very good article from an employer’s perspective, not a writer, journalist or expert, consultant, or commentator. Someone, as they say, with skin in the game. And that was kind of their point.

The phrase “skin in the game” has been attributed to Warren Buffett about having your own money in an investment, as opposed to just talking about it or investing for others. (It wasn’t Jimmy Buffett unless you count poker games as investments.) I’d kind of hoped it traced back to roman times and gladiators because then it would have something of a literal bent. But no. From an employee engagement perspective, it makes sense. People who actually own a company tend to work, as they say, like they own the company. It’s easy to offer glib advice to people wanting to work their way up corporate ladders to work like they own they company. I actually agree with the advice but it’s often just easy to say. You cannot make others feel like they have a genuine stake. But employers can set things up so that employees do have a genuine alignment between their own goals and that of the company. But it’s foundation stuff, not some ‘plaster over the cracks’ 2-month project.

For a start, Brain-Based Bosses can structure their recruitment processes to seek, hire and retain people who already have goals that align with the company’s. If the company succeeds, then they do. Part of that might be financial but not in isolation. There needs to be more. That’s a whole lot easier than changing people or changing goals or making other people change goals midstream. Those ways lead to a lot of pretending. And, you know, sometimes even that pretending leads to a short term uptick in engagement. ‘Fake it til you make it’ kind of thing. But it isn’t sustainable nor that much of an uptick.

I particularly liked this paragraph in the article about why, in many or most cases, such employee engagement improvement efforts do not work:

“Frankly, it’s because in many cases employees really don’t have a stake. Too many companies try to paste “engagement” initiatives on a foundation that’s fundamentally flawed. It won’t work. True engagement is a natural, organic extension of a company’s culture, and people can’t be cajoled, tricked or bribed into feeling it. There just aren’t any shortcuts.”

New Zealand’s gambling agency the TAB have a slogan, “It means more when you’ve got something on it.” That’s their version of having skin in the game. You can watch a sporting event and appreciate it. You can watch it and might even experience some vicarious emotions if you support the team that’s playing from your country, town, school or one you unilaterally and arbitrarily have chosen because you find their colours, mascot or swarthy south american star player aesthetically appealing. But nothing is quite like the effect on your biochemistry when the team’s loss causes you to lose something too. It might be the money you wagered. It might be you lose face at the pub or workplace the next day. But you lose or win something depending on the results.

It can’t just be the potential loss of a job or bonus if things go south. There needs to be potential wins too. Don’t underestimate the value of pride. When your employees are at parties (in their own time, of course) and others ask them what they do or where they work, what do they say? That’s actually quite a good indicator of pride and engagement, or the lack thereof.

How many employees feel that way about their workplace? Do yours? Does Jimmy Buffet? Of course, his lack of feeling might be due to other causes entirely…

'Stay' Interviews

Every employer does job interviews when seeking new people. Many employers do exit interviews when wondering why people leave. I like this idea of ‘Stay’ Interviews – interviewing people who are already working with you before they leave and on a regular basis. Why not find out as close to the current truth amongst your workforce as you can while there’s still time to do something with the information?
Personally, this is what a regular performance one-on-one chat should be anyway and coming up with a catchy and clever new name for it doesn’t make it different or separate. (Although , I really wish I’d come up with it!)

If it’s true that half your employees are actively seeking employment elsewhere at any given time, how focused on, or interested in, their outcomes for you are they really going to be? The metaphor here is keeping your finger on the pulse of the people in your business. As this article says, “Research by Towers Watson (2012) suggests organizations with high sustainable engagement have operating margins three times those of organizations with a disengaged workforce.”

A news item today laments that New Zealand mothers being visited by the free post natal support service Plunkett are highly prone to lying about what they do with their babies for fear of being judged by the visiting nurses. However counter-productive that attitude is, it is a very human one and quite predictable and understandable. So, would ‘Stay’ interviews be prone to the same problem of employees simply saying what they think bosses want to hear? The article I linked to above is sadly lacking on details about ‘Stay’ interviews and focuses mainly on surveys. There is way too much emphasis on surveys generally.

