Welcome to the Morale-Performance blog

Hello I’m David Bowles and I want to welcome you to my blog on morale and performance, the theme of a book published worldwide by Palgrave-Macmillan (see tabs above and picture below), which I co-authored with Professor Cary Cooper.  Instead of just focusing in the book on “what to do on Monday morning” to improve morale, Cary and I have looked in depth at the performance connections with morale…the things which are the answer to the question: “why should I care about this touchy-feely stuff”?  As we say in the book, performance is the reason why you should care and why organizations large and small are making morale “mission critical”.  I look forward to sharing with you here the research-based data we feature in the book and discussing your reactions to, and experience with, what I have to say.  Whether you are interested in productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction, worker health or innovation…all are affected by, and our data show, driven by, high morale.  Coming at a time of unprecedented stress and upheaval in organizational life, the drive towards high morale and the workforce engagement which results from it, can be our way towards success in the tough, globalized world which is our future.  I look forward to sharing this journey with you and hope you will contribute your ideas and thoughts.

Ego: The Biggest Threat to Employee Engagement

I often get asked this question: what is the one thing which is most likely to prevent an organization from having an engaged workforce? I believe it is something which lurks deep in the hearts and minds of individuals: the ego. What is the ego?  There are two ways to look at it, one from a spiritual perspective and another, psychological.  Eckhard Tolle, the great German spiritual writer and teacher has done a good job merging these two, while defining and describing it perhaps better than any of the many psychology books which I have read.  He says in his book “A New Earth”:

Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned , mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of “I”, a sense of self.”

Tolle points out that this leads to a separation of the individual from his/her sense of “being” and therefore from others;  in more extreme cases of ego-posession, the sense of simply (human) “being” almost disappears and is replaced by an identity which focuses instead on objects (or what Tolle calls “form”).  These objects can include one’s house (large of course, McMansion anyone?), the type of job or position one occupies, wealth, educational background, other status symbols such as cars and countless other “things” which enable the ego to pretend that it’s owner is “better” than others. 

The Princeton dictionary brings this into focus with a concise definition which is very aligned with how most people see and use the word “ego”: 

An inflated feeling of pride in your superiority to others

So what does this have to do with engagement at work?  Plenty if you think about it.  Imagine the worst boss you ever had, was she/he loaded down with ego?  Here are some of the symptoms:

• she takes credit for projects which you started and carried out
• he never hires people smarter than himself
• he “licks up” and “kicks down” in the organization structure
• she cannot take criticism
• he is a perfectionist and one can never “do it well enough” for him
• she never allows anyone else to make any significant decision in her area

 

This is not a happy person.  The ego posession makes him feel extremely vulnerable because identification with all the “things” in life is like building a house on sand.  Those things have ways of going away, as all eventually do.  Money can disappear,  as can jobs, “trophy” spouses, and other status symbols.  Living on the knife edge means always having to make sure than nothing, nothing at all, upsets this fragile status-quo, which at work means always having to check up on you to make sure you will not show this person (often a boss) up in a bad light.

You can hopefully see the short step to engagement:   you are there at work to share your talents and skills and help the organization succeed.  You love your job, but your boss….oh dear, your boss is an ego-maniac!  You didnt know that at first, your radar didnt send out a code red alert when you had the interview, but you found out later that something was very very wrong.  All the things which I described above, started to happen.  You arrived at the job ready, willing and able to engage but now…now the thing you most want to engage in is finding a new boss there or perhaps leaving the organization for a new job.

One of the problems in the world of work is that ego-driven top management often picks those like themselves;  they call it a “nice fit”.  I call it, “extending the ego-model out into the whole organization”.  This means you are unlikely to get far by complaining about such a person, even if you describe what they do:  top management will laugh and say that that’s quite normal, healthy behavior.  From where they stand it is. 

Speaking of top management, one of the most out of control aspects of CEO behavior is the arms race to get more and more compensation.  I have written at length about this because  I believe it erodes morale and engagement.  The ego loves the idea that “I” can make more than the next guy (or gal), and is horrified at the idea that I would ever make less!  The amount of ego-driven greed at the top of our organizations is staggering, with ratios of CEO pay to that of the average worker above 300:1 here in the US.  Of course the ego is canny, and needs to make sure that such excesses are guaranteed.  Heaven forbid that the ego would not receive what it is worth!  This means setting up their compensation in such a way that they are never affected by something as mundane as…performance.  Where do you think the “golden parachute” came from?   In these cases,  the ego’s ability to create real “separateness” makes it very able to totally justify this behavior and not allow its “host” to have a sense that others are affected in any way.  Only in some cases, like John Mackey of Whole Foods, or top management at BMW, have senior people transcended their egos and looked to the greater good in setting their own pay.   I love this quote from BMW’s press office, talking about how the company restrains top management bonuses in relation to what average workers receive :

“We don’t just want to build sustainable cars. We also want to have sustainable personnel politics. We think this is good for the company culture”. 

