We all do it.

We read the latest research on what motivates people.  We pour over the latest case study on intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards.  We agonize over whether we should include a cash incentive or if we should only use praise as a reward.

We are all looking for that 100% guaranteed solution that we can take to the board meeting and say – “See…we instituted ‘X’ program and we have 100% engagement, 100% satisfaction, 100% adoption, 100% of goal achieved by 100% of the people.”

But that will never, ever, ever, ever, happen.

Upping the Odds

At best… let me say that again… AT BEST a great reward program, a great recognition program, a great influence program – will increase your ODDS of getting people to comply, communicating your culture, hitting your objective.

Read that again… AT BEST a great motivation program will only INCREASE YOUR ODDS of success (click here to tweet that.)

Nothing is 100%

Infinite Variability

Motivation and engagement rely on the individual.  #FACT.

The individual is unique – they are snowflakes in your organization – each one different and special.

And what makes them happy, satisfied, engaged, and motivated – is unique and special.

If you try to motivate everyone – if you try to engage everyone – if you try to make everyone happy – if you try to hit 100% success you will fail 100% of the time (click here to tweet that.)

30% Failure or 70% Success

I read a post in a LinkedIn wellness group about a wellness program that had a 70% success rate.  You’d think they’d be celebrating but the comments were – “30% of the audience didn’t think it was a good idea and felt coerced – it’s not a good program.”

What?  70% of the audience was influenced – to me that is a great program!

Do we really think we’ll ever hit 100%?

With infinitely variable human beings as the object of our intervention there is NO WAY to achieve 100%.  Even if you hit 100% on Monday for some strange reason – Tuesday can be a dismal failure because someone said something to someone in the break room or someone had a car accident on the way to work.

Do not strive for 100%.  It is unattainable.

Instead… worry about increasing your odds of success by applying various techniques and strategies.  True engagement in an organization is about managing a portfolio of motivation and recognition strategies (click here to tweet that.)

Of that – I’m 100% sure.

Related articles

• Do Monetary Rewards Create Psychopaths? (symbolist.com)

I know, I know – this post is about zappos and that means everyone reading has to drink.  It is almost a cliché that when you talk about how to engage employees and create a workplace people want to be that you have to include zappos or the engagement police will slap you with fish.  I’m not sure even google can keep up with the number of posts and tweets and updates and articles about zappos and what they do to create an engaged and productive workforce.

But gosh darn it, when a company does something right you have to talk about it.  And zappos does a lot of things right.

If Wishez Were Fishez

Sticking with the fish meme, I’ve heard the saying “If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets.”  The implication is that we all have wishes – and we all want to see our wishes fulfilled.  But hey, this is the real world and we all know that we “can’t always get what we want, but we get what we need.”

Unless you work at zappos (drink!)

This is not news for a lot of you but it is to me.

Engaging Employees to Help Employees

Zappos has a program that allows their employees to make wishes – and here’s the really cool part – the allow the employees to FULFILL them!  This concept hearkens to the post our President and founder had the other day about employee capacity and how we can help our employees create capacity and help them find ways to use that capacity to help others.

In this case – the object of that capacity stays within the organization.

Here’s a video (subscribers may need to click through to watch it) where zappos employees talk about their Family Wishez Program…

I don’t think I have to go on and wax poetic for another 500 words to explain how enabling your employees to help each other – even if somewhat silly (hot dates anyone?) is a good idea.  Research has shown that simply helping another human being increases our dopamine levels making us feel good and is actually as beneficial to our “happiness” and motivation as earning an award for ourselves.

The technology to implement this in your own organization is easy and readily available.  In fact, I’m sure you could make creating your own Wishez network your first wish and some enterprising group of employees will make it happen in hot minute.

Sometimes you just need to close your eyes and click your heels together three times to get what you really need.

NOTE:  One thing concerns me is that the blog posts on this program on the zappos site doesn’t seem to be getting updated – last post was at the beginin of 2011.  I hope this is because they’re too busy and not because it has fallen out of favor.  Anyone in blogosphere know?  Is it still going?  It should – it is a great idea!

