Are you Unintentionally Discouraging Your Employees from Speaking Up?

By Allison Reynolds

Performing businesses thrive on two-way communication. The best ideas for improvement frequently come from the ‘shop floor’ or ‘open office’ where the workers know the issues and opportunities. The biggest problems can often be avoided if these issues are raised when they are first discovered. Harnessing these opinions and improvement ideas is very difficult for many managers.

Most people accept that employees will not speak up if they perceive a threat of punishment for doing so. However, a recent article in The Harvard Business Review highlights the much more common issue of employees keeping their ideas and opinions to themselves due to a sense of futility, rather than fear of personal consequences. If they perceive that nothing will happen anyway, why would they bother? It’s just not worth the effort. Speaking up is all too often unintentionally put on extinction by managers who are too busy or simply don’t recognise the importance of encouraging opinion from the workers.

“If you send signals that you’re already overwhelmed or conversely completely satisfied with the status quo, then it shouldn’t be a surprise if your employees doubt you want to hear about their ideas”.
The key to increasing the behaviour of employees sharing their opinions and ideas with you is to make sure that you reinforce all attempts. Booking time in your diary to solicit their feedback will increase the likelihood that you will do it. When you do get the feedback, make sure you reinforce the employee. Whilst you may not be able to implement every idea, saying thank you is often not enough. Consider other ways in which you might reinforce contribution, perhaps by letting them know that you received their idea and are considering it or talking about it at the next meeting.    Do nothing and pretty soon, you’ll be on your way to getting nothing.....or perhaps that’s where you’re starting from today.

http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/05/do-your-employees-think-speaki.html

It’s Not Them...It’s You

By John Austin, Ph.D.

The old joke goes like this: A couple had been married for 25 years, and the husband says, “Look, I told you I loved you when we got married; if anything changes I’ll get back to you!”

That kind of feedback is just not good enough for today’s world, in relationships or in business. Instead, we need strong feedback sources that we can rely on in order to improve what we’re doing. We just can’t learn unless we regularly see how our behavior affects others. This seems like a “no-brainer” – most organizations have spent literally thousands of hours arranging feedback systems to gather data from their customers.

My bank has a feedback system whereby the corporate office gathers satisfaction data after customers visit a branch. The system is rigid and automated. In their effort to make one size fit all and make it efficient to collect the data, the survey asks many questions of the customer that are irrelevant to your specific case – I took one of their surveys and after 5 minutes I was very frustrated. There was no personal touch, there was no relationship, and there was not much incentive for me to give thoughtful responses to the questions.

I visited my branch the manager recently and she asked me to give her branch a good rating on the feedback system. I asked her why she felt she needed to ask me to give her good ratings; and she told me that she is forced to account on the phone to her boss for every rating below a perfect-5. The change in her behavior over this new feedback system has been dramatic; she appears nervous and needy in her interactions with me – not good traits for a banker to exhibit.

Getting accurate and timely information you can trust is essential. The truly enlightened companies constantly seek better ways to talk to employees to obtain and use the information that is freely available to all who have strong enough relationships to get it. Lots of companies use external survey firms, these have a bad habit of producing levels of complexity that stifle the original intent of the surveys. Many also produce lengthy reports that make it very difficult to identify the key results you require.

Estimates suggest that managers actually receive between 10% and 20% of the feedback that employees could give, if they were willing to do so. Some of the techniques we like to use to get employee feedback include Survey Monkey and RF response cards to ask questions to live audiences and get their anonymous opinions on the spot. Once you develop your key relationships you can just ask individuals for feedback and get honest and good pinpointed responses. It takes lots of time and experimentation to get it right, but once you do, your improvement skyrockets. Once you get the pure stuff, you’ll never go back to the old stale ways you used to collect feedback on your ideas.

It’s the way you tell ‘em...

By Howard Lees

I have been made aware of some events that have occurred which were reported completely differently by two different attendees. Here are the stories:-

Situation 1
Manager’s story – “I sat down with my engineer and chatted to him about the course and his homework. It was good crack, it’s nice to be able to chat about non-work related things with my people.”
The engineer’s story – “My boss came over to me the other day and gave me a bollocking for doing my coursework in the office.” Moral to the story – One manager’s crack is another person’s bollocking.

Situation 2
Director’s story – “I’ve just completed our road-shows around the business, we presented for 2 hours letting everyone know the company business plan, what the future holds, it was really invigorating. There was no dissension whatsoever, I’m really fired up.”
Worker’s story – “We had to down tools last week to sit and listen to a load of company bullshit. It took two hours and we lost our bonus for the day, thanks a lot!” Moral to the story – What’s interesting to Directors might not be interesting to the workforce.

Situation 3
Team leader’s story – “I got the team together in the office today in order to thank them for their great work over the last couple of months during these difficult times.”
Team member’s story – “We got our usual pep talk today, you’re all doing really well but you cannot let up, there can be no slacking, blah, blah, blah, nag, nag, nag.” Moral to the story – If you are going to thank people then just do that and nothing else.

