Happiness at Work: 3. A Discussion with iOpener, Oxford, England

Note: this is the third in a series of posts on happiness at work. See #1 here and #2 here. For iOpener’s blog, where you can find a longer version of the discussion, please go here.

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It has been quite a wild week trying to advance the progess of my second book, while fielding some deliciously challenging questions and comments from the people at iOpener, an organization dedicated to Happiness at Work and based in Oxford, England. I have learned a lot about their approach, and I think perhaps they have learned a bit about engagement. In the end we have a lot in common, which is a big point in itself. One of the biggest things I took away from the discussion is that the happiness at work people are filling a very important need which we in employee engagement tend to neglect: helping people to be able to engage. We talk a lot about what we can do to create the environment in which people want to, choose to, engage. But whether they do or not is sort of inside the black box of the human psyche. We know that personality is involved, which doesnt make for a good outcome if we hire the wrong person who is incapable of engaging: good luck on changing a personality, right? But there are also skills, there are mindsets, which iOpener rightly points out we need in order to fully engage. This means that we can increase the chances of engagement by training people to have a particular mindset, and I for one am all in favor of that. Having said that, I do not agree, as you will see below, that happiness is a breakthorugh of the order of sliced bread or color TV. In some ways the happiness people talk as if they have re-invented and replaced engagement and its performance correlates….but have they really? They say a person can be engaged, even fully engaged, but miserable and wanting to leave. That that person needs to be happy as well, to be fully engaged. But my understanding of engagement includes a strong positive emotional connection above all else, to the organization, to one’s boss, to co-workers, to the job itself. Absent that, a person can perform but in a sort of empty, emotionless way which does not, for me, indicate full engagement. Wanting to leave, how engaged can you be? Not very, in my view. I am including my conversation with iOpener’s Dr. Simon Lutterbie below so you can see how we went back and forward and how I countered the idea that engagement is just re-packaged high performance. Anyone who knows me will guess that I did not take that comment lightly!  Here is what we said, with Lutterbie’s comments in italics:
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Simon this conversation gets more and more interesting.  Don’t worry at all about being  “controversial”, I think that is the way that knowledge moves forward, don’t  you?  As long as people listen to each other, of course!  And as I listen I begin to understand what you guys are all about and how it relates to engagement and other things.  Please also refer to what I said yesterday to Jessica on my own blog, which is that I am not an apologist or evangelist for engagement, have teased people in the field  quite a bit, and enjoy doing so (they respond in kind, all part of the fun).  It has more than a few shortcomings….like most approaches do.   There is more than one path to God and more than one path to an  engaged…or happy… workforce!

OK let me go with your format of quoting me then commenting.  Here is what you said:

What we are interested in is the mindset that make employees feel motivated to excel at their jobs,  gives them the energy and enthusiasm to perform at their best, and the resilience to overcome challenges.

 This is very important, and in the employee engagement (EE) field it is often overlooked.   There is a sense among EE practitioners that as long as conditions are right at work, then people will engage, but this is not true.  I have mentioned to you that personality is a big factor, and while I do see some people working on this, there aren’t enough.  Personality is hard or  impossible to change of course, so that has some extreme hiring implications.  So I believe that we need more of what you are doing, to give people the skills they need to be happy at work, to engage, whatever we call it.  My only question here is the age old one of nature vs. nurture:  what % of a person’s ability to engage/be happy at work is nature and what % nurture.  You muddy the waters a bit with your piece on DNA and seem to move the argument back to nature!   But like you, I do think people can change,  even when their DNA points them in one direction.

Component 2 is a feeling state. It occurs when the worker feels good, motivated, energetic, and enthusiastic. Component 2 is none other than happiness at work!  Engagement may be an acting state, but it  requires a feeling state. You can create the conditions for engagement, and you can give an employee all the resources they need to fully engage. But unless  that employee is happy at work, the employee may not choose to engage.

