Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Management

Don’t Push Employees to Change

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One of managers’ most common complaints relates to their failure to persuade their employees to change.

Having high expectations of employees can lead to bitter disappointment. The frustration that comes from employees not wanting to change causes many managers to focus on their employees’ negative qualities. Such an attitude makes it easy to find errors in employee behavior, leading to more disappointment—even resentment.

Even when an employee wants to change, he often fails to because he is pulled in two directions: by a motivation to change and by a motivation to maintain the status quo. Since change is seldom as easy as we think it will be, the motivation to maintain the status quo often triumphs.

The real reason employees (and people in general) don’t change is that underneath each employee’s commitment to change, he has an underlying, even stronger commitment to something else, as identified his intrinsic motivation.

For instance, an employee who expresses a desire to earn a promotion may avoid tougher assignments on his current job because he may be anxious about not measuring up. This employee may not even be fully aware of his own opposition. Therefore, managers are best served by understanding what truly motivates (and limits) each employee—i.e. his elements of intrinsic motivation. Only then can managers, through coaching and feedback, impel the employee to change by channeling the levers of extrinsic motivation (rewards, salary raise, fame, recognition, punishment) through one of the employee’s elements of intrinsic motivation.

Idea for Impact: Trying to change people will result in frustration and futility. Employees may change for a short time, but unless they have a compelling reason for change, they will go back to their natural state. Managers must temper their expectations about changing employees. As the Buddha taught, one way to lessen disappointment in life is to learn to lower your expectations of others.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  2. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  3. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  4. Direction + Autonomy = Engagement
  5. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave

To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect

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The Hawthorne Experiments

Sociologist Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne Experiments marked a sea change in industrial and organizational psychology. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Mayo led this famous series of experiments on workers’ productivity at a Western Electric factory in the Chicago suburb of Hawthorne.

The experiments’ initial purpose was to study the effects of workers’ physical conditions on their productivity. The lighting in the work area for one group of workers was dramatically improved while another group’s lighting remained unchanged. The productivity of the workers with the better lighting increased.

The experimenters found similar productivity improvements when they improved other working conditions, viz., work hours, meal and rest breaks, etc. Surprisingly, the workers’ productivity increased even when the lights were dimmed again. In fact, even when everything about the workplace was restored to the way it was before the experiments had begun, the factory’s productivity was at its highest level.

Recognition and even simple acknowledgment can give people a boost

When Elton Mayo discussed his findings with the workers, he learned that the interest Mayo and his experimenters had shown in the workers made them feel more valued. They were accustomed to being ignored by management.

Mayo concluded that the workers’ productivity and morale had not improved because of the changes in physical conditions, but rather from a motivational effect—the workers felt encouraged when someone was actually concerned about their workplace conditions.

'The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation' by Elton Mayo (ISBN 0415436842) The Hawthorne Experiments understood the individual worker in a social context. The resulting insight was that employees’ performance was influenced not only by their own innate abilities but also by their work environment and the people they work with. Mayo wrote in The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, “The desire to stand well with one’s fellows, the so-called human instinct of association, easily outweighs the merely individual interest and the logic of reasoning upon which so many spurious principles of management are based.”

Over the decades, the methodology and conclusions of the Hawthorne experiments have been widely debated. Yet the key takeaway is profound: when managers pay attention to people, better morale and productivity ensue.

Idea for Impact: Employee engagement is the very heart of effective management

Inspire your employees by asking them how they are doing. Let them in on the plans for your organization, seek their opinions, recognize them, appreciate their work, and coach and give them feedback.

Even a little appreciation and praise can go a long way to boost employee morale. The desire for recognition is a basic human need; and managers can easily fulfill this need with the aim of bringing out the best in people.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  2. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  3. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity

A Majority of Formal Training Doesn’t Stick

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Most formal corporate training programs fail because (1) they’re not extensive enough to indoctrinate a new behavior and (2) they tend to dwell more on “doing” and less on ingraining a prescribed thought process.

Corporate training programs work best if there is an immediate need for employees to use certain techniques and tools. If more than a few days pass between training and the application, employees may not recall what they’ve learned. Therefore, training programs are most effective when they are about need-to-know-now topics and relate to employees’ current problems.

When employees try repeatedly to apply a new skill and fail, they can get dispirited and revert to their old patterns of behavior.

As I mentioned in my previous article, formal training can be very effective with a good deal of follow-through reinforcement under the watchful eyes of a diligent coach, such as a Process Sherpa.

Idea for Impact: Employees will not use a skill consistently until it’s ingrained in their work habits.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Making Training Stick: Your Organization Needs a Process Sherpa
  2. Overtraining: How Much is Too Much?
  3. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  4. Learning from the World’s Best Learning Organization // Book Summary of ‘The Toyota Way’
  5. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

Making Training Stick: Your Organization Needs a Process Sherpa

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Corporate training in procedures usually doesn’t stick when the techniques learned are not immediately necessary on the job. If more than a few days pass between training and application, it seems employees cannot recall what they’ve learned.

In order for training to be effective and for employees to retain their newfound knowledge, there needs to be an element of on-the-job reinforcement. A guide can observe, correct, or commend on-the-job application of the training. This follow-up approach will solidify new information and give employees the benefits of experience.

If a certain procedure is required infrequently (say, just a few times each year,) employees may never remember it, not to mention master it. This issue may arise frequently as many organizational processes are only used sporadically.

Until a skill is completely ingrained and natural, employees won’t use it effectively.

To ensure employee familiarity with all relevant processes, even those used infrequently, every organization should consider appointing a Process Sherpa, a process guide.

The Process Sherpa would be analogous to the Sherpas, high-altitude mountaineering guides who help explorers carry loads and negotiate dangerous, ice-covered in the Himalayas and elsewhere. [See yesterday’s article for more on the Sherpas and pioneering explorers Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.]

The Process Sherpa would understand the wide variety of a company’s processes—filing expense reports, hiring contractors, searching a database of technical reports, preparing quarterly budgets, developing the annual operating plan, preparing for financial audits, and the rest. When the demands of these tasks fall beyond an employee’s understanding, the Process Sherpa could step in and help.

The Process Sherpa position could be adjustable and elastic. It could be a full-time, dedicated role, or the Sherpa responsibilities could be divvied up amongst many employees—after considering the needs of the organization and the expertise of the Sherpas in individual processes.

A Sherpa would not only assist employees, but could also improve the business processes themselves. Having personally witnessed the employees’ challenges, the Sherpa could modify processes to make them simpler and more effective.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. A Majority of Formal Training Doesn’t Stick
  2. Overtraining: How Much is Too Much?
  3. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  4. Learning from the World’s Best Learning Organization // Book Summary of ‘The Toyota Way’
  5. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees