Beyond Work is our line of resources for people and community leaders looking for something new and innovative outside, be it a new job, career change, or personal development outside of work.
One of the best ways to improve and sustain great performance at work is to ask for feedback and to give it, freely, continuously and in the spirit of driving better performance. Here are some posts to help you out with this quest:
6 Steps for Maximizing Feedback Through Feedforward
Drop Lots of FYIs to Communicate Effectively
3 Steps for Driving Employee Engagement through Personalization
Jennifer Lawrence, Hollywood’s highest paid female actress still doesn’t make as much as her male counterparts. And she’s pissed. But who she is pissed at may surprise you. She’s mad at herself.
You can see more on the story that aired on NBC Nightly News last week here:
Kudos to Jennifer. When we can take ownership of the issues that affect us personally, then we are on our way to fixing them. Blaming others doesn’t help the situation.
Women (and men) knowing what they are worth is a critical step in that ownership, then being willing and able to negotiate for that worth is vital. Jennifer knows now what the going rate is for her leading roles and is ready to negotiate for the next leading role that will surely come her way.
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Remember the wind chime, the umbrella, the party, snacks and bonus check in our last post?
Well during the corporate foray of employee rewards and recognition efforts, everyone in the department, regardless of their level of involvement in the project, got the wind chime and the umbrella and the party and the snacks and, yes, the bonus check.
In addition to the one size fits all approach whether earned or not, although an umbrella at some point is going to come in handy, and the wind chimes do actually still hang in my backyard almost ten years later, no one asked me, or anyone else if we particularly wanted any of it or we might have preferred say a rain jacket or maybe a decorative flag.
You see, one of the main tricks of employers who do the employee engagement game well know that perks and benefits should be personalized, fitting with each individual’s motivational preferences based on their personalities, interests and place in life.
As The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Todaystates,
“Rather than a standard package of health, wealth, and paid time off, companies can provide employees with a budget and a widely diverse set of options. These can range from sponsoring paid community service time overseas to allowing for credits to buy a hybrid car or even financially supporting an increased personal skill, such as learning a new language. The options are endless.”
So if you want to focus on making it personal, here are three steps:
1. Ask. Ask and ask often what employees want. You need to do this in aggregate and individually. We suggest you design a survey to ask employees what they want and value in order to design overall benefit package options and structure. However, each person should be asked individually by their manager what things actually motivate them and what situations they are experiencing in their life and in work that cause one thing to be more motivational over another. For a list of motivational factors we use, email us and we’ll send you a copy.
2. Create. Create a package of program options based on survey results of what people want inline with what is fitting with your organization’s budget. The above quote goes on to say, “How to fund this? In one survey, Millennials indicated that they are willing to make trade-offs in terms of base salary in order to have a job that fits with their values.”
In addition, some of the benefits/perks you see people want may cost little to nothing such as flexible work schedules and the ability to work remotely. These options in many cases have been shown to increase the bottom-line through productivity instead of decrease it.
3. Evaluate. Evaluate if your program is working to drive employee engagement. We recommend usingGallup’s 12 engagement questions for this. Regardless of the mechanism you use to measure employee engagement, these results should be positively correlated with desirable overall business results such as increased profits that every organization tracks. More on these business results that should be seen in next week’s post…
Are your rewards and benefits personalized? If so, what positive results have you seen?
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“$11.32 an hour,” she said. “That’s what many people can earn sitting on their couch. How am I supposed to encourage them to get off the couch when many of the jobs they qualify for don’t pay that?”
This statement came from a frustrated state career center worker tasked with getting individuals off federal and state assistance through a job placement program.
I could turn this conversation into a political post, but I won’t go there. Instead, I’d like to focus on how it illustrates a basic premise of motivation.
I’m going to spend the next few weeks talking about how to give people what they really want out of work (motivational factors) through performance management and maximization practices, but let’s face it, when I do this, I’m making the assumption that a basic living wage, or even a wage that is competitive with the wage someone could go across the street and earn with the skill set they have, (a hygiene factor) is provided in all workplaces I’m addressing. I can talk all day long about how meaningful work leads to performance maximization, but if that meaningful work doesn’t meet basic needs, or if basic needs can be met by, well doing nothing, then people are going to turn to being unproductive or turn to walking across the street for the higher wage. They are going to sit on the couch either literally or metaphorically by the way the show up to work and well, do just about nothing, or by taking their skills and going elsewhere.
It goes back to one of the basic premises of workplace (or well really any place) motivation that drives behavior: hygiene vs. motivational factors. Thanks to Herzberg, we have this tried and true theory that tells us if you really want to get the most out of people, you need motivational factors in the workplace like challenge, autonomy, creativity, etc.- basically all things that lead to meaningful work- to actually have the power to truly motivate someone.
However, hygiene factors keep people from being dissatisfied. And a lack of dissatisfaction is necessary for the motivational factors to work. Someone may be overwhelmingly content with the work they do, but if you don’t pay them enough to meet a certain standard of living, that oftentimes they compare to others around them that are doing the same or similar work, the motivational factors won’t work at least in the long run.
So before you go giving someone autonomy and meaning in their work and assuming that will keep people satisfied at the least or motivated at the most, look at how much you are paying. Get out your local wage survey and examine if your wages are competitive with the competitor across the street and around the world. Goodness help us all when the competitor across the street ends up being the federal assistance program (okay, maybe I did have to get a little political).
When was the last time you examined your wage practices?
“The whole chair situation makes so much more sense now,” said a woman in a Generations in the Workplace seminar recently.
As many of us looked at her perplexed, she went on to explain, “I bought new chairs for our office. I can’t get those in earlier generations to use them. They said the old ones are just fine. I can’t get the newer generation to quit standing up in them so they can talk to someone over the cubicle wall. I never knew how much headaches new chairs could cause,” she said with a sigh, but also some excitement in having an ah-ha moment over the issue realizing that the events and experiences of each generation impact workplace behavior.
Whereas she saw the older generation concerned with things like prudence (as shaped from living through the great depression and the war years), she saw another generation that felt encumbered by cubicle walls and wanted a workplace much like the homes they were brought up in where casual conversation and open dialogue was encouraged. Standing up in the chairs, even if they were new, didn’t seem to be a big deal. Standing up in the chairs to the prudent generation seemed disrespectful.
What this lady realized was that the chairs had sparked not one, but several, of the 12 generational sticking points that that Haydn Shaw notes in Sticking Points: How to Get the Generations to Work Together in the 12 Places They Come Apart
They are:
Which sticking point(s) would you chalk the chair situation up to? Which sticking points do you encounter the most in your workplace?
As discussed in this training, the best way to combat these sticking points is to consider whether the issue impacts business necessity or if it simply involves workplace preferences that different generations or just people with different backgrounds, personalities and experiences prefer. Examine what is business necessity by what contributes to your company’s competitive advantage and then make decisions based on business necessity, not workplace preferences. By creating a workplace that is flexible enough for different people to experience their workplace preferences contributes to competitive advantage just as much if not more than workplace policy that is governed by business necessity.