 I had said that when conditions are right at work, then people can make the choice to engage (“Component  2”).  What I didn’t say there, because I was not attempting to discuss the full blown psychology of engagement, was  that there is an intermediate step, and that is an emotional one, or “feeling  state”.  Cary and I did this is in our book though, where we explained that when the “psycho-social” conditions are right at work (everything from the physical environment to how your boss treats you and much much more), then people experience a sense of high morale (or “well being”) which then translates into the behaviors we now call engagement.  So now you can see the feeling state more clearly in this model, the emotional connection.  One of the most critical conditions we are talking about here, confirmed by much research, is the boss-worker relationship.  This has been tagged at  explaining more than 80% of the variance in the engagement level of workers, an amazing number.  So the emotional connection we feel is in relationship, not just to the job itself but to the people we are with day in and day out and how we are treated by them.  Now here is where we start to disagree:  Component 2 is not just a feeling state, far  from it!  People react to the conditions at work with a feeling state, but the conditions at work are the crucial driver of that feeling state;   those myriad conditions include the boss, but also all those pesky HR things like performance reviews (yuk!) and incentive pay programs, etc.  Morale and EE practitioners and consultants like me are very involved in those conditions at work, sometimes referred to under the useful heading of corporate culture (“the way we do things”).  With 80% plus of an individual’s engagement at work depending on that key boss-worker relationship, we had better see where the good and bad bosses are, and move actively to decrease the number of the latter and increase the former, and this we begin to do through the extraordinarily powerful methodology of surveys.

And when someone works to build engagement, they’re really just working to build high performance.  Which is great. But it implies that  ngagement isn’t a unique approach, it’s  just another name for what people have been doing for years.  

Oh Simon methinks you have just been “hoist with your own petard” as our own Will Shakespeare said.  I am not denying it for engagement, since I have made the same exact comments about it.   In other words,  engagement took the decades-long concept of morale, added some nice flavoring,  microwaved it and served it up as fresh!  But the same could be said for you guys:  your definitions of happiness at work are essentially what people have been saying for a long time represent the engaged worker.  The exact list which you cite for high performance is what you aim for, right?  So you have taken high performance or engagement and re-packaged it as  “happiness at work”.   You are teaching people to be “engaged”…which as I said before is a great thing and very necessary.  Look I am old enough and have been in this business long enough that there is not much new under the sun.  This happens all the time.  Engagement happens to be a word which excites people, they can use it easier than orale (she is “engaged” but not she is “moraled”), they can use it about customers, not just employees etc.  Having said this I will say that I think engagement (like happiness at work, as you describe it) goes beyond performance because it has a strong positive emotional component.   So I would disagree that engagement is simply performance, because for me, engagement means you are emotionally connected in a positive way and that is one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, you perform so above and beyond. As you would say, you are happy. As Jessica said on my blog yesterday, she knows CEOs who are “engaged” but are miserable.  I would not really define them as engaged, I would say they perform, that’s ll.  The level of performance I am talking about simply isn’t possible when you have one foot out the door.  OK maybe for a very short time, but this is a burn out situation which I have seen several times.

So, food for thought right?  I returned your controversial (and somewhat correct!) statement with one of my own.  But I like the tone of this conversation Simon, and appreciate it. This is also very useful for a writer and consultant like me, because it sharpens and clarifies the arguments for and against key things in my field.

best to you,  David

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10 Things I Want To Hear About on Morale and Engagement at SHRM11

Like a lot of people I am excited to be going to SHRM’s annual conference and exhibition this year in Las Vegas, Nevada and to have a chance to blog from there as I did last year. With so many sessions, I have to focus, which is easy for me with my field of interest and the way the sessions are organized. So I can take in morale and engagement all day long, meet some of the great presenters, take their pictures and blog about their offerings. Having said that I want to make a plea for some breakthroughs this year, in that we need to go beyond the meat and potatoes stuff which has been done so many times. Let’s see if some of the speakers can reach down into their creative psyches to come up with answers to questions which this part of HR and general management needs to answer. Here are some of those which come to mind:

–we think of the US as a very open society in many ways, which is a basic building block for worker engagement; yet we only have average engagement levels according to most who measure this…..why is this?
–the UK is even worse, its engagement levels were recently described by my former employer, HayGroup, as “the worst in Europe”….why is this? Is this a sign that social class issues have a big effect on worker engagement potential in a given society? Do other societal and national cultural factors have a big effect on engagement of workers?
–even if there are societal factors which affect engagement, can universally applicable activities create work environments in which workers choose to engage at high levels, almost no matter the society in which those workers live and work?
–we have heard a lot about “happiness at work” lately; some even say we need that instead of engagement. But is “happiness” enough? Can you prove that it drives performance more than engagement? What happens when the “happy” worker meets the boss from hell?
–executive compensation levels, especially in the US, are back at strastopheric levels. Does your organziation consider this when it approaches worker morale and engagement, like Whole Foods and BMW do? Does your CEO truly get “paid for performance” like the rest of the workforce? What impacts do these things have on engagement levels and if so, what can be/is being done?
–trends in engagement are very tricky to tie down, with big differences between the “big guns” of research and consulting in this field, such as Gallup and TowersWatson. Does this mean that they each define engagement differently, and if so how do we deal with this?
–if we cannot agree on engagement’s definition (see above) how can we convince leaders to go to work enhancing the conditions to bring it about?
–similarly why do organizations still compare themselves with outside morale or engagement “norms”, given the big differences in those norms from one consultant to the next?
–there is a tendency for some people with specific skills in the morale and employee engagement (EE) business to think that they alone have the skill-set to handle things in this field; the internal communications people, the psychologists, the HR specialists, and so on. Is this one reason for all the differences in EE definitions, questionnaires and trend data? What skill or skill mix works best for those who are involved in this field?
–how does individual personality affect engagement? You can create the best work environment in the world…but some still will not engage. This is a personality issue, and we need to know much more about it so that we can avoid hiring such people and deal with the ones we inadvertantly hired.

I’d love to see our SHRM11 morale and engagement presenters cover these and other key questions. They dont have to tell us that engagement goes up when people are treated well at work; that first line managers are the key to engagement; or that morale and EE drive performance, all of which we have known for some time. Let’s go beyond the basics to see some new things, which people can really take home and use. I’ll be there asking these questions and more….and I hope to meet you if these are your interests. Contact me through this blog or on Twitter and add more question topics if you want….I’d love to hear them and can ask them for you if you cant make it to Vegas.

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I Finally Gave In and Joined Twitter!

When I went to the SHRM Annual Conference last year as a proud member of the 2010 Blog Squad, I was the only one who was not actively using Twitter. Some of the people there were incredulous (but not those on the Squad, they were nothing but friendly), and some who didn’t make it onto the Squad were a bit peeved that a person who did not use Twitter….can you believe it?…made the Squad in the first place. Not so Jessica Merrill, Goddess of social media and especially Twitter, and author of Twitter for Business (highly recommended by the way). Jessica perhaps felt a bit sorry for me…being out in the cold and all that….but that wasn’t her motivation to give me a complimentary copy of her book at the end of the Conference, which she kindly did. That was simply to bring another person into something which she believed in and felt passionately about. I read the book right away and loved it, but it has taken me almost a year to get around to it (my excuse is that I am busy writing a new book). In any case here I am and I am going to go for it. Its not easy being starting with just one follower…but at some point everyone has been there. In fact I just picked up two more in the last hour…including SHRM’s multitasking social media guru and the man who picked me last year for the Blog Squad, Curtis Midkiff. OK, off and running and totally excited about it, and waiting now, breathlessly, for SHRM11 to start and the Tweetup to take place! Like with bacon and eggs, the chickens were involved but the pig was committed: I am committed to Twitter (but with a better outcome). Follow me and my Tweets by clicking below. I’ll have updates about the new book, ideas I am working on for new blog posts, and pleas for help with ideas for just about everything I do. I am a voracious consumer of information, especially as it relates to my passions of worker morale and engagement. Contact me here or….yes now I can say it…on Twitter. Glad to be there.

Blogging from SHRM 2011: See You There?

Just like last year I will be headed to the SHRM’s 2011 Conference in Las Vegas,  Nevada on June 25th.  I am excited about the conference because last year’s was so great.  I will be following the sessions on morale and engagement to see what everyone has to say and find out what new ideas are percolating “out there”.  I will also blog after the keynotes from Sir Richard Branson (pause for tiny feeling of pride for my fellow Brit), Arianna Huffington (must brush up on my Greek) and Michael J Fox (my hero, I am sure many peoples’ hero, cant wait to hear and see him).  Oh yes the Zappos guy Tony Hseih will be a must-see, given his success and cutting edge management ideas.

Last year SHRM had a special focus on military returnees from the Middle East trying to get back into the workforce and some fantastic speakers, who knocked the ball out of the park with their emotional comments on that topic.  That will also be a feature this year and I am excited to find out what else will tug on the heart strings and stimulate the cortex.