‘Stay’ interviews and engagement surveys aside, the best way to assess engagement levels is simple observation. Are people doing more than they have to because they choose to? Don’t worry about why they are (yet) but are they? If they are, they’re engaged. They can say what they like in a survey but there’s no hiding actual observed behaviour. Just be aware of surveys – Snow White did one once and discovered that six out of seven dwarves weren’t happy…

Congratulations On Your Engagement

Today’s business section in the Herald runs my latest column on employee engagement.

Q: I want to be a great leader. What’s this thing called “employee engagement” I’ve been hearing about? Is it just consultants coming up with some new term to sell me their services, or what? I’m hoping it’s real. Economic times are tough. I need something to get more out of the team I lead. – Bewildered of Birkenhead

A: Dear Bewildered of Birkenhead,

The phrase “employee engagement” might be new and it certainly is flavour of the month in leadership literature, but the underlying concept is true and timeless human nature.
Employee engagement is not “morale” or “satisfaction” or “happiness”. Plenty of unhappy people are highly productive and plenty of deliriously happy folk are fine with showing up, punching a clock, getting paid and going home regardless of whether anything productive happens. Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee chooses to apply discretionary effort. It’s doing more than you have to because you choose to.
So, there are engaged employees doing more than they have to, present employees who do only what they have to, and disengaged employees who are reading this careers section at work to find a new job with anyone who isn’t you.

The numbers vary a little across time, industry and geography, but they’re remarkably consistent: 26 per cent are engaged, 28 per cent are disengaged and 46 per cent are present.

These are averages. What are the proportions in your workplace?

Click here for more…

Feedback: What Happens In Vagueness Stays In Vagueness

Here’s a blog post about the dangers of non-specific feedback. The blogger references the work of psychologist Carol Dweck who I also quote in my book ‘The Brain-Based Boss’ on the subject of fixed versus growth mindsets. Here’s an excerpt:

The work of psychologist Carol Dweck is germane here. What she’s found is that, when children are praised in abstract–”You’re so smart” or “You’re so creative”–rather than concretely about how they improved their performance–”You put in an enormous amount of work, and it paid off”–the feedback is diminished. How come? Because the child takes from the teacher or parent the idea that she is innately smart or creative, and that she doesn’t need to work at it–so she doesn’t.

On the other hand, very specific feedback–especially about something an individual can control–can work wonders.

Quite rightly, the blogger points out that general statements such as ‘Good job’ might make you feel better and make you think that you’re dishing out some positive feedback but it needs to be more than merely positive to be useful and conducive to enhanced productivity. That phrase would need to:

• be said at the time the specific action warranting praise occurred or as immediately afterwards as possible.
• be said to the specific individual performing and controlling the praiseworthy action that you’d like to see more of.
• contain a few more details and expectations than 2 words of generality (what exactly was the bit that was good?)
• some connection to a greater goal, the wider team or higher purpose.

So, here’s some specific feedback to several new Twitter followers I’ve gotten recently – If you’ve only got 17 Twitter followers yourself, best not describe yourself as a ‘social media guru.’

Employees React Negatively When Prompted to Think About Money

Here are some studies that show that reminders about money led consumers to react against people who would normally influence their decisions.

For all the talk and research about the extent to which money motivates people, I”m certain its very important. My personal stance is that people get a job for money but, unless they have a routine, linear and unthinking job, money doesn’t motivate them to do any more or better work. Money gets people to show up and it’s a control mechanism. Calling the carrot or stick of money a motivator is giving it too much credit. And if there’s one thing money doesn’t like, it’s credit.

Christmas The Season For Layoffs? Ho Ho No!

Let’s compare and contrast two recent New Zealand newspaper articles about bosses. (Do they still call them ‘newspapers’? Other than crumpling them up to pack into boxes of crockery when shifting house, I haven’t touched news in paper form for years.)

