Stop Demotivating Your Employees! by David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind, and Michael Irwin Meltzer M OST COMPANIES HAVE IT ALL WRONG. They don't have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them. The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85% of companies, our research finds, employees' morale sharply declines after their first six monthsand continues to deteriorate for years afterward. That finding is based on surveys of about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies from 2001 through 2004, conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence (Purchase, N.Y.). The fault lies squarely at the feet of managementboth the policies and procedures companies employ in managing their workforces and in the relationships that individual managers establish with their direct reports. Our research shows how individual managers' behaviors and styles are contributing to the problem (see sidebar \"How Management Demotivates\")and what they can do to turn this around. Three key goals of people at work To maintain the enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially, management must understand the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their workand then satisfy those goals: Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security. Achievement: To be proud of one's job, accomplishments, and employer. Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees. To maintain an enthusiastic workforce, management must meet all three goals. Indeed, employees who work for companies where just one of these factors is missing are three times less enthusiastic than workers at companies where all elements are present. One goal cannot be substituted for another. Improved recognition cannot replace better pay, money cannot sub- stitute for taking pride in a job well done, and pride alone will not pay the mortgage. What individual managers can do Satisfying the three goals depends both on organizational policies and on the everyday practices of individual managers. If the company has a solid approach to talent management, a bad manager can undermine it in his unit. On the flip side, smart and empathetic managers can overcome a great deal of corporate mismanagement while creating enthusiasm and commitment within their units. While individual managers can't control all leadership decisions, they can still have a profound influence on employee motivation. The most important thing is to provide employees with a sense of security, one in which they do not fear that their jobs will be in jeopardy if their performance is not perfect and one in which layoffs are considered an extreme last resort, not just another option for dealing with hard times. But security is just the beginning. When handled properly, each of the following eight practices will play a key role in supporting your employees' goals for achievement, equity, and camaraderie, and will enable them to retain the enthusiasm they brought to their roles in the first place. Achievement related 1. Instill an inspiring purpose. A critical condition for employee enthusiasm is a clear, credible, and inspiring organizational purpose; in effect, a \"reason for being\" that translates for workers into a \"reason for being there\" that goes above and beyond money. Every manager should be able to expressly state a strong purpose for his unit. What follows is one purpose statement we especially admire. It was developed by a threeperson benefits group in a midsize firm. Benefits are about people. It's not whether you have the forms filled in or whether the checks are written. It's whether the people are cared for when they're sick, Copyright 2006 by Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. 3 Stop Demotivating Your Employees! (continued) helped when they're in trouble. ing as your employees' expediter: it is your job to facilitate getting their jobs done. Your reports are, in this sense, your \"customers.\" Your role as an expediter involves a range of activities, including serving as a linchpin to other business units and managerial levels to represent their best interests and ensure your people get what they need to succeed. How do you know, beyond what's obvious, what is most important to your employees for getting their jobs done? Ask them! \"Lunch and schmooze\" sessions with employees are particularly helpful for doing this. And if, for whatever reason, you can't immediately address a particular need or request, be open about it and then let your workers know how you're progressing at resolving their problems. This is a great way to build trust. This statement is particularly impressive because it was composed in a small company devoid of high-powered executive attention and professional wordsmiths. It was created in the type of department normally known for its fixation on bureaucratic rules and procedures. It is a statement truly from the heart, with the focus in the right place: on the endspeoplerather than the meanscompleting forms. Stating a mission is a powerful tool. But equally important is the manager's ability to explain and communicate to subordinates the reason behind the mission. Can the manager of stockroom workers do better than telling her staff that their mission is to keep the room stocked? Can she communicate the importance of the job, the people who 4. Coach your are relying on the stockroom being properly maintained, both inside and outside the company? The importance for even goods that might be considered prosaic to be where they need to be Receiving recognition for when they need to be there? That achievements is one of manager will go a long way toward providing a sense of purpose. the most fundamental employees for improvement. A major reason so many managers do not assist subordinates in improving their performance is, simply, that they don't know how to do this without irritating or discouraging them. A few basic principles will improve this substantially. First and foremost, employees human needs. 2. Provide recognition. Manwhose overall performance is satisagers should be certain that all factory should be made aware of that. employee contributions, both large It is easier for employees to accept, and small, are recognized. The motto of many managers and welcome, feedback for improvement if they know manseems to be, \"Why would I need to thank someone for agement is basically pleased with what they do and is helpdoing something he's paid to do?