One of the best things about SHRM is the unplanned encounters of great people from all over the world, all HR enthusiasts busting their behinds somewhere, trying to make their work places great, like the rest of us.  Fortunately, despite the reputation of Vegas as “Lost Wages”,  I am not at all tempted by the crap tables:  my casino was the stock market and the 2008 Crash cured me even of that, so my attention will be all business, plus the Keith Urban concert of course.  If you wanted to be at SHRM11 and cannot be, let me know and perhaps I can write about something which interests you?  If you will be there, let me know!

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Women as Leaders: Good for Worker Engagement and The Performance of Our Organizations!

Some interesting information came over my favorite evening TV news show the other day: it was about the role of women at work, something in which I have been interested ever since I was a young recruit at the Hay Group, an international HR consulting firm which specializes in compensation programs, among other things.  My job as a junior level consultant was to learn the Hay System, a method of evaluating jobs for knowledge and skills needed, and responsibility placed on the person in the job.   Each job then came out with a single score of “Hay points”.  It was interesting because it was capable of separating the job from the person in the job.  The system allowed clients to pay women equally based on what was being paid in their market or locality for a given complexity or “size” of job regardless of male or female incumbents.  As such it enabled our clients to tell their female workers that they were being paid, not on prejudiced pay scales for “womens’ jobs” but on something “gender neutral”.  I got a lot of satisfaction from that.  When I soon moved into Hay’s research business (employee opinion surveys, culture, worker morale etc.) I didn’t forget the lessons learned on the compensation side, and have always been interested in data about women at work.

So on NBC News the other day, this piece came on about how many women are now in the US workplace and what positions they hold, how many go to college and so on. Data was also shown as to how they are being paid, which is always a depressing figure.  The employment and education numbers are far from depressing, however. Sixty percent of women now work outside the home; they occupy more than half the professional and managerial jobs in the US, which is an astounding statistic.  There are now more women in college than men in US, and 40% of women are primary breadwinners in their families.

This was mostly great news for women, but it got better: the part which really caught my eye was about top management jobs and womens’ impact when they occupy them. NBC quoted a study, not a new one but one I had not seen before, that looked at 2000 of the biggest US companies. This was done by David Ross of Columbia Business School and showed that when women were senior managers in a company, it performed better.** Ross was interviewed and he said that is because as leaders women are more democratic, less dictatorial and more collaborative. I would add, also more compassionate. Now the jump to engagement here is an easy one: the traits which Professor Ross mentions are clearly ones which are related to creating a more “engaging environment”, that is one in which workers will choose to engage.

The idea that women are having more and more positive influence on work cultures is gaining ground in both books and the blogosphere. In Enlightened Power: How Women are Transforming the Practice of Leadership, Barbara McMahon states: “In the new form of leadership, it is no longer doctrine that creates a following; it is dialogue. It’s more valuable to be able to engage than to influence. Command and control has shifted to collaboration and empowerment.” As blogger Mitch McCrimmon points out: “Regardless of whether more women make it to the top, organizations are becoming more feminine. There is now more emphasis on relationship skills, emotional intelligence, the ability to nurture talent, listening skills, collaboration and partnership. These skills are essential for success for both male and female executives.” At the same time he points out that mens’ competitive nature is essential and that “In any case, this issue should focus, not on men versus women, but on organizational culture. At that level, a mixture of feminine and masculine traits are required. But there is no doubt that we are in the midst of an unstoppable shift to more feminine cultures”

With women now going to college more than men, and that trend accelerating, they will continue to get more of the top jobs. This study would indicate that this bodes well for US engagement and resulting organizational performance levels. That is good news in an otherwise still quite gloomy post-Crash hangover!

** Note: I am aware that correlation is not cause, and the fact that there may be a third element in this story, which “causes” both women being hired to top jobs and great performance by the organization. I was not able to check if Professor Ross had allowed for this, but he talks as if he has. It is certainly worth further research.

Data source: NBC Nightly News (US), “America in Transition”: March 4th 2011

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Employee Engagement’s Big Issues for 2011

It’s a New Year so time to take a fresh look at the state of engagement at work, employee/partner/associate engagement, whatever you might call it. How is this field doing and what are the big issues facing it and its practitioners? What challenges do we face moving forward? Has engagement met its potential in terms of acceptance by the larger organizational community and its leadership?