Related articles

• Consider The Employee Capacity Challenge (symbolist.com)
• Are You an Employee Sustainable Organization? (symbolist.com)
• Making Your Company Beautiful (symbolist.com)
• What Sustains You? (fistfuloftalent.com)

One of the clues that someone is a psychopath is that they lack empathy for others.  Psychopathy in an individual can present itself as a callousness and lack of remorse and guilt.  In other words psychopaths really don’t give a rip about you.  And for being successful in business today that may not be a good thing.

Today’s business activities are increasingly more team-based and more reliant on people working together toward a goal – one person’s output is dependent on another’s and so on.  No man/woman is an island any more.  Therefore, it is more important than ever that our employees have the skills and temperament to work together effectively.

It Is All About Me

However, using monetary rewards may erode the ability of your employees to experience empathy for others.  Without the ability to understand how others feel may make it extremely difficult for an individual to work harmoniously in an organization.

And your rewards strategy may be the problem.

“Financial incentives lead individuals to see themselves as less interdependent with others, and consequently render them less able to accurately infer what others are feeling.”

That quote is from an article on the Pacific Standard where they talk about a research study published in January 2013.  Now, I’m probably stretching the application of the outcomes a bit but I do think we should keep these findings in mind when we think about the need to use cash rewards as a motivator.

The Set Up

The experiment was pretty straightforward…Two different sets of people – two slightly different rewards scenarios.

1. 49 students were assigned to watch two videos of individuals discussing something they had recently experienced, and then to infer what those people were feeling.  Half were told that if they answered accurately, they would receive $100 at the end of the academic quarter. The other half were told they would “earn points in a game,” which could ultimately result in a financial prize.
2. A second experiment, featuring 123 students, was set up similarly, except half were told those who most accurately judged the subjects’ emotions would receive a $40 gift card. The others were offered no incentive of any kind.

In the first experiment – participants who were directly offered the cash incentive were less likely to list emotions that matched those which the people in the videos reported experiencing.  In the second – gift cards scenario – the gift card group also were less likely to accurately see the emotions from the video.

The researchers concluded that the results suggest, when using money as a motivator, the thought of making money causes people to be more focused on self-related concerns, and less able to empathically infer others’ feelings.

Now…I’m not saying that this PROVES monetary awards WILL cause pyschopathy in our employees – but it does provide some directional information that money might tend to drive people to maximize their returns (a rational economic process) and crowd out the ability to see what the other person is feeling and experiencing (an emotional process.)

With so much of our day-to-day work reliant on others it would seem to me that using cash or other monetary equivalents should be approached with caution.

Even the lone-wolf sales person could run afoul of their own clients if they are focused too much on their commissions and not enough on their client’s point of pain.

Something to think about the next time someone suggests simply cutting a check when someone hits a goal.

Related articles

• One Coin – Two Sides – Incentive Good or Incentive Bad? (symbolist.com)
• Sales Incentives – Not Just About Goals (symbolist.com)
• 5 Reasons You Need Incentives (symbolist.com)

[New post from Tom Miller - President and founder of Symbolist. You can read more about him and where he'll be this year on our Leadership page.]

I love that Symbolist gets to help create capacity.

Building and implementing tools that define organizational language, encourage right behaviors and highlight performance, is really meaningful work to me.  When we do our job well, an organization becomes a better place to work and human beings benefit.  It’s such a cool dynamic – the company gets stronger in multiple ways and the people that work there increase their capacity to live in a way that, in turn, benefits others (family, the Girl Scout troop, the Little League team…)

Now, I’m a capitalist at heart and believe individuals should be free to choose what they do with “capacity” they may have – however it shows up in their lives.  But I also believe that in some cases, employees are looking for direction.  Sometimes they just don’t know what they can do with their extra capacity.

And I think a company that believes in the “whole person” should help employees find ways to use that capacity.

Can I challenge you to consider how you use the capacity that you or your company might have?

It’s safe to say that anyone reading this blog is looking through a “first-world lens” – we’re thinking about solving the issues in front of us – but NONE of us is dealing with where our next meal will come from, where we will sleep tonight or what will happen to us if we get ill.  The World Bank says that 2.4 billion people in the world live on $2 or less per day.  That’s a lot of people.  They need clean water, food, medical care.  And hope.

As an example, the video at the right explains how people took excess capacity and created something great.  I can’t tell the story as well as the video embedded here does.  Take a moment and watch it – it’s only 3 minutes long. (subscribers may need to click through to see the video.)