How Powerful a Motivator is Avoidance?

by Rachel Edwards

Losing something makes us twice as miserable as gaining the same thing makes us happy – in other words we avoid loss twice as much as we want to incur a gain.

In a test run with over 1000 students, mugs were given out (which were meaningful to the students). The students were put into pairs and one of the pair was told they would be selling the mug, and the other buying. The seller was asked how much they’d be prepared to part with the mug for, and the buyer asked how much they’d spend. On average, the seller wanted twice as much for the mug as the buyer was prepared to pay.

This experiment describes loss aversion. Loss aversion can produce inertia, or a strong desire to stick with what we have. For any of us still paying fees to a gym we never attend, or a magazine we don’t read, or higher fees to a credit card company than available elsewhere, we’re probably experiencing some inertia in order to avoid loss.

So, can we frame information in a certain way to make it more effective and influence people’s choices?

It seems so: a group of homeowners were 300% more likely to carry out energy efficiency improvements in their home when they learnt they were losing 50 cents a day versus homeowners who were told they could save 50 cents a day by doing the same thing.

Most of us are aware of how our mood can affect our decisions, whether we’re extravagant when we’re happy or grumpy when we’re tired. Have you ever wondered if your mood affects your pocket? An experiment was run to assess the impact of mood on how much we spend.

A group of people was split into two; half of the people watched a sad film clip and were asked to write about it, the other half were asked to watch something neutral (a short film showing calming fish swimming around). The people were then instructed that they were moving on to a separate activity (unrelated to the film clips) asked to identify how much they’d pay for certain items. The people who had watched the sad film clip were prepared to pay 30% more than the neutral group, and willing to sell items for 33% less than the neutral group.

Applications for these ideas in our day to day lives are plentiful; whether we’re pitching a new idea to the team (“we’ll lose £100k if we don’t implement this” versus, “we could save £100k by doing this right”) or just organising our diaries so that we make sure our moods don’t aversely affect our decisions.

This article was inspired by ideas discussed in ‘Nudge’ and ‘Yes’.

Coaches Corner – Staying calm in a crisis

As the effects of the credit crunch spread there are a number of managers who appear to be having trouble keeping a cool head in a crisis. I have had it reported to me that some previously calm managers are emitting destructive comments like a fighter jet discharges flares as it goes in to attack.

The real test of a good leader is how they behave in a crisis, of course it can be difficult to stay calm, but it’s not impossible. People can do it if they arrange their environment so that its filled with reminders to take a breath before responding, this kind of ‘pairing’ is a great way to ensure you are surrounded with reminders of the importance of staying calm.

I often write in big letters on my wipe-board, things like ‘YOU ARE TIRED’ or ‘IT’S A CLIENT, STUPID, STAY CALM’, or recently ‘YOU ARE OLD, WRITE STUFF DOWN’. I change them every time I say something stupid, I change them regularly!

Ideas for Wimps

This year’s BMT conference featured a speech by Howard Lees entitled ‘Ideas for wimps’, it contained material from his new book of the same name. Here is the introduction to give you a flavour.

My wife took this photograph when we were on holiday in Switzerland; it was funny when the pigs started chasing me, not so funny for me when they sped up and made the kind of noises I imagined pigs make when about to feast.

This book is predicated on the fact that all of us are wimps at some time, even the hardest people I know have had their wimp moments. I have attempted to put together a set of chapters here which I hope will resonate with you. I have encountered many examples of how fear stops people doing what they feel are the right things and have developed a number of tools for individuals to help them overcome this fear. Fear is not a bad thing, our bodies are designed to detect fear and respond in ways which help us deal with the threat. Fight, flight and freeze are the physiological responses to a threat; if the threat is a grizzly bear then you can run, fight the bear or stay very still and hope he doesn’t notice you.

In the workplace it is sometimes easy to see who decided to run, who fought and who stood still hoping not to be noticed. Some workplace environments are a joy to be part of and leaving them can be a struggle. Sadly there are also some work places containing people who are in a permanent state of boss induced paralysis. In the workplace we have choices which will determine whether we will place ourselves in danger. Our perception of what is danger in the workplace is developed over time, our past experiences guide us. The fight, flight or freeze responses still apply but you are hardly going to physically fight, run or stand very still in the middle of an office hoping no-one will see you.

Leaders who recognise that there will be fear in the workplace, recognising how and where it will manifest itself and dealing with these stress points would be seen as good leaders. Most leaders I have encountered are on a journey of enlightenment, some have travelled far; some are still in the garage.

Removing fear and the causes of fear in the workplace would be a good objective for leaders. However if the leaders are poor there are many techniques where everyone else can create their own positive bubble. This book will discuss various workplace situations I have witnessed, been told about and read about, I will offer commentary and some ideas of things you could do to reduce your chances of just being a wimp!