Increasing Staff Engagement – When Money Isn’t The Answer

As the economy and organisations emerge from survival to growth what about staff morale and engagement?  Just as leaders can get caught in post recession paralysis, so can employees.  After all the uncertainty and insecurity and with companies maybe asking that bit extra of staff to make it through the recession, what’s next in moving forward?

Well the most superficial response will be bonus’s and pay rises.  Yes of course rewarding your staff is key.  But as Frederick Herzberg said donkey’s years ago, pay is a hygiene factor and not a motivator.  Without it you’ve got serious problems, but there is a point beyond which it doesn’t motivate or engage staff.

In fact Lord Richard Layard wrote a book Happiness – Lessons from a new science.  Research shows that there is a fiscal point above which earning anymore doesn’t make you happier.  If memory serves me right it’s £25K.

So what does increase employee engagement?  Achievement, Recognition, Responsibility, Promotion / Career Progression, Learning and Development, Relationships / Team work, Flexible Working.  These softer, more intrinsic aspects are what  we should ensure are present.  Typically when they aren’t that’s when people start demanding more money.  It’s a sign that they don’t feel valued but are at a loss to put in place the intrinsic factors, so the tangible cash solution is a sticking plaster that patches things up for a while.

As the profits increase staff will, quite rightly, expect a share of that somehow.  Yet in this emergent state your company may not be in a position to offer cash bonus’s.  However if you use the extra cash you have to invest in ensuring the more intangible, intrinsic motivators are present then the payoff’s could be far higher than a pure cash solution.

Is Greed Ever Good? – Remuneration and Motivation in an Organisation

The business culture of the 80’s put a clear emphasis on personal reward on the basis that highly motivated individuals could transform organisations and societies.  This continued until the late 90’s  when we began to see some companies traumatised and bankrupted by the inappropriate use of remuneration as a motivator.   Now there rages a debate about the bonus’s paid in the financial sector, and the short term view or reward they encourage.

The notorious Barings Bank had individual traders on bonuses in the millions yet in the long term these motivated individuals were not fulfilling the company’s objectives.  Then of course there are the reward system’s based on appropriate performance indicators, resulting in the organisation’s success and yet problems arise from the large differential between salaries of senior people and those of middle management.

Wise organisations are therefore trying to reward and motivate all staff so that staff act energetically to further the corporation’s interests both short and long term and feel they have been treated fairly. However there must clearly be in place the link between the items on which they are being rewarded and the actions they are able to take to influence the desired outcome.

A wise organisation accepts that:

• It is reasonable for the individual manager to act in his or her own interests.

• Managers work for people not organisations and want to please the superiors closest to them, or failing that, their peer group.

• Managers want to achieve and will be attracted to those tasks at which they know they can succeed, usually favouring the short term at the expense of the long term.
The clear implication is that an organisation should be aware of the culture at play before relying on a remuneration structure to change performance and behaviour. In other words the management and organisation’s values must be in balance with the remuneration system.
There are 5 major pre-conditions to the installation of an effective reward structure.

1. Measurement: “If you don’t measure it you won’t get it”. There are various measurement systems of which Balanced Scorecard, which sets multiple objectives and is used by Tesco, is perhaps the best known.

2. Monitoring: If the performance measures are not monitored properly or only monitored in a review at the year end, it can give the manager signals that they don’t really matter or, worse still, that failure is acceptable providing all the managers fail together.

3. Control of the tools for the job: The organisation must ensure that the individual is not over dependent on factors outside his control to achieve the performance measures set out (this is the ‘how’ part of the equation).

4. Consistency: Ensuring that short term organisational factors don’t over-influence managers or drive them from their real objective. The organisation must also ensure that its own design (be it bureaucratic or loose) is appropriate to what is being asked of managers.

5. Reward and strategy in line: An organisation’s achieving a clear strategy is not an event that will take place in the future; it is a journey. A remuneration system can be put into an organisation even when it has a relatively muddled strategy providing that organisational and management disputes are resolved by reference to strategy and the “balanced score card”. Only then will there be pressure on the organisation to refine its strategy, structure and remuneration systems.

Based on these 5 pre conditions, there is a checklist of 10 factors that the effective remuneration and reward structure must achieve:

1. Support the business strategy

2. Encourage the desired behaviour

3. Reward relevant performance

4. Be fair

5. Be substantial

6. Be tax efficient

7. Be timely   (The reward must take place close to the achievement)

8. Incorporate non financial rewards (Recognition can be as important as cash)

9. Be firm   (A bonus lost through missing target should not be recoverable whereas a salary increase should only be delayed until target is reached)

10. Be crystal clear

The Benefits Of Career Assessment

How often to you take time to evaluate the progress of your career?

Here’s the outcome for someone who did.

“By evaluating my life and going through career coaching, I was able to find a position that was more suited to my needs.  Plus, since I am happier in my job, I have been advancing faster.   I never thought that a career change at my age would be easy, but through my career coaching, I found skills that make me more adept at my job which helps me to excel more as well as to have more self fulfillment.”

“After I found a career coaching, things started to look up.  Sure, my life still follows that same lather, rinse, repeat pattern, but at least now I feel motivated at work.  For the first time, I feel at home at my job.  That comfort, plus the new challenges keep me happy and interested in what I am doing.  Now that I have a vested interest, I find getting ahead easier and my day no longer drags by.  I’m so glad that I sought out and invested in career coaching.”

You might not even need coaching.  Perhaps just giving yourself a little one on one time and asking yourself questions about your career will give you new impetus.  If you’re disillusioned, seeking a career change or just feel like you’ve plateaued or are about to stagnate, then treat yourself to our free 5 part course and a little one on one time.

Fault finders should be fault menders

Perhaps there is something in the water, but just recently several people have had conversations with me about their colleagues and bosses finding faults only. 

Ranging from the general “No matter what I do they always find something wrong with it/missing.”

To the specific “Last week I handled an incident, kept the company legal and product on the shelf, what do I get, 3 people wittering about some administration I haven’t done.. no thanks for working your weekend or we appreciate this and when can you do Y for us…just people with nothing better to do than find faults.” 

Now these people are bright, self starters, they’re talented and committed, just the sort of people you want to keep in an organisation.  They regularly go the extra mile without creating a song and dance.  But now they seemed to be tuned in to people only telling them what they’re doing wrong / missing.  A case of too much stick and not enough carrot. 

In each case we talked about the intentions behind the person finding fault.  Was it well intentioned, did they care about the way it was received, did they take time to understand why?  Or were they having a prima donna moment, feeling all self righteous because they’d been able to point out something that had been missed/not done yet/ was wrong.  In other words were their ego’s running away with them.

As a teenager if I was having one of my moments pointing out everything that was wrong, my mum would just say “fault finders should be fault menders” and then ask me how I was going to put everything right.  I of course would point out that actually none of this was my fault and so why should I have to do anything to put it right.  Eventually I realised that if I didn’t want to help and put things right I should keep my ego to myself.

As a leader what’s your praise to fault finding ratio?  You’re setting the tone, are your staff following suit?

Let’s face it if you whip your donkey hard enough it’s either going to stop or bite you – and you wouldn’t believe the number of people who are surprised when this happens.