They’re both good articles. One notices that a disproportionate number of redundancies occur nearing the end of the calendar year. This might possibly be due to planning schedules and so forth but it also has the double-whammy effect of being at the same time some tribalistic ritual and consumer frenzy called Christmas occurs. Have a read. It’s position is probably that New Zealand employers are not that much concerned about employee engagement or being tarred with a Grinchiness brush.

Contrasting that is this article from a competing newspaper. It says that gone are the days of splashing talented employees with status trinkets and disposable goods and experiences and they’re being gradually replaced with things of meaning to nurture a culture that talent will want to belong to and stick around with. It does lament that New Zealand is a bit behind but the trend is positive.

The only criticism of the 2nd article is my usual one – they have all the right research but make a sloppy observation that employee engagement equals happiness. It doesn’t. Engagement is the choice to apply discretionary effort. Happiness is just nice.

My Christmas shopping this year is easy. Everyone’s getting my new book ‘The Brain-Based Boss’. I have yet to to hear how my teenage kids feel about that. Luckily I”m not relying on them for reviews…

Well Well Wellness - Employee Engagement Is Healthy

 

Smart employers provide a wellness-supportive work environment and try to nudge their employees into healthier lifestyle choices. They’re not being nice, they’re being smart.

I used to work in local Government. When I started, there was a ‘Rubbish’ department. It became ‘Refuse and Recycling.’ Last I heard, it had become ‘Waste Minimisation.’ These aren’t just superficial labels, they represent a shift in thinking. A similar shift has occurred when it comes to wellness at work. It’s gone from ambulances at the bottom of cliffs (sometimes literally) to prevention and a broadening of scope from the merely physical and work-related.

I’ve worked with organisations that offer subsidised gym memberships, 10,000 Step programmes and reward-point-scoring health insurance schemes. In-house Occupational Therapists teach posture and micro-pausing to the masses, ergonomic furniture is installed while Sven the masseuse takes your shoulder massage booking. I actually saw one company intranet’s homepage announcing the boss was paying for a diet specialist to come in and speak, although this was right next to an advert for the social club’s fish ‘n’ chip evening. I love those situations, like my local supermarket which had a sale bin of toothpaste right next to a sale bin of chocolate bars – 5-for-$4! An aisle of value but also an aisle of irony.

My point here is that even if you’re not an employer that doles out massages and gym memberships, your workplace has a tremendous capacity to affect your people’s physical and mental health one way or the other. That some employers make efforts to bolster worker wellness isn’t altruistic. They reap the benefits of attendance, attitude, engagement, productivity and more. A study published in the U.S. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that for every dollar a worker’s illness cost, the average impact on their employer’s productivity was $2.30. So, for example, preventing staff illnesses causing $10,000 of medical costs could enhance your bottom line by $23,000.

I read a book last Christmas called ‘The Blue Zone. Lessons for living longer from those who’ve lived the longest’ by Dan Buettner. He and his team have studied the four little pockets of humanity where they have a ridiculously long length and quality of life. (None are in New Zealand. They’re in Sardinia, Costa Rica, Japan and California.) There’s a quick online quiz, after which it tells you how long they reckon you’ll live if you keep going the way you’re going and how long you could live if you take their advice. Take the test but do it with friends. (Ironically, doing it with friends is part of their advice.)

I need to get a pet and at least one more friend at ‘organ-donor’ level. Otherwise, I’m pretty sweet. You might be pleasantly surprised at their alcohol and exercise advice. Having a reason to live is important and, for some, work can provide that. Friendship is generally good for your health but there are different levels of friend. I think we all know that. We might not have it written down but we have a ‘friend matrix’ somewhere. When you’re a kid, you need a friend with an X-Box. When you leave home, you need a friend with a van to help you move. When you’re my age, you need a friend with a spare (functional) kidney.
I'm doing a show in the 2013 New Zealand International Comedy Festival. I'm not too sure if any / many of my 'Brain-Based Boss' readers know that I also  perform stand-up comedy? Anyways, my show is based around this book 'The Blue Zones' and is all about health. They do say laughter is the best medicine. My show is called 'The Grin Reaper.'