First of all, 2010 has brought more evidence of the importance of morale and engagement at work as more and more data are added to the extensive set which Cary Cooper and I detailed in our late 2009 book on the subject. No one should now be doubtful that engagement at work is not only a correlate of performance (customer satisfaction, productivity, profitability and even worker health) but more importantly, a driver of this. So this our starting point, the fact that worker engagement is mission critical.

Again this background, there are several issues which this field faces in 2011, and we will look at three of them here:

–Trends in Engagement: Are We Improving? Getting Worse?: depending on whom you talk to there might be good news or bad news. If you talk to Gallup, it would seem that engagement has not gone down during this Great Recession, which would seem incredible until you remember that this means that engagement of employed people has not gone down. Those who still have work perhaps feel so relieved that the downsizing machine has missed them, that that translates into some form of engagement. There are also some very well managed companies which have avoided layoffs by shortening the work week of those who work for them, and they indeed have benefited from stable engagement levels as a result. Some would suggest workers are now engaged only as long as the job market is bad, and they will then fly out of their jobs like out of a cannon, as soon as things turn around. Nonetheless, this is pretty good news and not as depressing as what we hear from others who collect data in this field, namely that both engagement and job satisfaction have suffered badly in the recession. The fact that these data do not agree is something we will cover in more detail next.

–Definition of Engagement: as strange as this may seem, the fact that trend data detailed above differ so much (Gallup has engagement flat while some have a minus 9% shift in the last year) means only one thing, and that is that they are defining engagement differently and this is reflected in their questionnaires used to collect this data. This is troubling for the industry and I have talked about it before, but it is still the case. The field is quite fragmented and each practitioner seems to have different definition of what engagement “is”. Can we imagine what would have happened in the physical sciences if someone said water was H2O and others said, no its HO2…? But in the social sciences we are used to disagreements in definition (witness the arguments about intelligence when it was a very inexact and fairly new concept), although this does not mitigate the problems which this brings to the field of engagement. Somehow and in some way we need an industry standard definition so that all can get on the same playing field and know that we are talking about, measuring and tracking the same thing.

–Professionalism of Practitioners: there has been an explosion in this field and it seems like everyone and his brother is now an employee engagement consultant. This is a bit like when your taxi driver gives you stock tips, and its time to pull back from the stock market. Maybe the field is a bit crowded and buyers of professional services in this area need to remember one of the few phrases I remember from my 5 years of English grammar school Latin: caveat emptor (buyer beware)! I am not saying that there are not great people in this field and I consider it very positive that many wish to help organizations improve in this area. However there is a two-part skill-set which is required to help an organization measure and/or improve worker engagement and morale. First a real professional in this field must have a knowledge of business issues derived from experience and learning in actual business settings, not just academic. Secondly, since engagement is about emotion and human behavior, it is essential to have a background in the social sciences, especially psychology, to really add value. I do not consider a background in communications sufficient, valuable yes but not sufficient for this. There have been too many times where I have seen great communications programs put together for the workforce which had a wonderful message but which in no way represented the way the organization culture really “lived”.

Hopefully 2011 will bring some improvements in these areas which will move engagement forward and into more and more organizations, where it should be. By most accounts the number of organizations which have ongoing and extensive worker engagement efforts is still quite low and I have never seen a number of more than 30% put forward for the US and the UK. The percentages in France, Germany and other European countries are lower even than this. This is pitifully low (given the huge benefits which accrue from it) and anything which can improve it is to be encouraged and welcomed. Part of the issue here is that some of the practitioners whom I have discussed above take a far, far too “touchy-feely” approach to the subject with prospective clients, which puts them off the subject.  As I discuss elsewhere here, morale and engagement are and should be focused on the ability of the organization to achieve its mission, and that is something any CEO can get behind given the overwhelming morale-performance connection to which this blog is dedicated. A second reason for low levels of engagement at work is that engaging workers means coming down off one’s high horse, letting go of ego-based behavior and fears, and some leaders find that hard, if not impossible, to do.  As I have pointed out, ego is probably the greatest destroyer of engagement at work.