\" Workers repeatedly tell ing them do it even better. us, and with great feeling, how much they appreciate a Space limitations prevent a full treatment of the subject compliment. They also report how distressed they are of giving meaningful feedback, of which recognition is a when managers don't take the time to thank them for a job central part, but these key points should be the basis of any well done yet are quick to criticize them for making misfeedback plan: takes. Performance feedback is not the same as an annual Receiving recognition for achievements is one of the appraisal. Give actual performance feedback as close most fundamental human needs. Rather than making in time to the occurrence as possible. Use the formal employees complacent, recognition reinforces their accomannual appraisal to summarize the year, not surprise plishments, helping ensure there will be more of them. the worker with past wrongs. A pat on the back, simply saying \"good going,\" a dinner for two, a note about their good work to senior executives, Recognize that workers want to know when they some schedule flexibility, a paid day off, or even a flower on have done poorly. Don't succumb to the fear of giving a desk with a thank-you note are a few of the hundreds of appropriate criticism; your workers need to know ways managers can show their appreciation for good work. when they are not performing well. At the same time, It works wonders if this is sincere, sensitively done, and don't forget to give positive feedback. It is, after all, undergirded by fair and competitive payand not considyour goal to create a team that warrants praise. ered a substitute for it. Comments concerning desired improvements 3. Be an expediter for your employees. Incorposhould be specific, factual, unemotional, and rating a command-and-control style is a sure-fire path to directed at performance rather than at employees demotivation. Instead, redefine your primary role as servpersonally. Avoid making overall evaluative remarks 4 harvard management update January 2006 Stop Demotivating Your Employees! (continued) (such as, \"That work was shoddy\") or comments about employees' personalities or motives (such as, \"You've been careless\"). Instead, provide specific, concrete details about what you feel needs to be improved and how. Keep the feedback relevant to the employee's role. Don't let your comments wander to anything not directly tied to the tasks at hand. Listen to employees for their views of problems. Employees' experience and observations often are helpful in determining how performance issues can be best dealt with, including how you can be most helpful. Remember the reason you're giving feedbackyou want to improve performance, not prove your superiority. So keep it real, and focus on what is actually doable without demanding the impossible. Follow up and reinforce. Praise improvement or engage in course correctionwhile praising the effortas quickly as possible. Don't offer feedback about something you know nothing about. Get someone who knows the situation to look at it. Equity related 5. Communicate fully. One of the most counterproductive rules in business is to distribute information on the basis of \"need to know.\" It is usually a way of severely, unnecessarily, and destructively restricting the flow of information in an organization. Workers' frustration with an absence of adequate communication is one of the most negative findings we see expressed on employee attitude surveys. What employees need to do their jobs and what makes them feel respected and included dictate that very few restrictions be placed by managers on the flow of information. Hold nothing back of interest to employees except those very few items that are absolutely confidential. Good communication requires managers to be attuned to what employees want and need to know; the best way to do this is to ask them! Most managers must discipline themselves to communicate regularly. Often it's not a natural instinct. Schedule regular employee meetings that have no purpose other than two-way communication. Meetings among management should conclude with a specific plan for communicating the results of the meetings to employees. And tell it like it is. Many employees are quite skeptical about HOW MANAGEMENT DEMOTIVATES There are several ways that management unwittingly demotivates employees and diminishes, if not outright destroys, their enthusiasm. Many companies treat employees as disposable. At the first sign of business difficulty, employeeswho are usually routinely referred to as \"our greatest asset\"become expendable. Employees generally receive inadequate recognition and reward: about half of the workers in our surveys report receiving little or no credit, and almost two-thirds say management is much more likely to criticize them for poor performance than praise them for good work. Management inadvertently makes it difficult for employees to do their jobs. Excessive levels of required approvals, endless paperwork, insufficient training, failure to communicate, infrequent delegation of authority, and a lack of a credible vision contribute to employees' frustration. management's motives and can quickly see through \"spin.\" Get continual feedback on how well you and the company are communicating. One of the biggest communication problems is the assumption that a message has been understood. Follow-up often finds that messages are unclear or misunderstood. Companies and managers that communicate in the ways we describe reap large gains in employee morale. Full and open communication not only helps employees do their jobs but also is a powerful sign of respect. 