In 2007, Gallup research found that “having a best friend at work” increased the likelihood of someone being engaged at work by 700%. Sarah Burgard from the University of Michigan has shown that job insecurity (fear) causes more illness than actually losing a job. Disconnected employees are more likely to get sick and more likely to miss work. A study by the Confederation of British Industry estimated that fifteen percent of illness days taken were not due to actual illnesses.

A recent episode of TV’s ‘The Biggest Loser’ was filmed in New Zealand. I presume New Zealand paid for this because it seemed that the phrase, “In New Zealand” had to be said at least every ninety seconds. “I’m eating an apple IN NEW ZEALAND.” “I never thought I’d be doing push-ups IN NEW ZEALAND.”
There is a lot of time on screen of exercise, dieting and dramatic weigh-ins which probably makes for good TV but is unlikely to lead to ongoing long-term wellness-supportive lifestyle changes. What does help are social proof, goals, regular non-judgemental behaviour-based feedback and a sense of purpose. Not surprisingly (hopefully), these things are also powerful drivers of workplace behaviours that support not only wellness but productivity and profitability.

An obese person sat next to me on the plane recently. Despite he and I both paying for one seat, he was taking up a good third of my space. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me IN NEW ZEALAND.

Employee Engagement Is Not Happiness

It is not your responsibility to make your employees happy.

This blog post from Ed Muzio talks of a trap for employers when it comes to employee engagement. He had me worried for a while with his talk of happiness, as if employee engagement and employee happiness were interchangeable terms. But then he got on track (by which I mean, he stated a line of thinking with which I agree) and his key point was that the trap employers fall into is thinking that employee engagement is their responsibility to generate and maintain.

Let’s leave the whole ‘happiness’ thing out of it. Engagement is not happiness. Radiantly joyful workers can be costly and unproductive. They can be efficient and productive. Dour workers can be either-or too. Engagement does not equal happiness. Engagement is the choice by employees to apply discretionary effort. They choose to do more than they HAVE TO. Why? Less to d with happiness than it is with the fundamental human needs for mastery, autonomy and purpose. I love Dan Pink’s book ‘Drive’ on this.

But I like the blogger’s key point. It isn’t the employer’s responsibility. You, me or anyone else cannot truly motivate anyone else. Genuine, long-term behaviour-changing motivation must be internal. I suppose you can put a gun to someone’s head or threaten their children and that will ‘motivate’ them to do what you want. Yup. Effective – in the short-term – but relationship-damaging and expensive, plus you and your gun would always have to be around. The same goes for any so-called incentifying carrots and sticks. The best an employer can do (and should do) is create and maintain an engagement-supportive workplace. THAT’S the responsibility of employers. Individual engagement is up to individuals.

You can’t force, even in a seemingly unforceful and caring way, others to be engaged. It’s up to them. It’s like donating blood. Donating blood is a noble and unselfish act (assuming it’s your own blood….)

Employee Engagement: There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Dov Seidman’s recent post says that most management efforts at employee engagement have been ‘out to lunch.’   As in, taking employees out to lunch, as if that kind of reward or team-bonding activity had some effective influence on the engagement behaviours of employees. Lunching isn’t inherently a bad thing (depending on how healthy you’re eating I suppose, or if you let anyone drink alcohol) but there’s no proven cause-and-effect relationship with employee engagement. I like this one of Dov’s key points:

“The frequency of lunches, performance reviews, volunteer program outings and team-building exercises does not produce higher levels of employee engagement. Employee engagement is determined by the quality and meaningfulness of these interactions, and the journey managers are enlisting their employees to engage in.”

He makes an excellent point about engaged employees – that “…they exhibit many more specific “engagement traits” – including a willingness to put in a great deal of extra effort, increased loyalty, a greater willingness to recommend their company as an employer of choice, efforts to  inspire others in the company through concrete comments and actions, and similar outcomes – compared to other employees.” It doesn’t matter if they think they’re engaged or not, or if they tick a box on a survey saying they’re a 4 or a 7 on an engagement scale of 1-10 as those abstract measurements are devoid of applicable usefulness. Engagement is observable behaviour.