So that is where I see this field as we begin 2011, and clearly there is lots to do.  The three areas I have discussed above would be a good start!

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Employee Engagement: Lets Stop Making It So “Touchy-Feely”!

I’ve been reading a lot lately about employee engagement as I get ready to write a new book on the subject. While there is a lot of great material out there, it seems to me there is also a focus on something which is not useful to this field: a tendency to make it a “touchy-feely” subject instead of a solid, data driven business essential. A lot of the reason for this is the fact that many practitioners who now work in this exploding field have backgrounds exclusively in the social sciences such as psychology or sociology, or they are communications specialists. Many have no direct business training and/or experience, and as a result their career paths and knowledge are very different from those in top management at most of our organizations.

The net result of this is a one sided approach to engagement which, while it emphasizes the human elements which are certainly there, neglects the fundamental reasons why anyone in top management would bother to move towards a more engaged workforce.

I’m talking about approaches which refer to engagement requiring “authenticity”, “compassion” and so on. I am as in favor of these things as anyone else, but if I am a tough CEO at the head of a company I need a lot more than this to go ahead with the steps necessary to maximize the engagement of my workforce. In the words of the political slogan from a past US election: “where’s the beef?” The beef is there of course, and its good stuff: worker engagement and its cousin high morale drive performance. Now that is something a CEO can get her teeth into.

Organizations of any kind, from a police force to a hospital or a mining company, exist to achieve a mission. Just as if you wanted to run the London Marathon, you would need to be in shape to do so, and engagement is a big part of the “shape” your organization is in. A great strategy is useless unless your culture is lined up and your workforce ready and willing to make it happen. Engagement is nothing less than mission critical. It’s not a nice, flowery “add on”, its something which one needs to focus on from Monday at 7am all week long, from the C suite to the shop floor to the home offices of the mobile-connected workers. In this hyper-competitive world where competitive advantage can be wiped out by a sudden shift in technology (ask the makers of CDs) and by ultra-low developing-country wages, engagement of one’s workforce provides an edge, something which organizations can leverage as they fight to survive and thrive. There’s nothing “touchy-feely” about this!

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Warning: Ego at Work! Do You Have People Like This Where You Work?

My recent blog post on ego and morale/engagement in the workplace received more hits than anything I have written in the last year.  I wonder why?  One reader wrote and told me that she found it quite stressful just reading about the stereotypical ego-driven manager and how (s)he operates, having had exactly such a person as boss in a previous job.  My argument in the previous blog was that ego is the biggest destroyer of morale and engagement at work, because in so many organizations, there are ego-driven managers.  But there are also, of course, ego driven employees, who may not have much power over others but are a pain to work with, and manage.  They drain the energy of the group and occupy too much time of the manager.  As host of an occupying force, their energy is not going to be focused on your organization and its goals, nearly as much as someone who does not have this trait.  Instead the ego-driven employee will spend inordinate amounts of time on other things, to satisfy the insatiable needs of this force which has them in its grip.

As we saw last time the ego is a false self, built up over time, and usually in childhood, to replace the “real” you, which you decided…unconsciously of course…was not “enough”.  Its like an inner conversation in which you said to yourself, “well I’m not making it with who I am now, so I am going to build a new “me” which will have the characteristics or exhibit the behaviors that I am sure will work with <fill in the blank>”.  At an early age, this blank is often filled with one or both parents.  At a later age, that role is often played by, guess who?  People at work.

This is a normal condition, only the famed spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle claims to have no ego, but the rest of us are stuck with one, to a greater or lesser extent.  The key is how much this false self stays unconscious and drives behavior; in some cases it will remain totally unknown to its host (the ego loves that, it is a stealthy creature) and even completely control its host.  If that is you, you simply have no idea what drives your life and would be amazed to find out.  The ego won’t easily let you, though, and will make you fight like crazy before any light is shone on itself.