As we saw with the list of management traits above, control is another sign that the ego is lurking.  Ask an ego-driven manager to give up some control, to delegate, to flatten the structure and let some teams manage themselves, for example,  and you will be met with a show of horror…..and logical justification as to why that should never happen.  But these aren’t the real reasons:  under the surface, the ego abhors loss of control because of its fragile nature and high levels of fear, and the sense that such delegation might lead to loss of status in some way.

So what can be done about this?  Certainly try and be a bit more like BMW and introduce a sense of fairness into the “personnel politics”, as they call it.  Fairness (which does not mean equality of outcome!) is a key to high morale and engagement at work.  Try to hire those with talent but less ego….interview for this trait, become acquainted with the signs, avoid it at all cost!  There is nothing wrong with self confidence and an assured manner, but that is not what I am talking about here.  As an excellent blogger Gwyn Teatro recently said, we need more humility in the workplace,  to which I say, amen, Gwyn.   Self confidence, yes by all means, but a basis of humility.  Then we can create the conditions under which our workers feel that they are part of something, that they are respected, that they are there to perform their best in the highest interest of the organization, not to feed someone’s ego!  Feeling and knowing that, they will gladly engage.

SHRM 2010 Conference, The Blog Outtakes, 2: Al Gore

This is the third in a series of blog posts which were written for SHRM’s 2010 annual conference in San Diego, as part of my membership in the Blog Squad. This one did not appear on the official blog but I had fun writing it and wanted to share it with you. Al Gore was really good, tailored his message well to the assembled HR folks, was funny (his trademark “Hi I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next President of the United States” was expected but still cracked up the 8000+ people in attendance). He wove HR and climate change together in an interesting way, which was not shrill, but with a steady fact-based approach. He was more optimistic than I expected, given the calamity in the Gulf, perhaps even because of that. Here is what I said:
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Monday General Session: Al Gore

By David Bowles @SHRM10 Blog Squad

I couldn’t help it. I had closed my eyes and was ready to hear that voice, the voice of Darrell Hammond, doing Al Gore on SNL and saying “lock box”. I felt that Darrell did it even better than Al, it was the slight exaggeration which made it so funny and played into Al’s reputation at the time of the Bush-Gore contest, 2000, for being a bit…how can I say? dull? A reputation which he slammed today at the San Diego Convention Center as he told funny stories and covered hugely divergent content with almost no notes.

I waited and waited to hear the Al version, but it didn’t happen. There was no lock box, Al didn’t talk about social security at all (which was what he was going to put into the aforementioned box). He had plenty of material without that.

Its hard to believe the achievements of this man. His introduction started with the Nobel prize of course, then the Oscar but then the unexpected (because I refuse to watch all the self-congratulatory shows) Emmy and a Grammy….who knew he could sing so well? I know he didn’t sing, but just the thought of it was almost as good as my “lock box” (actually it was for a “spoken word” album). Of course he was VP too, keeping the home fires burning while Bill Clinton was off doing what he did best…I mean of course balancing budgets, creating jobs and generally making us all more prosperous (those days seem far away right now but somehow this SHRM event has rekindled my natural optimism significantly). We haven’t even covered being on the Board of Apple at a time of its most extraordinary success, being also an adviser to Google, and the inventor of the Internet in his spare time (just kidding… I am sure he never said that). Think about it, what else would you want to do in life?

It seems what he wants to do is run his TV Channel, Current TV (which has won the Emmy) and keep spreading the word that we have to do something about climate change. I have seen his movie, and the data are familiar, but we received an update on the ice melting, the weather becoming more and more violent (the “1000 year” flood in Nashville, Gore’s home town, only recently, was a good example….how many thousand year events can one have before people realize, its real?)

What impressed me though was his in depth knowledge of business practices, especially those which are impacted by HR. He covered a whole range of them and reached out to the SHRM membership by doing so. We didn’t get the usual “climate only” approach, but instead he wove business sustainability into the climate situation. Imagine, he said, thousands upon thousands of jobs making windmills and solar panels, here in the US; no more wars to protect our oil supply, balance of payments issues greatly reduced. Imagine all this. His vision received a warm response.

But I never heard the words “lock box”, so I’m off to YouTube to get my Darrell/Al fix.

SHRM 2010 Conference, Vineet Nayar and Google’s Shannon Deegan

This is the second in a series of blog posts I wrote for SHRM’s Blog Squad at the 2010 annual conference in San Diego.  This one did appear on the SHRM blog but I wanted to share it with readers of this blog. See here for the previous post on Marcus Buckingham’s amazing appearance at the conference.

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General Session 6/29; Vineet Nayar and Panel Discussion

By David Bowles @SHRM10 Blog Squad

Vineet Nayar

Its not often you get to be in the company of CEOs who have such a stellar reputation as Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, a $2.3B, 60,000 employee company in India.  Listen to this:  Tom Peters thinks he just might be the next Peter Drucker.  They study Mr Nayar’s management style at Harvard; the London Business School praises him, it goes on and on.  Added late to the General Session he turned out to be a bonus which I am glad I did not miss.  Now I have to go and get his book, “Employees First”, a philosophy which adds, but not in the book title, “Customers Second”.   Talk about changing paradigms, all that stuff about the Customer is King?  Forget that, that’s so…20^th century.

Some five years ago his company was on a ledge, “on fire” as he says, and they had to ask some deep questions about who they were, what kind of business they were in, and therefore what kind of business should management be in.  Nayar’s solution was to turn things upside down, literally, the org chart is now an inverted pyramid but unlike some other flipped pyramids (the airline SAS for example), the employee and not the customer ended up on top.

At the time of crisis, Nayar and his team realized something so critical that its worth discussing here:   they understood that management’s job is not to lord it over everyone, but to “induce the employees to add value” in what they call the Value Zone, that area (far removed from the CEO!) where the employees meet the customer.  The traditional approach breeds distrust;  this approach, driven by transparency, breeds trust.  Nayar’s personal 360 review is open to everyone in the company, that’s just one example of this.  He no longer talks “pyramid” but “sphere” for the way the company operates, which he describes as a true democratization of the workplace.  A great point he made: “how can we all work so hard to have democracy in our political life but shy away from it in our work life?”  Finally I also liked his three stage approach which he say he based on the great teachers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King:

1.  Create dissatisfaction with the status quo (“we can do better”)

2.  Create a romance of tomorrow, a vision for how things can be better

3.  Make the actions plans to get from here to there.

All of this is just management-speak unless it is lived.  Nayar deserves bragging rights: HCL cruised through the Great Recession with big gains in revenue, profit and head count.

An amazing guy.

Panel Discussion:

Shannon Deegan, Google Director of People Operations — Strategy, M&A and Staffing

This was a very good panel and although they didn’t discuss anything earth-shattering I was struck by a couple of things the Google guy (Shannon Deegan) said:

—no work spot is more than 200 feet from a kitchen (I was hungry when writing this, so listed it first).  This encourages working together throughout the day.

—Google encourages people to spend 20% of their time on their own projects which may have nothing to do with company goals.  Some of the best ideas have come from this, like Gmail.

–Because of their origin as an engineering company (both founders and the CEO are engineers) Google is a heavily data driven company.   This translates into very significant use of people surveys, both “pulse” versions as well as full blown total organization 100 question surveys they call “Google Geist”.  They slice and dice this data with as much enthusiasm as they do their ad revenue data.  As interesting as this, the fact that they ask if people want to be identified or not, and 90% click “not”.  Truly amazing, and a sign of the level of trust they have built.

This is all very interesting for me, a survey guy.  The common refrain on the blogosphere now is that short surveys like Gallup’s Q-12 are the only way to go, or better still, banish surveys from the organization.  How interesting that GOOG (love that stock symbol) is going totally in the other direction, which is exactly what my increasingly lonely voice had been saying in my own blog (big surveys are a goldmine of what to do for employees to help them engage).  But don’t feel sorry for me: now I have some company and great ammo….

SHRM 2010 Conference, The Blog Outtakes 1: Marcus Buckingham

As one of SHRM’s Blog Squad at their recent annual conference, I had a chance to see and hear some great things. Not all that I wrote, however, got into the official blog. So like others on my blog team, I am giving you a chance to see what went on and share my impressions. It was a great conference with some fine speeches and interesting sessions with Al Gore, Marcus Buckingham, the head of Google’s People Strategy and many others. I focused on the keynotes and anything which was workplace morale or engagement-oriented. I also spent an incredibly touching day listening to material on hiring and supporting our returning vets.  Marcus Buckingham spoke on the last day and I did a “Prequel” for him, to introduce some of his ideas to those who had not read his books (which included myself until a month ago).  Here is what I said after he spoke:

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Marcus Buckingham-The Sequel

By David Bowles, @SHRM10 Blog Squad

Buckingham signs for almost 2 hours at SHRM’s Book Store

Let’s see if I can explain this to you: I had high expectations for this presentation, very high. As high as the blackened ceiling in the giant room where the presentation took place. Sure I had seen MB before on video and thought he was good. But this exceeded my expectations so much that they blew through the ceiling and threatened to penetrate earth’s atmosphere. I don’t use such hyperbole too much, but trust me, its true. I have seen hundreds of presentations and made hundreds myself as a consultant but I cannot remember when, if ever, I saw something so good. Its hard to put my finger on it, was it the disarming English humo(u)r, which he warned us about and then promised to raise his hand each time we should laugh at a joke? Was it the self deprecation, laughing gently at himself? Was it his hilarious comedy routine about his and his wife’s visit to their son’s Kindergarten, and the lessons about strengths and weaknesses which that gave us? Was it the way he went through a fact- based presentation with no notes and yet made it seem like an amusement park ride, not a serious topic like “Leadership”, which in fact it was. Was it his mastery of these facts and his use of stories and examples (like Rosa the super-housekeeper at an LAX Hampton Inn)? All of the above.

Afterwards, to show you that this man is more than a great speaker, he signed books from about 10.15 to noon. At 11 when I checked up on him and took some pictures, the line was still huge. As he eventually walked away he was graciously willing to briefly meet, and he said something to me which I won’t forget, after I told him how much I loved the presentation: “I was just out there entertaining myself, really”.

That’s the way it should be done. Thanks Marcus, in my view you were the star of the 2010 SHRM show, a high bar indeed.

SHRM 2010 Annual Conference…What an Experience!

I got back home yesterday afternoon from a 5 day assignment as one of the 5 Blog Squad members for SHRM’s annual conference (see our posts here). This is an event which takes no less than six years to plan….so next year’s in Las Vegas (with Sir Richard Branson and Michael J Fox) has already been in planning stages for 5 years. The scope of this thing is amazing: 11,000 attendees this year (up from 7,000 last year in the depths of the recession); 4 keynote speakers including Al Gore, Steve Forbes and Marcus Buckingham, and no less than 800 volunteers. Hundreds of sessions, usually 20 at any time period from which to choose, but none which conflict within the major topic areas like Talent, HR Law, etc. They pull it all off with such ease, it seems to fly along.

I’ll be honest and say that I never had been a SHRM member till this year. I had been too busy as a consultant and too wary of anything which smacked of bureaucracy of any kind. Consultants are Lone Rangers in the best of times and that certainly described me. But now that I know what SHRM is and what it can do I have become an enthusiastic convert. SHRM ROCKS!! Yes they literally rock, we were dancing before the first keynote to the Black Eyed Peas, and by “we” I mean a massive room with at least 8,000 people in it. A/V was fantastic, giant screens and super audio. I could go on and on but I want to say, that from the top of SHRM to the volunteers to the Book Store people to the Social Media people to the state organizers to …everyone I met….I cannot think of a friendlier, more competent or more hard-working organization. They treasure their members and it shows. The networking possibilities are great, as is the chance to learn new things and hear people like Buckingham, who hit the ball so far out of the park yesterday morning, it went into the next zip code.

I’ll write more because I learned things which are relevant to this blog but first I wanted to say, thank you SHRM, you gave me an opportunity and experience which was simply…unforgettable…and for that I am so grateful.

Can you tell I fell in love with SHRM at this Conference? I admit it……

BP: A Disaster for the Gulf and a Painful Lesson on Corporate Leadership

As a British import to the US its very sad to see a company based in my former homeland horribly pollute the waters and land of my adopted one. Even worse is to see the ineptitude with which BP is dealing with this crisis. Is this the best that the UK can do in terms of leadership of its biggest companies? If I worked there I would have been squirming daily as CEO Tony Hayward put his foot in his mouth over and over again then finally was pushed from day to day crisis management and showed up….on a yacht. He “got his life back” all right, sailing on the pristine waters off the Isle of Wight, such a contrast to those he left behind him in the Gulf of Mexico. Even BP seems to have sensed that something was very wrong with Hayward’s performance, so they trotted out their Swedish Chairman for a meeting with President Obama. Sure enough, he also screwed up by talking about the “little people” who were affected, right there outside the White House…I mean this might sound fine in Swedish, but please, if you are on the world stage, run what you plan to say past an English speaker!! Could Hollywood cast better characters and create such situations, dripping with irony like Hayward’s sailing trip? With great difficulty.

My morale as a BP employee right now would be rock bottom. I would be wondering, first of all, how did BP fool us all into thinking it had been re-born into an environmentally friendly company, when they are reported to have spent less on alternative energy than they spent on changing their logo to reflect that new direction? I would be thinking, secondly, how do such people as Tony Hayward, with almost zero emotional presence, with no apparent ability to actually listen to people who have been affected by their company’s recklessness, get to be CEO of such a large and formerly prestigious company? Is this the Peter Principle, where someone is promoted to their level of incompetence? Yes but only partly; I think Hayward is the recipient of that classic promotion mistake: take someome smart and successful in the core competency in which the company operates (geology), add some special relationship with the former CEO, and promote him to the top job. A formula for disaster. Hayward talks with such low affect, I am surprised someone on the Board doesn’t demand that he be tested for a pulse. I mean even by British standards, he shows little emotion and one could hardly feel him caring at all, as he waited to “get his life back” as soon as possible.

The spill is much bigger than anyone thought: a “worst case” of 100,000 bbl a day, (yes that is an astonishing 4.2 MILLION gallons a day); of course we dont yet know if that is what has happened, we have no idea. What we do know is that BP looks like they have rushed the last part of this drilling job because they were over time and over budget. Now we have to pay the price in lost jobs and an environmental catastrophe. BP’s image, meanwhile, is in tatters, but that seems trivial compared to the jobs lost, the lives upended, the loss of life, the horrible mess on beautiful beaches, and so on.

What I am left with is this image of Hayward day after day on TV, pitifully unprepared for this calamity, and shockingly bad as the front person for this global giant. Will we ever learn that it’s not enough to be the best geologist, engineer, accountant…whatever? That doesn’t qualify you to run an organization. Ford learned that lesson: their super-successful CEO, Alan Mulally, never had anything to do with autos before running that company, except driving one to work in his previous jobs. You don’t need to know all the technical details, that’s what the technical people are for! You need to know about…and have the built-in talent for…leadership.

It may be too late for BP to learn this lesson. They have gone from Beyond Petroleum to…Bankrupt Perhaps?

(photo BP British Petroleum Co., Ltd., 1922; public domain)

Macmillan Nominates “Employee Morale…” as Business Book of the Year in FT/Goldman Sachs Contest

I’m very pleased to say that the book I co-wrote with Professor Cary Cooper has been nominated as Business Book of the Year 2010 in a Financial Times/Goldman Sachs contest due to be held in October 2010. The book is titled: Employee Morale: Driving Performance in Challenging Times and is the first of its kind to link worker morale and engagement to crucial performance metrics such as customer satisfaction, profitability, productivity and worker health. Using data from the world’s largest workforce opinion databases and research from the best academic centers, we make the case for morale and engagement not only being connected to but driving performance in these key areas.

Read more about the contest here:

http://www.ft.com/indepth/business-book-award-2010

For more about the book please see here.

Joining SHRM’s “Blog Squad” for Annual Conference in San Diego, June 27-30

I’ll be blogging from there for SHRM’s 5-person Blog Squad; should be a blast, hope you come by and say hello if you are there!

Its a real honor to be with such an talented team:

 Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR, HR professional, television host of “Job Search Secrets,” author of Tweet This! Twitter for Business, and blogger at Blogging4Jobs.

 Rachel Salley, SPHR, an HR consultant and blogger with Musings From the Career Anarchist.

 Matthew Stollak, Ph.D., SPHR, assistant professor of business administration at St. Norbert College and blogger at True Faith HR.

