The Truth About Getting the Best From People

by Martha I. Finney

  10 times more likely to come forward with an innovative idea

  1.5 times more likely to stay, even if they are offered a better job elsewhere

  Even though Intuit is headquartered in Silicon Valley—famous for the many ways companies trick out their workplaces like playgrounds with free latte bars and gourmet restaurants—its leadership knows that getting the best from its employees isn't about the toys and the free eats. Getting the best is about building a culture of trust, connection, growth, and service. That culture is sustained and enlivened by its managers one person at a time, one interaction at a time. That's employee engagement.

  There are two ways of looking at the relatively new field of employee engagement. There is the positive way. Then there is, of course, the negative way. Let's start with the negative way first.

  Getting the best is about building a culture of trust, connection, growth, and service.

  Disengaged employees are destructively expensive to have on staff. In the United States alone, they cost as much as $350 billion in low productivity. Their attitude also poisons the day-to-day experience of working at your company, chasing away your best employees—not to mention your best customers.

  Employee engagement is so cheap it's practically free.

  Here's the good news: Companies with a highly engaged culture have shown consistent growth and profitability over recent years, while their low-engaged counterparts report declines in market performance. One study has shown that companies with 60- to 100-percent engaged employees report an average total shareholder return of 20.2 percent. But companies with less than 40 percent engagement show a –9.6 percent return.

  When you do the cost/benefit analysis, employee engagement is so cheap it's practically free. It can begin anywhere within the org chart. Certainly, the experts will correctly say that an engaged culture must be created at the very top as an essential value to have any chance of thriving organizationwide. But, in truth, the engaged culture lives and dies in the moment-to-moment decisions and behaviors of supervisors and managers. So it only stands to reason that engagement can be born anywhere inside the company.

  According to the Hay Group, up to 35 percent of the difference in business results can be explained by the day-to-day differences in the workplace cultures created by managers. So you, as the manager, can make it happen for your department, no matter where you are inside your company. The payoff will be immediate—even immediately visible—and ultimately measurable.

  Does this payoff mean you must bring in free donuts and fresh sushi every day? No. Do you need to allocate budget and space for a half-pipe for skateboard practice outside the break room? No. Does it mean that you have to show personal interest and concern in the well-being of each and every one of your employees as individuals? Yes—even on those days when you're so busy or preoccupied you'd rather just spring for that skateboard half-pipe.

  If you're managing people, you're standing squarely on the intersection between corporate mission-critical objectives and the personal ambitions, passions, and drives of your employees. If there's going to be a 30 percent difference between your department and your colleagues' departments, you can either take the blame or take the credit.

  The choice is entirely yours. And so is the power to make a real difference—one person at a time.

  Truth 3

  It's not money that motivates

  Don't get the wrong idea. This Truth doesn't let you off the hook for fairly compensating your employees for the work they do. (Anxiety and growing resentment that come from being broke can be very distracting.) You can adequately—even lavishly—pay your employees, but if you overlook one most essential engagement tool, this is what you'll get: Ho-hum workers driving around in expensive cars wondering how they can fill this odd, empty feeling inside.

  People yearn for purpose—for doing something that's important, that engages their full potential in a way that's meaningful beyond their personal bank accounts. And that makes your job as their manager a little harder. You may not have as much control over their compensation and benefits program as you might like to have. But you do have control over how inspired they are and how connected they feel to the mission their jobs serve.

  It's not about the company. It's about what the company is doing to make the world a better place. This may seem like an overly romantic or grandiose stretch, but, in truth, most people's standards are realistic and modest. Few aspire to be the one to save the world from Evil Genius with his finger on the button. Most people want to feel that thanks to their efforts, the world is a little better off by nightfall than it was when the day started.

  And the truth is, it is! You just have to help them figure out how what they do makes it happen that way. The first thing, though, is for you to understand how your company improves the world—and then how your job serves that mission. With precious few exceptions (drug dealers and professional assassins are the only two jobs that come to mind at the moment), every paying job improves the day—or the world—for someone else. This is because money is motivated to change hands for one or more of only three reasons:

  To relieve pain

  People yearn for purpose.

  To restore hope

  To bring beauty into the world

  Once you've connected your own job to one or more of these reasons, your next job is to help your employees make this connection for themselves. And that's going to require some imagination.

  It's easy to show a mason that he's doing more than just building a wall; he's making a cathedral. It's even easy to show a hospital janitor that he's doing more than just mopping the floor for the fortieth time that day; he's saving lives. But this same connection can be made to elevate the vision and attitudes of all employees, no matter what they do.