We humans think we know ourselves as we get older, but often we do not; instead, we continue to do things which the ego demands in order for it to continue to exist.  Let’s look at some of these behaviors which might show up in your current or prospective employees or yes even….you:

–Sheila has a compulsive drive to up her personal Twitter and Facebook connections, even asking people she knows almost nothing about to become “friends” and competing with others who seem to have “made it” on these platforms.  As a result social networking takes up a significant part of her work day, even though much of it may not be business related.  (How’s that for a productive day?  You added 20 “friends” but got nothing done at work!)  Like many good activities and things in life, Facebook or Twitter can also become an addiction, and although Sheila does not think she is addicted to anything, she nonetheless feels a compulsion to act out this behavior. Unconsciously, Sheila has a deep belief that if she has 5000 Facebook friends she will have certain worth or value which was lacking when the count was 5.  When she reaches that number however, after a painfully short celebration, she finds that it does not “work” and she is no happier; unfortunately she is not allowed more than 5000 friends by Facebook, so is “stuck” there.  Sheila will look for another temporary and fragile solution, or if she is lucky and finds herself pushed by an inner drive or a good friend, be forced inwards for the journey which will lead her to a real and solid sense of self-esteem not based on external events, “friend” counts or material goods.

–Fred treats his bosses like parents, even gravitating to a boss whose style most (unconsciously) reminds him of a parent with whom he had problems.  This same mechanism is at work with the woman who marries a man who treats her like her father did, of course.  Its familiar, its what she is used to, what she thinks she deserves (good or bad, I am not saying this is always a bad thing, its just a common thing).  In the organization, we see this all the time.  We also see a more extreme version, where a mild mannered boss can be seen as a tyrant by an ego-possessed worker, whose bad childhood experience of “authority” makes anyone in an authority position ”bad” like the parent. This is of course a failure of perception, a projection of the parent onto someone who may not deserve it at all.  Of course, in Fred’s case, since Fred always seems to gravitate to people who are actually like his Dad, the perception could be close to reality!  Fred sees himself as a victim of these types of people, but of course he is not: he continually chooses them.  Until he understands his choices and why he makes them, he will continue to do this, and his organization will get less of his talent and energy and more of his childhood struggles.

–Mike expects to be rewarded for just showing up.  His ego has given him its inflated sense of “worth” which it transfers to its host. This is not to be confused with self-confidence or real self-esteem. The ego version is unrealistic and unearned; but if this is pointed out the ego will react harshly, to say the least!  Unfortunately Mike does not have a solid sense of himself as a good or capable person, so external signs are constantly solicited and he pressures his manager in ways that she finds very irritating.  In Mike’s case his problem was exacerbated by growing up at a time when his peer group of “Trophy Kids” was given awards for placing 4^th in a race, for example. Constant positive feedback, which his ego demanded, was actually provided by a (temporary) cultural phenomenon, the expectations of which organizations still struggle with today.

–Johnny makes a confrontation of everything and plays to win at all times, even when this is not at all appropriate.  This drives other team members crazy; why can’t he relax and have fun sometimes, or let someone else shine?  Because his ego will not allow it, it requires constant proof that he, Johnny, is the best! Johnny’s ego scoffs at the idea of making room for, or celebrating the success of others, seeing such apparent generosity as “weakness”.

–Christine cannot receive anything but an “exceeds expectations” rating on the dreaded annual performance review.  Unlike the normal disappointment which might come to those who are rated “average” (although never using that word, always euphemistically called “meets expectations”), Christine goes into a major funk each time and gets into a verbal fight with her manager.  She also gets seriously discouraged, instead of being able to bounce back and excel based on what she has learned. This in turn reduces her chances of genuinely deserving a hike in the rating next time.

In each and every case here, the ego has taken over an individual.  In one way or another, and there are several ways in which this happens, a false and very fragile self has been created and maintained, sometimes for decades, and ends up causing havoc everywhere this person lives….including at work.  The amount of time and energy which goes into managing the hosts and the egos themselves is uncountable, because it is so widespread.  The customer satisfaction consequences of such ego-driven (and often disgruntled) employees are off the charts.  But there is hope, if we can identify early some of these cases and avoid them.  If not, then we have to look at ways to manage people we have hired (and did not know what was in store for us).  We will look at some of these strategies next time, as well as talk about what to do if these cases remind you of…YOU!

Why is European Customer Service So Bad? A Tale of Two Food Stores

I just got back from a long stay in Europe, where I live part time (in Germany). I am always surprised when I am there as to how bad customer service can be. I’m not talking about business to business service, I am talking about service in retail establishments like supermarkets, cafes and restaurants. We all know that Paris has a bad reputation for surly service, although I must say it is not worse there than in many other central European countries, and to a lesser extent in my native Great Britain.