 April Dowling, SPHR, HR Generalist, active member of the Birmingham SHRM Chapter and blogger at PseudoHR.

 http://shrm.org/about/pressroom/PressReleases/Pages/NewBlogSquad.aspx

Memo to the Morale/Engagement Survey Haters: Here is Why You’re Mistaken

It had to happen:  the backlash against employee opinion surveys, engagement surveys, morale surveys, call them what you will.  The sound you hear on the blogosphere in places such as HR Capitalist and Employee Engagement Network is a crescendo of voices saying that surveys are just so 1990, they are done with, finished, they never were that useful anyway.  We read of the thud of massive survey result feedback books arriving on organizations’ doormats once each year and everyone groaning that they have to, once again, wade through all this data.

As I look at the people who are saying this, there is a mix.  Some have done quite a bit of surveying and got sick and tired of it over time or had a bad experience once or twice.   Others seem to have no experience at all and yet wish to pontificate about surveys anyway.   Common themes are that:

–nothing was ever done with it

–it didn’t relate to morale or engagement “on the ground”, in other words a really engaged team might come across as disengaged in a survey

–it took too much time

–it replaced one-to-one contact which is what workers really wanted

–surveys are “unscientific” in any case

This is a shame, but it is understandable.  The survey industry certainly has made some mistakes and in some cases failed to adapt to the times.  However, to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to discontinue surveying or decide not to do this if you have never done it, is a mistake.  The reason is that surveys are the ONLY method of collecting information about morale or engagement which meets all of the criteria shown in the table below.   Those criteria are:

• Providing a full “census” of all your people and not a sample.  You don’t want to sample because of one good reason, you leave out people who want to express their opinions.  Sampling also has myriad statistical issues which have to be resolved in order for the sample to be ……
• Generalizable to the whole;  you need to be able to say, the information we have here truly represents our whole organization or that part of it in which we are interested.
• Providing quantitative data.  As a result of having zero or minimal quantitative data, one cannot do crucial things like compare results to the past and see change (or lack thereof), make a benchmark for where things stand now, internally rank groups and find “centers of excellence” within your own organization and so on.  These are all incredibly valuable, if done by a knowledgeable practitioner with the right tools.

So let’s look at various methods of finding out the key question:  “how are our people doing?  Whether you are interested in engagement, morale, satisfaction, culture or climate, this is the basis of what you need to know.  Several methods exist for doing this:

• Ambush survey:  the boss (or boss’s boss) arrives in the elevator at the same time as you and quizzes you on how things are for the 30 seconds it takes to reach your floor.  Of course ambush surveys can happen anywhere, including on the phone.
• Casual chat:   your boss sees you in the cafeteria and sits down for a talk.
• Group/Team meeting:  more structured, focused on issues, etc.  May be peers only or may be attended by management.
• Self directed group:  this is a team which runs its own affairs, usually handling all that HR used to do, including hiring and firing, setting goals, internal people management issues, etc.
• Focus group:  a sample of people gathered for a task such as identifying issues for an opinion survey questionnaire.  May or may not be structured to statistically represent a larger whole, of which these people are part.
• Employee opinion survey:  called by many names including all those above (engagement, etc.).   Web-based and individually completed, paper and pencil and group-completed or combinations of these.

(Note: I left out social networking methods, partly because they are so new and we have no data on how they work and secondly because the issue of confidentiality looms so large for them I am not sure they will be so useful in gathering really solid data; that remains to be seen).

Each method above has strengths and weaknesses in relation to the criteria above (full census, confidentiality and numerical data).  If you choose to run only focus groups, for example, you have several problems.  Often it is very hard to make them statistically representative of the whole.  Then you need a skilled facilitator running them so that the “talkers” do not dominate with their endless stories about…whatever.  Even then, those who are shy but may have extremely valuable information may not speak up.  Also, those who are not necessarily shy but fear their views will be “outed” if they complain about something, keep quiet.  Focus groups are very time consuming, yet even within an hour period it is impossible to cover more than a few topics in depth.  You can see, the list is long and the issues are big.  Yet people on the blogs insist they can “talk to people” to get the information they need about engagement, morale, etc.

The table below summarizes these issues for each possible method of information gathering:

Methods of Gathering Morale and Engagement Information **

	Sample or 100% Census?	General-izable to the Whole?	Anecdotal Or Numeric?	Structured or New Information Possible?	Confi-dential?	Allows for In-Depth Study of Issues?
“Ambush” Survey	Sample (small)	No	Anecdotal	New Information limited by “Fear Factor”	No	No
Casual Chat	Sample (small)	No	Anecdotal	New information, but limited	No	No
Group/Team Meeting	Sample (very limited)	No	Anecdotal	New information, but limited	No	Yes, can do over time
Self Directed Group	Sample (very limited)	No	Anecdotal	New information, but limited	No	Yes, can do over time
Focus Group	Sample (usually limited)	Limited	Anecdotal	New information, but limited	No	Yes, but limited by time
Employee Opinion Survey	Typically 100% Census	Yes	Both	Both	Yes	Yes

As you can see, surveys of your workforce win hands down.  They are the ONLY method of finding out “how our people are doing” which meets all the important criteria.  Anything else leaves you with less, sometimes far less.  The information you then have is second rate, even wholly misguided. Can you then base decisions on it?