And please do tip your waiting staff. I’m pretty sure an engaged server wouldn’t spit in your soup.

Corporate Social Responsibility: A Lever For Employee Attraction & Engagement

This Forbes article contains some challenging results from surveys about what some employees would be willing to trade off in terms of pay in exchange for a workplace that was into social responsibility, positive environmental impact or similar values. I’m a little cynical but having made some similar trade-offs myself in recent years, I can believe it. I think my cynicism is around the fact that these employees must have some baseline of income they’d demand before they start getting all altruistic. Fair enough. The happiness research says that beyond a certain point, more money doesn’t make you sustainably happier. So maybe some of these warm, fuzzy organisational behaviours would?

When it comes to employees, ‘happy’ is not the same as ‘engaged.’ Happy is whatever you think it is for you. Engaged means you’re applying discretionary effort at work – i.e. doing stuff you don’t HAVE TO because you CHOOSE TO. That said, I’d like to be happy and I’d like employees to be happy. Of course, the big question is to what extent am I, or any employer, willing to pay for that happiness? My usual answer applies, “It depends.”
It would depend a whole lot less if there was a genuine willingness to make some trade-off. We’d all love to hug a tree but might be less inclined to live in one.

35% would take a 15% pay cut to work for a company “committed to corporate social responsibility” (whatever that means.) 45% would take a 15% pay cut to work for a company making a social or environmental impact. (I presume they mean a positive impact?) 58% would take a 15% pay cut to work for a company “with values like my own.”

Employee engagement and people’s natural internal motivation is driven by, amongst other things, a sense of purpose – contributing to something greater, something beyond self. I think that, for this influence to kick in, it would have to be a more specific personal connection than merely a general or vague corporate social responsibility. It would need to be precise and relevant to the individual. Taking a 15% pay cut to work for a company that might cure cancer sounds like a box you’d tick on a survey. But if you had cancer or loved someone who did, you wouldn’t have time to tick the box or take surveys because you’d be passionately engaged in working towards helping cure cancer. Nothing inspires a personal protest against motorways more than a letter revealing your house is in the way of a motorway development.

The sad thing, not so much about the article itself but how some employers may interpret it, is how some employers may choose to use the information from the survey. If the primary finding was that people will take a pay cut to do good deeds with us, you’d like to think that would encourage employers to do good deeds etc. The last recommendation of the article was to optimise social media to spread the word about the good deeds. This spin angle is what many businesses will pick up on. What will get generated may not be a better world but a noisier one. But I suppose the community-minded employee has to find out about potential employers somehow. I do worry that the truly socially responsible corporates will be drowned out by those with shiny facades and little true depth.

So, long-story-short-too-late, I agree that community contribution or social responsibility or whatever label you choose to use, could be a useful lever for enhancing employee engagement but it would have to be strongly personally relevant and emotionally connecting. But, even if it wasn’t, I’d prefer banks etc not to be parasitic blood-sucking leeches.

What Causes Talented And Engaged Employees To Give Up?

This article has a great quote and a word of warning to workplace leaders, “Once-engaged employees who are now disengaged can cause more harm to a company than those who were never engaged.”

Ouch!

It varies slightly from time to time and from country to country and, even, industry to industry but, let’s say roughly, research shows that 26% of employees are engaged & 28% actively disengaged. The 28% is bad enough but that missing 46% are ambivalent. It’d be easy and understandable for workplace leaders to target their efforts at improving or managing out the disengaged. Or even considering that the biggest bang for their buck and time and effort would be investing in better engaging the ambivalent middle 46% who merely show up. That’s not a bad idea but it should NOT be done at the expense of the highly engaged who are choosing to apply discretionary effort at work.