6. Face up to poor performance. Identify and deal decisively with the 5% of your employees who don't want to work. Most people want to work and be proud of what they do (the achievement need). But there are employees who are, in effect, \"allergic\" to workthey'll do just about anything to avoid it. They are unmotivated, and a disciplinary approachincluding dismissalis about the only way they can be managed. It will raise the morale and performance of other team members to see an obstacle to their performance removed. Camaraderie related 7. Promote teamwork. Most work requires a team effort in order to be done effectively. Research shows repeatedly that the quality of a group's efforts in areas such as problem solving is usually superior to that of individuals harvard management update January 2006 5 Stop Demotivating Your Employees! (continued) working on their own. In addition, most workers get a motivation boost from working in teams. Whenever possible, managers should organize employees into self-managed teams, with the teams having authority over matters such as quality control, scheduling, and many work methods. Such teams require less management and normally result in a healthy reduction in management layers and costs. Creating teams has as much to do with camaraderie as core competences. A manager needs to carefully assess who works best with whom. At the same time, it is important to create the opportunity for cross-learning and diversity of ideas, methods, and approaches. Be clear with the new team about its role, how it will operate, and your expectations for its output. agers who operate with a participative style reap enormous rewards in efficiency and work quality. Participative managers continually announce their interest in employees' ideas. They do not wait for these suggestions to materialize through formal upward communication or suggestion programs. They find opportunities to have direct conversations with individuals and groups about what can be done to improve effectiveness. They create an atmosphere where \"the past is not good enough\" and recognize employees for their innovativeness. Participative managers, once they have defined task boundaries, give employees freedom to operate and make changes on their own commensurate with their knowledge and experience. Indeed, there may be no single motivational tactic more powerful than freeing competent people to do their jobs as they see fit. N Related to all three factors 8. Listen and involve. Employees are a rich source of information about how to do a job and how to do it better. This principle has been demonstrated time and again with all kinds of employeesfrom hourly workers doing the most routine tasks to high-ranking professionals. Man- 6 harvard management update January 2006 David Sirota is chairman emeritus, Louis A. Mischkind is senior vice president, and Michael Irwin Meltzer is chief operating officer of Sirota Survey Intelligence. They are the authors of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing, 2005). They can be reached at MUOpinion@hbsp.harvard.edu. What's your role? As an SEIU steward, your job involves much, much more than handling grievances. Grievances are important. They are often the most visible and dramatic aspect of the union's presence. Sometimes they'll take up most of your time. But grievances should never be confused with your chief responsibility as a steward: to build a united, organized, and involved membership in your workplace. Without this involvement and solidarity, no union in the world can protect and serve its members. As a leader in the workplace, you'll have your hands full. That's because SEIU stewards are ... Organizers. This is the big one. It doesn't just mean signing up new members, although it means that too. It means SEIU stewards are responsible for organizing the whole workplace to deal with problems as a united group.Which is, when you think about it, what labor unions are all about. Problem solvers. You're the person workers turn to with their problems. It might be a work-site hazard. Maybe someone's been fired, or perhaps layoffs are threatened. It might be just a new employee with a question. Perhaps you can solve the problem with a friendly word, or maybe you'll organize a worksite action or file a grievance. Problems don't go with your territory. They are your territory. Educators and communicators. The contract. The health insurance plan. What's a "ULP"? How can I do this? Why did they do that? It's a complicated world, and your members are counting on you to help them make sense of it. Equally important, your union officers are counting on you to help them keep in touch with your co-workers. You work with them every day. They don't. Worksite leaders. You're the one who keeps it moving. You're the one who's not afraid to speak up to management. You make unity happen, and you never let anyone forget there's a union at your worksite. (Nobody said this job is easy.) The sections that follow will explain some of your different jobs in more detail. (Pages with the symbol provide handy checklists of things stewards need to know, have, and do.) For now, it's enough that you understand and accept your wide responsibility in the workplace, and remember that your primary duties are to organize and to solve problems. (You'll see later how those two duties go hand in hand.) An Employer's Guide to Employee Engagement June 2014 Stephen Wendel Principal Scientist at HelloWallet Table of Contents What is Employee Engagement | 01 Why is it Important? | 03 How is it Measured? | 04 How can it be Improved? | 05 The Role of Benefits in Creating an Engaging Environment | 08 Tips on Improving Engagement | 09 References | 12 Employee Engagement: Stephen Wendel | 01 What Is Employee Engagement? \"Employee engagement\" is a term often thrown around as a key outcome of employee benefit programs. Everything from wellness programs1 to pet insurance2 to brain-training games3 are said to increase engagement. The term became popular over the last 15 years in consulting and HR circles, and there seem to be three main ways the term is used:4 \" It's the emotional state that is caused by a supportive work environment, and causes behaviors and outcomes such as increased productivity. 1. Participation. Sometimes \"engagement\" means simply participating in an employer program, such as attending a seminar, or signing up for a wellness program. This is a low bar, that doesn't necessarily imply that the program is impactful or that employees value it. 2. Emotional attachment to work. \"Engagement\" can also mean an emotional commitment on the part of a person toward their job, which then translates into higher productivity, better customer service, and lower absenteeism. This is a definition used in business management and some academic studies. 