The table is a summary, and does not even begin to cover the psychological factors which come into play when one human being talks to another: issues such as selective listening (filtering out what is uncomfortable to hear, or what does not fit into preconceived notions, for example).  Of course surveys can also be mis-interpreted, but professionals in this area know how to help internal or external clients face the data, and such data is much more difficult to fudge in most situations where it is openly published, as it was with all our clients as a condition of our working for them.  Try doing that with information which is collected in a quick chat between an employee and her boss’s boss in the elevator or on the telephone, which can be immediately forgotten, or turned into something quiet different, etc.  Alternatively it can be, and often is, incorrectly generalized to larger groups when in fact it represents just one person.

I challenge anyone: let’s take an organization of 5000 people scattered here and there and you go and talk to them and I will survey them.  I’ll make it so that you win if we both come up with the same information…how’s that for a deal?  But if my survey tells a different story in any area (geographic) or on any topic, we will have the issue of which is “correct”.  The tie breaker will be like cards: confidentiality is the Ace, and if you cannot provide that in the method you used to collect the data, you will be trumped.  Much research shows that confidentiality changes the data you receive, so try ensuring that with your “talks”.  I already know the winner here:  the survey.

No matter what the gurus on the blogosphere say, there is no substitute for surveying your people at work.  Far from being “unproven science”, good surveys are heavily researched and validated (see below);  they provide far better data than any other method in my Table, above.  Some bloggers make the amazing point that they conducted an engagement survey and found that the most engaged groups came out worst on the survey; this was then used to invalidate the whole process!  This is Organizational Psych 101.  Good surveys have to be carefully constructed:  they must pass tests of validity, for example, whereby they are shown to measure what they say they measure.  Using a bad survey which does not correctly identify highly engaged groups is a lack of methodological rigor for one instrument, not a failure of employee surveys as a whole, which provide extraordinary benefits to smart organizations worldwide.

When I was full time in the business of running such surveys, my clients wanted and received these benefits and took full advantage of them.  They had early warning of things in Tokyo or in their ER; they knew what was happening in the heart of their German operations or in the building next door; they knew which of their 100 hospitals was doing a great job and why (meaning they could use that to help other hospitals); they could compare and rank morale and engagement for each sales group across all operations, whether around the state, the country or around the world.  Surveys made all of this possible.

All surveys are not created equally, that is for sure.  To be any good, you need excellent, heavily tested and validated questions; you need to cover the crucial issues in that organization; you need a process which is quick and efficient; you need comprehensive and totally honest feedback; and you need the survey to be part of an overall effort which puts people first and wants to create absolute excellence in that relationship.  A survey should never be a stand-alone effort, an end in itself.   No serious practitioner would ever agree to that, and in fact if I felt a potential client was not going to follow-through, I refused the assignment since I did not want my firm associated with such a failure.  My best clients saw surveying as only a part of their goals of being world class in terms of a high morale culture, which was lived and breathed by everyone who worked there.

Managers running around chatting with individuals is a great thing and absolutely necessary on a day to day basis.  But to use it in place of a survey when you really need to know “how our people are doing” on a large scale (and who does not need that at least as much as they need to have a handle on their finances?) is like someone taking snapshots of people at their workplace. Well constructed and run surveys, like those of the really good practitioners in this field, are a whole-organization MRI or CT-scan.  That’s the difference.

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**  Table above excerpted from Employee Morale: Driving Performance in Challenging Times by David Bowles and Cary Cooper. Copyright © 2009, 2010 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

Goldman Sachs: Can Employees be both “Engaged” and Unethical?

This question has been banging around my head since the SEC charged Goldman and one of its star traders with civil fraud.  Can a company have very “engaged” employees who are at the same time highly unethical?  The allegations relate to the mortgage securities business and one particular financial vehicle, so they are very focused;  but they look like a proxy for a lot that happened in the last few years, and Main Street seems to be happy that Wall Street might be…finally…getting its comeuppance for helping bring about the Great Recession. 