Why am I so surprised? Because the Europeans often spend so much time training people in jobs like waiter, yet the results leave so much to be desired. A Swiss waiter or waitress will go through all the training about wines, types of and placement of cutlery, on and on, but when they deliver the food, except in the highest-end establishments, they throw it on the table with little or no eye contact or words exchanged. Language is not the issue, I speak their language(s). When I point this out to my Swiss or German friends, they agree, telling me that they are amazed in the other direction when they come to the states, how friendly and good the service is here, and how they are just “used to it” in their own countries and can do nothing to change what they see as a cultural phenomenon.

Let’s do an interesting comparison between two arms of the same company, the famous Aldi food store chain from Germany. Aldi (the word Aldi means “Albrecht Discount” because it was created by the Albrecht brothers, who became billionaires as a result of their creation), is a wildly successful concept for the German food market, selling a limited selection of inexpensive and good quality items in a fast paced environment, which flushes customers one-way through the aisles rather like IKEA. When one reaches checkout, the real fun begins, not only when a lane opens, which creates a stampede, but also when one reaches the clerk doing the scanning. Let me just say, you had better be prepared! Get your bag(s) ready, and fill them as soon as you can. You will receive no help from anyone to load your shopping, and heaven help you if you load slowly and drag out the waiting time for the line….the withering looks you get will drive you to a higher-end store like Tengelmann next time, if you are thin skinned.

Now let’s cross the Atlantic to the US, where Aldi owns a food store chain with a remarkably different culture, Trader Joe’s. TJ’s, as it is called by its many fans, was bought by Aldi around 1979, but few if any Americans know that. TJ’s and Aldi’s German stores could not be more different, not so much in the way they look or the quality of food they sell, although that is a bit different, but in the way things work. At TJ’s a line which opens does not result in a stampede, instead the person first in a longer line will be invited to be first in the new one. On arriving at the checkout, clerks will, in a remarkably relaxed and friendly way, check your stuff then load it expertly into the bag(s). No rush, no frenetic feeling, yet it all happens fast. TJ’s does not necessarily have more customers in the store at one time than Aldi, and yet it will always have six or so checkout lines going. Aldi tops out at three and often has only one, with the line snaking back into the store. That changes when enough people call out “neue Kasse”, or as the military would say, “call for backup!”

How is this possible? Clearly TJ’s is a profitable enterprise even given the apparent inefficiencies built into the system vis-à-vis its parent’s German stores, such as more checkout clerks and loading of customers’ bags by them. I bet Aldi has studied the numbers and would introduce the German system if they could….but of course they can’t! This is because the US has a shopping and general service culture which demands that customers be treated in a certain way. Having to stuff your own bags would be seen as a major insult; having the clerks do that is a minimum expectation. Having long checkout lines, the same. Germans are of course rather oriented to rules and perhaps they see the Aldi system as “those are the rules and I abide by them”. Faced with this situation, Americans would say, “those are the rules and unless they change I am voting with my feet and going elsewhere”.

This is a blog about morale and here is where I am leading to: I have shopped Aldi in Germany many times and when I look at the workers there they look somewhat burned out and certainly harried, tired, stressed. They rush from one task to another as if their life depended on it, and that includes when they have check-out duty. On a recent visit to a German Aldi, a friend of mine was looking for an item which she could not find and a clerk who was stocking shelves was working in the area; instead of stopping to help my friend, the clerk berated her for being in the way! The pressure on the clerks seems to be so intense that stopping for a customer, also in my experience, is almost the last thing they want to do.

Trader Joe’s people on the other hand, no matter if they are in California where I live or any other state, seem to have that “laid back” relaxed style even though they work fast and efficiently. They are friendly. I’m willing to bet their morale and engagement is head and shoulders above that of their German colleagues, which has many significant long-term implications for their business, their longevity on the job, and yes, on their individual health. This is a shame, Aldi has proved that they can master a system in the US that makes both workers and customers happy. For me as an Aldi customer in Germany, I only tolerate it to get the cheap coffee, cheese and wine which they have.

As for the heavily trained waiters in Switzerland and their non-existent people skills, give me an untrained US worker any time, who smiles at me and says the classic “have a nice day” when I leave. Better a fake smile than a real scowl.

Have a Nice Day!

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.