3. Something good. \"Engagement\" is also used as a catch-all term for everything good and beneficial for a company that isn't quite tangible. For example, I've seen both productivity and employee satisfaction equated to engagement. In fact, a common complaint about the term \"engagement\" is that it mixes causes (good managers) with attitudes (feels about the company) with behaviors (discretionary effort) and outcomes (productivity).5 I prefer #2, emotional attachment to work; that's one of the most widely used formal definitions, and the one that I find to be the most clear and concise. It's the emotional state that is caused by a supportive work environment, and causes behaviors and outcomes such as increased productivity. The emotional attachment to one's work, or employee engagement as we have defined it, shouldn't be confused with other employee characteristics like: \u001c\u001c Motivation. When HR professionals refer to motivation, they usually mean an employee's extrinsic reason to do something the desire to get paid, to be recognized, and to complete a task. And, because of that focus, there's a lot of talk in the HR 1\thttp://www.virginpulse.com 2\thttp://partners.healthypawspetinsurance.com/AffiliateAssets/RWOI 3\thttp://www.workforce.com/articles/brain-training-is-becoming-the-new-push-in-employee-wellness 4 There are numerous related concepts in the academic community, such as organizational citizenship, which I touch upon discussed below. Since the term \"employee engagement\" arose in the HR consulting community, here I am focusing on that term and how it is used; I'll reference the academic literature and concepts where relevant to the concept of engagement. 5 E.g., Macey and Schneider (2008). Employee Engagement: Stephen Wendel | 02 community about providing incentives to make employees \"more motivated\". Engagement is differentadding incentives are largely ineffective (and often detrimental, as we'll talk about later). Instead of the fickle, coin-operated meaning that's often attached to motivation, engagement is an internal and relatively stable emotional bond. \u001c\u001c Satisfaction. Many Americans are satisfied with work, but not engaged. According to SHRM, 83% of American workers are satisfied, but only 30% of them are engaged, according to Gallup.6 How can that be? While the two concepts are strongly related, these surveys are clearly measuring different things. Employee satisfaction can be considered a basic level of contentment with one's job; engagement is a more recent and richer concept that extends far beyond satisfaction.7 As Abhishek Mittal from Towers Watson describes it, \"Satisfaction is a 'one-way street' (what can you do for me), whereas engagement is a 'two-way street' (what can you do for me and what I can do in return)\"8 Perhaps most importantly, engagement is strongly correlated with increased productivity, while satisfaction is less so. \u001c\u001c Happiness. Happiness is a current emotional state, that is often related to many factors that have nothing to do with employmentthe weather (people are happier on sunny days), family life, personality, etc. Engagement is viewed as a more enduring emotional attachment. An employee can be happy because they just ate a great bagel; that bagel doesn't mean much for employee engagement. To better understand employee engagement, and how it works, let's look at four questions: \u001c\u001c Why is it important? \u001c\u001c How is it measured? \u001c\u001c What causes it? \u001c\u001c How does one improve it? 6 See Gallup (2013a). This is especially striking because Gallup's survey was previously considered a survey of \"job satisfaction\" before it was rebranded. It's the measurement of \"engagement\" that effectively defines it; there is no formal definition. And clearly, these two surveys are measuring (and defining) two different things. In the academic community \"job satisfaction\" has a particular and narrower definition; I'm using the non-technical meaning of the term here. 7 Engagement, as used here, is related to the older concept of \"overall job satisfaction\Home Rights We Protect The National Labor Relations Board protects the rights of most private-sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions. If you believe your rights have been violated, or that an employer or a union has engaged in unlawful conduct, you may file a charge through one of our regional offices. Petitions for representation and decertification elections may also be filed at regional offices. What's the Law? As an employee, you have the right to join together with co-workers to address issues at work, with or without a union. The NLRB is here to help. Learn more about these rights and what you can do if you believe they've been violated. Employee Rights Employees covered by the NLRA are guaranteed the right to form, join, decertify, or assist a labor organization, and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, or to refrain from such activities. Employees may also join together to improve terms and conditions of employment without a union. Protected Concerted Activity The law we enforce gives employees the right to act together to try to improve their pay and working conditions or fix job-related problems, even if they aren't in a union. Employer/Union Rights and Obligations The law forbids employers from interfering with employees in the exercise of rights to form, join or assist a labor organization for collective bargaining, or from working together to improve terms and conditions of employment, or refraining from any such activity. Similarly, labor organizations may not interfere with employees in the exercise of these rights. Jurisdictional Standards The Board has statutory jurisdiction over private sector employers whose activity in interstate commerce exceeds a minimal level. Over the years, it has established standards for asserting jurisdiction, which are described on this page. Home Resources The NLRB Process Unfair Labor Practice Process Chart The chart below shows the steps subsequent to a breakdown of talks at the local level or of the employer fails to solve the issue in the long term. The union will become involved and act accordingly. ***Note - this chart is for the exclusive use of Trident University MGT516 students***