  A music teacher looks out at a room full of snot-nosed kids and wonders if she can do it another day, another year. Mozart was once a snot-nosed kid. And look how well he turned out. More recently, a high-producing salesman who traveled the world marketing telecommunications systems for airports quit one day because he felt that he was born for greatness. Airport electronics just wasn't doing it for him. No one took a moment to help him see that his product helps loved ones fly to one another safely and that when a traveler collapses on a concourse from a coronary, the telecommunications system kicks in, and consequently, EMTs arrive in seconds, saving a precious life.

  Motivation, for this salesman, was not about winning the game of making plan for the quarter. It was about making a positive difference in people's everyday lives, which was exactly what he was doing. His boss just didn't help him see it that way.

  Motivation...is about making a positive difference in people's everyday lives.

  Motivation...is about making a positive difference in people's everyday lives.

  Every job carries with it myriad ways employees can relieve pain, restore hope, and bring beauty into the world. Helping your employees make the connection between their daily deliverable and enduring meaning may not be the easiest, most obvious conversation you can have. But, with a little one-on-one exploration, you'll find that connection together. It could be with the product itself, the customers themselves, the community, the coworkers, even the employee's family and the dream future your employee's job with your company is helping them realize.

  And the conversation you have with your best employees exploring those ways is many times more pleasant than the one that begins with, "Is there any way we can change your mind about leaving? More money, perhaps?"

  Truth 4

  Employee engagement isn't for sissies

  It's easy to underestimate the full impact of employee engagement and how it's going to challenge you, not only as you implement it but also as it helps you carry your company's values into the future. In its simplest definition, you could say that employee engagement is about getting the absolute best effort from your employees by making them feel good about the work they do. What could be so bad (or hard) about that?r />
  Trivialize employee engagement, and you're going to be playing the Hell edition of Twister.

  Employee engagement is not a namby-pamby trip to Candyland—just another employee commitment fad. Trivialize employee engagement, and you're going to be playing the Hell edition of Twister. And that won't be any fun at all. Not one little bit.

  If you take employee engagement seriously, you take on a no halfway, no turning-back high adventure of finding out just how far your personal and organizational courage will take you. Here's why you had better be really sure you want to do this:

  Once you're in, there's no getting out—If you're going to do engagement right, you must go public with your commitments to align your company's actions to its stated set of values and mission. Once you go public, you're stuck with your promise. If you ever withdraw that commitment, you would break valuable bonds of trust, and in the process, rip out a lot of heart and talent. Recovery would be long and painful—if you could achieve it at all.

  You have to take a good hard look at yourself—You can make a list of ideal values for your company, your department, and your own personal life as idly as leafing through an up-market catalog. Everything looks so delightful and so within reach. But fantasy and real world collide when you tally the potential costs of every must-have. You have to decide what you can't live without and what is a luxury. Which values do you prize over all other values? Which would you quickly abandon when times get tough? Know the difference between the two sets, get real with yourself, and base your commitments on your limitations.

  Which values do you prize over all other values?

  You have to be prepared to choose passion over profit—There will be times when the most expedient response to an issue is the one that will make you money. If that choice violates the engagement bond that you've established with your organization, you will start paying for that so-called profitable choice almost instantaneously as your actively disengaged employees rise up—or go underground, which could be even worse.

  You can't finesse or ignore the numbers—Companies that are serious about improving their culture will invest in high-quality, well-designed employee surveys. There will be numbers that relate directly to the way you manage your direct reports. When the scores come back, you have to face them head on and then let your people know exactly how you intend to improve your performance to serve them better.

  You must be willing to cut loose the star players—You will face some agonizing decisions as you move forward with your engagement initiative. One of those choices may be what to do with the bullies who are also the ones bringing in the big numbers. The star players who are the top performers in every one aspect of their jobs—except that they make life miserable for others—are more expensive than you can know. They cost the company in reputation as a best employer, and they chase away employees who know that they can do just as well elsewhere and be happier. They may even stain the company's external reputation by the way they treat customers and vendors. Getting rid of these people will be painful (especially regarding your department's performance), but keeping them will be even more painful.

  You must keep the faith over the din of the skeptics—You've just given your starting lineup the boot. Your numbers are dipping (temporarily). Your quarterly report requires some explaining. The stockholders are becoming disenchanted with this whole engagement thing. You think, "If I hear the word values one more time, I'm going to quit." That's when you have to keep the faith and be willing to stand toe-to-toe with the skeptics (especially the one in the mirror) and remind them that no one said that engagement was going to be easy.

