The statistics induce nightmares:
· Gallup’s 2013 report on the State of the Global Workplace states that only 13 percent of workers in America are engaged at work.
· The report states that the bulk of employees worldwide — 63 percent — are “not engaged,” meaning they lack motivation and are less likely to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.
· 24 percent are “actively disengaged,” indicating they are unhappy and unproductive at work and liable to spread negativity to coworkers.
In rough numbers, this translates into 900 million employees who are not engaged and 340 million actively disengaged workers around the globe. And this is an improvement from Gallup’s workplace assessment study in 2009-2010, which showed that only 11 percent of the work force was engaged!
How is a manager supposed to drive performance in a work environment like that?
Not as dire as it seems
Take heart. For starters, some respected thought leaders on workplace management and performance improvement believe the Gallup numbers are significantly out of whack.
“Normally we believe numbers from large and respected research organizations. But we have reason to question the accuracy of this number and we are particularly concerned about the impact this message has on the executives of organizations,” stated Jack Zenger, co-founder and CEO of Zenger Folkman, a strengths-based leadership development firm. His comments came in an article for Forbes.com.
Zenger says his company’s own work inside hundreds of businesses around the world reveals a more positive story. “We simply don’t believe that all the corporations we deal with can be that deft at hiding 70 percent of their work force from us. Our experience with workers does not in any way confirm that 70 percent are actively disengaged or not engaged in their work. They are not indifferent and checked-out, nor are they just ‘killing time.’ ”
Zenger feels a sense of urgency to puncture this disengagement balloon. “The drum-beat message to American managers that 70 percent of their workforce is unengaged is not only inaccurate, in our opinion, but it is harmful in the same way. In many cases (if not most), it will create unintended and negative prejudices in the way managers perceive and then behave toward their subordinates. This, in turn, will become a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Small tweaks beget big results
What’s more, for those workers who are not fully engaged, small changes can often solve the problem, say Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick, authors of a number of books on improving workplace performance and the importance of workplace recognition.
In their new book, “What Motivates Me: Put Your Passions To Work,” Elton and Gostick unveil an assessment tool they say provides an accurate means of measuring a person’s core drivers. “The good news: when people’s jobs give them the opportunity to do more of the kinds of things that satisfy their key motivators, they are happier and more engaged in their work. The sad news: most people don’t have a clear understand-ing of what their strongest motivators are; and even those enlightened souls who do understand how they are motivated often don’t know how to put those passions to use in their daily work.”
It does not take a Herculean effort to find a solution to most workers’ disenchantment with their work, Elton and Gostick state reassuringly. “Though there is a prevalent notion that if you’re unhappy with your work that you have to quit and find your ‘dream job,’ for the vast majority of people, that’s just nonsense. Most don’t need to take a risky leap; they just need to make small changes in their work lives. Many of the happiest people we’ve spoken with didn’t find their bliss down a new path; they made course corrections on the path they were already on.”
Motivation through recognition
Recognizing stellar performance has long been a stalwart of building a positive workplace culture and boosting employee engagement. A 2013 Trends in Employee Recognition study by WorldatWork (worldatwork.org), a human resources association, showed that 88 percent of organizations have recognition programs in place, a trend that is on the rise after dropping along with the economy between 2008 and 2011.
Of the top five recognition programs in 2013, the top three remained the same — length of service, above and beyond performance and peer-to-peer. For the first time, however, programs to motivate specific behaviors jumped to the fourth-most prevalent recognition program (overtaking retirement). Sales performance recognition dropped to the sixth spot in the WorldatWork study.
“I think we’re finding that a combination of formal and informal recognition works best,” says Rose Stanley, practice leader with WorldatWork. “Those that put good thought into what criteria they’re looking for reap the biggest rewards. [It takes] really putting pen to paper and understanding how that may differ from one group to another. When you have a better line of sight, you can connect the dots better for every employee.”
Big data’s role in incentive programs
Customer relationship management (CRM) and other ubiquitous sales enablement tools that have been implemented in the past five years have dramatically altered the way sales incentive programs work. “We’re not just an isolated program anymore,” says Tom Silk, vice president of sales and marketing for Corporate Rewards, a New York City-based provider of incentive programs through customizable software as a service (SAAS) platforms.
“You now have data that tells you this group or territory sells better than this one to that level of customer. What we want to do is match what we are able to do with our incentive programs to what the particular manager is seeing within their Salesforce CRM. If we come in with one platform that everyone is using to incentivize everybody the same way, that doesn’t make sense,” Silk says. “Configuring the solution to the tactical needs of the client drives better results.”
Silk adds that today’s incentive program buyers are much savvier about Big Data and the need to sync programs together. “It’s not just, ‘What kind of gift cards do you have?’ You have a much more sophisticated buyer who is adept with CRM and the company’s human capital management needs. There is a technical aspect of this sale that didn’t exist six or seven years ago. I’d say three out of four of our proposals have an integration component with [CRM].”
No easy answers
If there is a unifying message among those we spoke with regarding employee motivation and incentive trends, it is an emphasis on putting in the time necessary to specify your most important objectives. In other words, get beyond “sell more.” From there, discover what motivates your workers and how they want to be recognized.
In “What Motivates You,” authors Elton and Gostick push back against the notion proposed by author Daniel Pink in his 2013 book “Drive” that people are almost predominantly motivated by three intrinsic factors: autonomy (freedom to carry out tasks), mastery (the tools to build competence) and purpose (the clarity that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves).
“The truth of individual motivation is actually much more complicated,” Elton and Gostick state. “It seems intrinsic motivation is not the whole story, and extrinsic motivation isn’t entirely bad. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators are not diametrically opposed. To feel the most highly motivated, most of us in the working world must have some of both.”
In terms of the most popular types of recognition awards used, plaques has held on to the top spot in the biannual WorldatWork Trends in Employee Recognition survey since 2002. “Cash plays a big role, but it’s not the only role,” says World at Work’s Rose Stanley. “When you look at the employee value proposition — what the employee is looking for when coming to an organization — what attracts them is cash, but what retains them isn’t necessarily always cash.”
As Elton so adeptly summarizes, “the better you understand your employees’ passions and motivators, the better you’re going to be as a leader and the more productive they’re going to be. At the end of the conversation, that’s really what melts our chocolate.”