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that when first-world companies create capacity, the humans working there can take that capacity and do amazing things (tweet that quote) – just like in this video.

You can help create more capacity in your organization by making your company a place employees want to grow, want to engage, want to be.  You can then help them spread that message in other areas of their lives where it can make a difference.

While there are lots of stories about how that happens – I just think we need more of them.

Related articles

• Saying Thank You to Our Own (symbolist.com)
• Are You an Employee Sustainable Organization? (symbolist.com)
• Being Relevant Takes Effort (symbolist.com)

Mrs. Witterly is of a very excitable nature, very delicate, very fragile, a hothouse plant.”
(Nicholas Nickleby, 1838 by Charles Dickens)

Hothouse flowers/plants are flora that requires very special circumstances to grow and flourish.  They can’t survive in a normal, unprotected environment.  They may be beautiful and wonderful – but they are temperamental.

This idea of “hothouse” flowers was part of an article on the Psychology Today website entitled “A Nation of Whimps.”  Negative positioning aside, the article points to a few things lumped under the category of “parental hyperconcern.”  That concept got me thinking about employees and the almost irrational focus corporate America has on providing benefits and recognition/rewards to drive employee engagement.

The question in my mind is:  Are we entering a phase of employee engagement that could be more aptly labeled “corporate hyperconcern?”

Points from the article (some are paraphrased):

• A parent requesting their child take the SAT as an untimed test due to her child’s “difficulty with Gestalt thinking.” (yeah… I had to look that one up too…)
• With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety.
• An uptick in binge drinking in college.  “Every fall, parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen and within two or three days many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm’s way. These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy.”
• Grade Inflation: Lawrence Summers publicly ridiculed the value of honors after discovering that 94 percent of the college’s seniors were graduating with them. Safer to lower the bar than raise the discomfort level.
• Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess.
• Kids are having a hard time even playing neighborhood pick-up games because they’ve never done it.
• The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises, “they’re constantly referring to their parents for guidance,” reports Kramer. They’re not learning how to manage for themselves.

I could go on – the article is full of statements like this (granted – some are simple observations without data to back it up – but it does ring somewhat true to this old guy.)  These points and the many others in the article seem to be the leading edge of what many companies are seeing fist hand as the children of hyper-focused parents have now become THEIR responsibility.

And I wonder if we, managers, HR, companies – are complicit in the continuation of supporting hothouse children by creating hothouse employees?

Recognition and Rewards

As a company who helps other companies create work environments where employees WANT to BE – it would seem anathema for me to say that we shouldn’t be so focused on the well being of our employees.  But in the big picture (see, I don’t have a problem with Gestalt thinking) we may be perpetuating a very bad situation…

• When recognition programs allow for minor activities to be held up as super-human feats we reduce the value of true top performance.
• When we worry about making everything totally “fair” by someone’s warped sense of fairness we remove the line that sets the true performers apart from the average performer.
• When we remove the “stress” of performance we remove the value of that performance.
• When we treat employees with kid-gloves – and cater to the results of the most recent “satisfaction” and “engagement” survey we may do more damage than good.

The best reward and recognition programs reward REAL performance – not perceived performance.  The best way to drive more competent employees is to let them fail and coach them after the fact.

When showing up for work on time becomes an “incentivized behavior” we’ve lost the war in my opinion.  We’ve created employees who can’t contribute.

I think you could remove the word parent and child in the following quote from the article with manager and employee and it still makes sense…

“Hothouse parenting  managing undermines children  employees in other ways, too, says Anderegg. Being examined all the time makes children employees extremely self-conscious. As a result they get less communicative; scrutiny teaches them to bury their real feelings deeply. And most of all, self-consciousness removes the safety to be experimental and playful. “If every drawing effort is going to end up on your parents’ managers refrigerator recognition list, you’re not free to fool around, to goof up or make mistakes,” says Anderegg.”

There is much, much more in the article than I can go into here on this little blog but the I do think there is a need to really, really dig into what we think are the behaviors that drive success and create employees that we are proud to have in the company.

I’ll close with the paragraph that really stood out to me:

“Virginia’s Portmann feels the effects are even more pernicious; they weaken the whole fabric of society. He sees young people becoming weaker right before his eyes, more responsive to the herd, too eager to fit in—less assertive in the classroom, unwilling to disagree with their peers, afraid to question authority, more willing to conform to the expectations of those on the next rung of power above them.”