As a former active stock trader (for my own account) I am very aware that every trade involves a buyer and a seller, and that shorts have as many rights as longs.  This is not the point.  The point is that the game is meant to be played on a level playing field, with equal access to information for all.  With that in mind one can take the risk and bet on the direction of a stock, mortgage bonds, etc.  So if there is fraud, the game suddenly changes and one side benefits to the detriment of the other.  This is what the SEC is charging. 

So let’s consider the Goldman culture:  don’t you think that people who work in such a successful environment, where the average bonus for 2009 was more than $700,000 and where they are among the best and brightest people in their field, in the world…don’t you think these people have high employee engagement?   Read the e-mails of the trader who is charged, the “Fabulous” Fab, he seems to be having a blast, even though he admits to not understanding what the hell he is selling.  Doesn’t it make sense that this environment would be one in which people would be extremely engaged, partly by the intense nature of the business, by the fact that Goldman can and does hire the most enthusiastic, the most motivated, the most energetic?  By the fact that they can earn what for most of us would be like winning a lottery every year?  I’d love to ask the person who has surveyed this company’s employees but I am sure he is far too ethical to tell anyone about a client, and I would never actually do it anyway.   Perhaps he is a lot more ethical than some of those he is surveying?  Why do I say that?  Because the Goldman e-mails indicate that traders regularly characterized one or more of the financial instruments which they were selling as “shitty”, as famously demonstrated in Congress the other day when the mails were read by the Chairman of the committee which gave Goldman people such a grilling.   Did the traders tell the buyers how “shitty” these were?

So it has occurred to me, and not for the first time recently, that engagement, high morale, call it what you will, and ethics…can be quite unrelated.  This goes against what I thought I knew, but life always proves me wrong when I think I am sure about something.   The reason I thought ethics was important in engagement was that there is evidence, which I presented in my book,  that ethical companies are seen as very attractive to some people, and they engage more because the company lives sustainability, fair trade, no- sweatshops, Green values.  This is especially true for younger workers for whom these things seem to be especially important.   Clearly though, as we saw at Enron, some people have values which are quite different and they find a place where those values are being lived, and those values have nothing to do with fair trade and so on;  they have to do with winning at any price, lying and cheating.  Witness the gung-ho Enron energy traders who delighted in getting large areas of California to be “browned out” (lose electricity) by their trading prowess.  They gave names to trades which have been immortalized in books such as “The Smartest People in the Room“.  They actually were thrilled that “Grandma”, three states away from their Houston offices, would have no power.

I know that some of you reading this would say, these people were out of control, they were deranged in some way.  I would say that much of the time they probably exhibited many of the traits of an engaged work force, as we currently define them.  Engagement definitions, as far as I can tell, make no mention of ethics or morals. It’s clear therefore that lack of a moral compass does not have to deny someone the chance to be engaged.  “Values” for one person can mean honesty and fairness, for another (usually unconsciously of course, most would not openly admit such a thing), hiding the truth and greed. Yes, ethics can engage certain people, those for whom this is important.  But there are obviously more than a few people who don’t care about that, who care about making money and doing what they can to advance, and whatever the company wants them to do, and to hell with ethics.  Companies and individuals with these values will, inevitably, find each other.

Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that this never ends well.  There is a form of “corporate karma”.  Enron went bankrupt and its auditor went out of business;  sadly many innocent people who were probably very ethical and might have known nothing of the fraud being conducted on other floors of their Houston tower, lost their jobs and retirement plans.  Many Goldman people are certainly this way too, they are honest and ethical people.  But Goldman’s reputation, especially on Main Street, has been devastated by the activity of some.  How endemic this is in the firm, we may never know.  They have become the poster child for bad behavior, even though many on Wall Street see what they did as “business as usual”, and their alumni who have access to television pulpits (such as the frantic Jim Cramer) defend them, as one would expect.   So what is to be done?   I am not saying that we need to extend the definition of employee engagement to include ethics;   I am saying though that we need to be mindful of this.  We love football teams which win within the rules of the game; we hate those that cheat, those that secretly film another team’s practice to gain advantage against them.   Even Goldman has very recently said it plans to go deep into its culture and make some changes.  I hope they do.  “Engaged” employees who lack the “moral” root of the word “morale”, that’s not a long term strategy for any organization, no matter how successful they are for a while.