For a start, if the ones you’re trying to move up into the engaged group see how you’re failing to support the engaged group, that’s likely to be self-defeating for you. Personally, I believe that people who are engaged are far more likely to be self-motivated at work and in life generally by the pursuit of greater autonomy, development towards mastery in skills and movement towards some sense of purpose. If you just get out of their way, you’re unlikely to be able to diminish those drives that exist within them. However, if you’re short-sighted and inobservant, you could chip away at their abilities to pursue those self drivers.

They would most likely leave but, in the meantime, would they become a worse contributor to your workplace than if they’d never been engaged in the first place?
The article quotes findings from research conducted by Florida State University College of Business. “Model employees committed to their organisation are willing to go the extra mile to see it thrive but can give up if they sense that they’re being asked to do more and more, and with fewer resources, while comparatively little is being asked of their less-engaged colleagues.”

I doubt that a truly engaged person would sulk and withdraw but it’s never a good idea to reward poor performers and punish good performers, even if it is easy to do in the short term. How many newbie team leaders find themselves saying something like, “Hey great job. Can you finish this task that someone else couldn’t?” Maybe if that’s only an occasional occurrence and if it’s handled well and if there’s something in the extra work that appeals to the top performer being ‘rewarded’ with more work, that scenario might be OK. Maybe.

But, over time , if that’s all there is for the engaged top performer, I can see some resentment potential. It might cause them to leave but they won’t turn on you nor will they give up. They’ll simply give up ON YOU. But the things a leader can do (or not do) that will contribute to the talented and engaged employees giving up are anything that messes with those core drivers of the pursuit of greater autonomy, development towards mastery in skills and movement towards some sense of purpose.

Ideally, employees should be like the judges at Olympic ice skating with their little scorecards ready to hold up every time you ‘perform’ as their leader. But they don’t. They’d probably end up with repetitive strain injury anyway…

10 Things Economics Can Teach Us About Happiness

This article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson makes lots of interesting research-based correlations between wealth and happiness, for individuals and countries. Have a read. In short the answers are, "Kinda", "Up to a point" and "It depends."

From my interest area of employee engagement, some key comments were that its not so much the lack of wealth that makes unemployed people unhappy. Its the unemployment. And the self employed are happier than the jobbed (until they're not.) Work (or 'jobs', if you prefer to use that similar but not totally synonymous word) provides us humans with more than money. We'll take the money we need, and the lack of it up to a point will make us unhappy, but past a further point, more won't make us happier. Those points are different for different people and change with time and circumstance. The unemployed get sick and depressed partly from a lack of money but mostly from a lack of a sense of self worth, inclusion, contribution and development. Plenty of people in sucky jobs get the same negatives even if they have an income. That negatively impacts on health, attendance and productivity.

To me, the overwhelming theme of the findings is that people are different. Average findings about wealth and how it relates to happiness (if wealth really is any kind of an indicator about employee motivation) might be interesting but it isn't useful. People are different. That's the level of research that becomes useful. And that is the level when you as a leader observe and investigate the individual people you lead. What works for them?

Happiness is a staggeringly shifty set of goalposts to aim for and really isn't the same as engagement. But if you grow a workplace culture that supports self awareness, movement towards skill mastery, increasing autonomy, some sense of purpose and the ability to influence others, then you'll engage your people. If they've got that, they won't be unhappy.

A lot of my blog readers come from countries celebrating a public holiday today - Queen's Birthday. It's a bit anachronistic but a holiday is a holiday and in the southern hemisphere, there's a long, cold and dark winter until the next Monday off in the Spring. The definition of employee engagement is when an employee chooses to do some work they don't have to do. They engage in a discretionary activity and that activity happens to be some work. That occurs at the workplace and these days the workplace is very hard for many to pin to a single location. (Wherever your smartphone is, there you are!) So, on a public holiday, people are getting all discretionarily active all over the place. What are you doing? What do you get out of that activity? Are there aspects of your work where you get the same jollies? If not, you could be one of the three quarters or so of workers who are either disengaged or merely present at work. Maybe spend some of your holiday thinking about that and make a change?