I don’t think you want those people working with you.

What say you?  Are we transferring out parental-hyperconcern to the boardroom?

Related articles

• Employee Engagement Is Good – Let’s move on… (symbolist.com)
• Engagement Surveys = Junk Science (symbolist.com)

We’ve all heard about putting lipstick on a pig – trying to make something pretty by just adding some surface enhancements.

Too often employee programs fall into this category.  Companies read about zappos (everybody drink!) or the new engagement wunderkind – google, and their “fact-based approach” to engagement – and say “Bring me one of those.”

But they miss the point.

The point is that your reward and recognition system (RRS) is only as good as the underlying core beliefs and actions of the majority of the people in the company.  No amount of “googlizing” or “zapposizing” your company benefits, systems or rewards will turn you into a world-class engagement machine.

It just won’t.

You can change your company but only within the confines of who you are and who you hire and reward.  Your corporate personality, culture and approach are uniquely you and that is where your value in the market lies.

Focus on being you.  Focus on being the best company you can be.

And remember – no one can create your culture.  Not even us.

Staying with the makeup metaphor – well-applied makeup doesn’t create beauty…
it reveals it.

And in the same vein - our program recommendations don’t create your culture…

they help you reveal it.

Related articles

• Why You Need an Outsider to Design Your Reward Program (symbolist.com)
• Are We Dumbing Down Recognition? (symbolist.com)
• We Are Your Culture Personal Trainer (symbolist.com)
• Engagement Surveys = Junk Science (symbolist.com)

There are 100s of companies that will sell you “culture change” or state they will “create a culture of fill in blank.”

Don’t call us if that is what you’re looking for.

See – your culture can’t be created by an outsider.  Only you can do that.

What we CAN do is:

… help you reinforce a culture.

… help point out things you’re doing that are contrary to the culture you want.

… help you identify the behaviors that are the manifestation of your culture.

But you… and only you… can actually change your company’s culture.

I (we) are great at helping you identify the steps needed to reinforce the right behaviors and ignore the wrong ones but at the end of the day – YOU have to do the changing.  You have to do the work.

If anyone tells you they can change your culture – or create a new one.  They are selling snake oil.

Like most things in this world that have any real value – you have to earn them.  You have to work for it.

Consider us your “culture personal trainer.”

We aren’t going to do the work for you but you better believe we’re gonna be in your face making sure you know what to do and we WILL hold you accountable.

If you’re ready to do some work, give us a call.  If you’re lazy – go buy a “belt” that promises you it will give you the body of a greek god without any work.

Then call us when that doesn’t work.  We’ll still be here – ready to make you sweat.

Related articles

• Second Laziest Post Ever on Company Culture (symbolist.com)
• It’s Not The Stupid Culture – It’s The Culture, Stupid (symbolist.com)
• What Do Stickleback Fish Know About Changing Corporate Culture? (symbolist.com)

We often get RFPs – Requests for Proposal – in which a company will spell out their needs, the program they “want” and the general structure of what the program will look like, how it will operate, the award values, and in some cases, the communication design elements.

I know the requesting company is very proud of their work.  They put a lot of effort into the RFP and they think it will make it easier to choose a partner with whom they will build and run their reward program (this applies to both employee programs as well as channel programs.)

Unfortunately – what they get at the end of this exercise – is the company that can best answer their questions in the RFP – not the company that can best design and operate the program THEY NEED to drive the objectives they outline in their document.

You Don’t Know What You Won’t See

The problem is – as is pointed out in very succinct way in this post on the We Know Next site… Most fish don’t know they swim in water.

I’ve seen that inference before but it is always nice to be reminded of it.

When something is sooooooo ubiquitous, so all encompassing as water is to a fish – it is precisely the thing you miss in your program design calculations.  It is the obvious you miss because it fades into your intellectual background – you just can’t see it.  It’s the gorilla in the basketball game that you miss because you’re so focused on something else.

While the post on We Know Next is focused on understanding corporate culture, you could almost remove the references to culture and substitute “Recognition and Reward System” (RRS.)  The idea is the same.