  Part II: The Truth About Yourself

  Truth 5

  Your behaviors are your brand

  Brand experts will tell you that you build an enduring relationship with customers by connecting them emotionally with your product. Sure, it's essential to provide a product that is consistently excellent and priced to appeal to your customer base. But you also have to make them feel good about what you're selling.

  As a manager, you have a brand, too. The way you treat your people categorizes you as a certain type of commodity among your most valued customers—your employees. Just like a box of soap or a cast member at Disneyland, your own features deliver hundreds, if not thousands, of touch points to your customers. These are moments of truth when your people experience your management brand promise and decide whether they're going to remain loyal customers. The way you treat your employees on a daily basis—even in those insignificant moments—makes up your brand promise. And it determines how much brand loyalty your people have to your company and to your department.

  Are you proud of your current brand promise? Or is it time for a major brand overhaul? The answers aren't necessarily easy or obvious. Just like there are many brands of soap and a wide selection of amusement parks to pick from, there is a variety of "right" management behaviors. They just have to be consistently appropriate to the culture you want to establish and the values you want to promote. Assuming you don't behave like a character out of a Charles Dickens novel (Scrooge, for instance), and assuming you behave like a basically decent human being, your management behavior brand can have a variety of characteristics and still be engaging. It just has to create the emotional experience you want your employees to have and, in turn, provide their customers.

  Do your personal habits demonstrate quality standards you expect from your team?

  The way you treat your employees on a daily basis makes up your brand promise.

  If you want a clean and organized department, how tidy is your own work area? If you need employees who speak well and correctly to your customers, does your grammar meet that same standard? What about your vocabulary? Do the words you use set the right tone of formality or informality that would make your customers feel at ease? Do you dress at least as well as you expect your customer-facing employees to dress, even if you sit behind a desk all day?

  Your management behavior brand can have a variety of characteristics and still be engaging.

  Do you treat your employees the same way you expect them to treat their customers?

  If you want a high level of customer service coming from your department, you need to show a high level of customer service in the way you treat your employees. Do you return their phone calls and emails promptly? Do you honor your appointments with them? Do you keep their secrets? If a fleeting bad mood makes you edgy, do you take it out on your people, even if it's only just a little bit? Do you lightly shrug off the rare, innocent mistake? Or do you routinely overlook sloppy work? Or do you pounce on a slip-up as if it were a deadly virus about to be unleashed on Los Angeles?

  Do you fit into the overall company culture?

  You are your company's kind of manager if its customers are your kinds of people. Companies whose customers prefer a high-end, formal experience are best served by employees who behave in a high-end, formal way. And those employees are best served by managers with a more formal demeanor themselves. (The opposite is also true, of course. The wait staff from Le Cirque would be poissons out of water at TGI Fridays.) What that means in specific terms, naturally, depends on the company itself. But if you're not feeling comfortable in the environment there, either internally or in the way the company faces its customers, it's possible that your own personality is a poor fit with the company's brand.

  So the final question is this: Are you your company's kind of people? If not, you have two choices: Change your branding behaviors, or change your company.

  Truth 6

  You can't give what you don't have

  The heat is on. As companies are developing a growing awareness of the real bottom-line value of employee engagement, the pressure to create that relationship is put directly on the shoulders of front-line managers. And that's where it belongs. According to the Hay Group, as much as 30 percent difference in business performance can be attributed directly to the way managers treat employees. However, judging from the accoun
tability that senior leadership places on managers to boost the engagement or satisfaction scores that come out of annual surveys, it would be natural for managers to feel at least 80 percent responsible for that difference in business performance. Engagement, no matter how satisfying it is, is a heavy burden for you to carry.

  If you're not engaged yourself, you can't inspire your employees.

  The question is this: Are you feeling that same level of engagement you're expecting to provide your employees? If companies aren't assuming responsibility for your needs as an employee, you're not a catalyst for high-performing, engaged cultures. You are the scapegoat for the failures of your senior management, who may want the benefits of engagement but not the hard work that goes into it. If you're not engaged yourself, you can't inspire your employees to any level of emotional dedication to their work.

  Companies that measure engagement rely on a certain set of characteristics that describe the ideal experience their employees have on the job. Some start with an off-the-shelf product, such as Gallup's Q12 questionnaire. Others evolve their own custom list, usually with the help of consultants who specialize in engagement and surveys. No matter what the list is or how it's specifically worded, the items most commonly reflect some or all of the following sentiments:

  My company's values are similar to mine.

  I believe in my company's future.

  I see how my job serves the company's big-picture mission.

  I have what I need to get my job done.