Get an Outside Opinion

We’ve actually incorporated that step in all of our client engagements.  A screen shot from our website below provides a high-level overview of our process.

The first step is to provide a third party point of view on your company, your culture, and your employees, to help you design the best program for your environment – not the program our software is designed to run.

We create – with you – the program your company needs.

Doing an effective job on your program design can only start with a new and different perspective on your company and program.

So – ask us about Step One. 

Let us point out that you, in fact, do swim in water.

Related articles

• Are We Dumbing Down Recognition? (symbolist.com)
• Sales Incentives – Not Just About Goals (symbolist.com)

The Frontier Project is a barrier breaking event.  It is being put together by the bad boys from Talent Anarchy – Joe Gerdstandt and Jason Lauritsen - and it is designed to help create the future of HR.  I think it will be an experience that will change the way you practice your craft as an HR person and the way you approach problems and work with teams.

We’re partnering with the boys to bring this new event to you.  Click here – or on the image in the side bar – register and get a 35% discount.  Yup 35% DISCOUNT.  As the ad says - “you can always use more money.”

Check the newest slide show below on the event – then go register. (Email/RSS subscribers may need to click through to see video.)

C’mon – Let’s go break through some walls together – let’s go get bloody!

Related articles

• Creating The Future of HR with @TalentAnarchy (symbolist.com)
• Being Relevant Takes Effort  (symbolist.com)
• Saying Thank You to Our Own (symbolist.com)
• Work Life Balance Isn’t About Time (symbolist.com)

[New post from Tom Miller - President and founder of Symbolist.  You can read more about him and where he'll be this year on our Leadership page.]

What do you do to be better at your work?

For most of us, staying relevant requires that we regularly invest time and energy in gathering and absorbing information, seeking out and building new relationships and adapting to a changing environment.  Jobs that don’t require this level of effort will be sourced to the lowest cost provider – unfortunate for those that lose jobs, but an economic reality that is blind to the need for the human side of the workforce. (Watch the embedded news clip about a robotic machine that does amazingly detailed work.  The robot costs $30,000 and can work 24/7… Email subscribers may need to jump out and watch it in the post on our site.)

Robots are fine if the work is specific and unchanging.  But if your work requires “knowledge capital” you have to regularly get better at what you produce.  And make no mistake, this type of work is where true value is created in an organization.

I personally enjoy this part of my work and look forward to “unknown” spaces that will be appearing on the radar soon.  I like to work with people that have that same characteristic – and actively look for them – it’s part of what makes Symbolist unique.

“OK Tom – so what?”

This…

Does your organization admit that this is reality or does it pretend that nothing will change and that what you know now will be fine next month?  Next year?

Sure…every company talks about adapting and changing to meet the marketplace needs – but is your organization built to do that?  Some companies are famous for trusting people to expand their knowledge – WR Grace has some very cool stories related to the practice.  Google has a famous practice of allowing their people to spend a portion of their work time on “non-Google” work.

Your company doesn’t have to be WR Grace or Google, but you will need to institutionalize an innovation mindset.

To do that you need to:

• Celebrate when people grow – professionally or personally.  You can’t just celebrate time on the job like many service anniversary programs do today.
• Communicate what the future looks like and help the people you work with see a vision of themselves in that future.
• Highlight the role models that are out on the edge, leading and thinking about the future.  Find the stories in your own company of how people are changing the organization for the better.  Create a formal way to share and promote those people and stories.
• Create space in the organization and in job descriptions for people to think, daydream a little, experiment with new ideas and new practices.
• Expect people to be better.  Set the bar higher.  If people are in a healthy environment, they will want to expand and create.

A lot of companies and managers know that the world changes and that the future belongs to those that change with it.

But few companies – the best companies – take that knowledge and create a process that allows people to take the next step and play and experiment.

How are you actively engaging your employees to create your (and their) future?  How are you reinforcing that this is the expectation?

How are you staying relevant?

Related articles

• Work Life Balance Isn’t About Time (symbolist.com)
• Organizational Change Means Leaders Have to Work (symbolist.com)
• Yoda Was Wrong – When Recognizing Employees There is a Try (symbolist.com)
• Creating The Future of HR with @TalentAnarchy (symbolist.com)
• Are You an Employee Sustainable Organization? (symbolist.com)