Let's roll out a couple of organizational realities today to get into the topic at hand:
1. You've got employees.
2. The employees come to work each day.
3. The employees give you minimal effort without you asking. That's what you get in exchange for salary, benefits, etc.
4. You can get more than minimal effort for your money in several ways. You can scare your employees through punitive measures (although the returns are short-lived), you can become best in class in measuring results and performance management, etc.
5. It's hard to get more than minimal effort. Damn hard.
6. The easiest path to get more than minimal effort is to hire people who traditionally give more than the minimum.
7. There's only so many of those to go around.
8. For everyone else (those that migrate to giving the minimum), you've got to come up with a culture and strategy that engages employees to give more than the minimum (I'll call this DISCRETIONARY EFFORT), often with no financial rewards.
In short, you need to think like an online community. You know the type of community - one like Yahoo Answers that engages readers to provide increasing amounts of time and labor with no direct path to increased rewards. All because they LIKE AND ARE ENGAGED BY THE CONTENT/TOPICS and get a non-financial high from contributing.
Need an example? How about ThisNext out of Santa Monica and how it corrals the sweat equity of volunteers. More on getting free labor from the engaged user at BusinessWeek:
"It's dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, an advertising creative director in her early 40s, begins to surf the Net. She searches intently, unearthing such bizarre treasures for sale as necklaces for trees and tattoo-covered pigs. As usual, she posts them on ThisNext, a social network where people exchange shopping leads. Why does she spend so many hours each week working for free? "It's sort of a cool feeling that you're influencing people," she says.
A half-hour's drive to the west, a serial entrepreneur named Gordon Gould strolls into the Santa Monica offices of ThisNext. Gould has managed to entice an army of volunteers, including Sweet, to labor on his site without pay. Traffic on ThisNext is soaring, with unique visits nearly tripling in a year, to 3.5 million monthly. Revenue comes from advertisers, who pay to display their wares amid so many shoppers. What's in it for the volunteer workers? "They can build their brands," Gould says. "In their niches, they can become mini-Oprahs."
Here's how it works: Entrepreneurs like Gould build meeting places that provide visitors with tools to express themselves, mingle with friends and strangers, and establish their personal "brands." The result, when all goes well, is an outpouring of creativity. These bottom-up efforts have produced not only ThisNext but also YouTube (GOOG) and even American Idol.
The challenge for managers all across the economy is to harness as much of this free labor and brainpower as possible to their own enterprises. From universities to the computer labs of Internet giants, researchers are working to decode motivations and perfect the art of enlisting volunteers. Prabhakar Raghavan, chief of Yahoo! Research, estimates that 4% to 6% of Yahoo's (YHOO) users are drawn to contribute their energies for free, whether it's reviewing films or handling questions at Yahoo! Answers. If his team could devise incentives to draw in an additional 5%, it would enhance Yahoo's pages, bringing more traffic and advertisers to the site. Incentives might range from contests to thank-you notes."
Now think about your company, specifically our exempt/salaried ranks. They've got a choice if you aren't really focused on what they are doing. They can do the socially acceptable norm (40 hours) and go home. Or, you can figure out what makes them tick, maybe give them tools to work remotely so they can find work/life balance, and watch the hour count go up as they become more engaged in their role and the mission of the company.
It's the holy grail of engagement, and it's part hiring for motivation, and part motivating and engaging once they're in the door. I suspect much like the woman featured in the BW clip above, the secret sauce to this type of engagement is part praise, part visible scoreboard, and part future career promise for the individual moving forward if they put in the time.
Kind of like why I blog each day, right? Think about it and figure out what you can do to create that type of "discretionary effort" in your employees. Remember, they don't have to give you the last ten hours of a 55 hour workweek - the key is to make the value proposition better than Xbox or TV... without money...
HR Capitalist - Great Post. I have to say I am a big fan of #6. The easiest path to get more than minimal effort is to hire people who traditionally give more than the minimum.
Dare I say not every (perhaps many) managers understand what makes their people tick or how to reach into their souls and figure out how to engage them. Therein lies the secret sauce of great leadership; figure out not just what your the talents of your team are, but what are they passionate and excited about - then you get true engagement and that extra 10 hours of the 55 hour week!
There's a ton of books out there on the subject, I happen to be reading Ken Robinson, Element right now and it speaks to this subject...but there are scores of others too.
The reality, there's a ton of coin spent on training programs for managers on how to engage their people that is wasted because they didn't try a little harder on the hiring side and determine if their new whiz has the goods and is a great fit for the role, the manager, the team and the culture. In that realm, we fail...and then we have the audacity to blame the employee rather than look in the mirror and admit we screwed up.
The engagement game isn't all hard though, and if we just practiced a little more gratitude we could even engage the toughest, surliest of employees.
TF
Posted by: The Talent Freak | February 26, 2009 at 09:18 AM
In most companies,they try to innovate benefits or rewards for employees to do more. But I believe it would be a lot easier to hire one that really gives more than the minimum.
Posted by: Kim-free information exchange | February 27, 2009 at 02:11 AM
Great post Kris.
The key things that stood out for me are:
Hire for passion (read motivation) for the job and the company
Visible Scorecards - that is HUGE when it comes to reinforcing the real culture of a company
Make the job more than a job - you really are competing for their free time - or time they would rather do something else
If you get the first one right the others are much easier to attain. I'm am constantly surprised that companies don't use employee referral programs more widely to get the right type of people in the first place. Who's better at picking the right people than the people who are doing the right things now?
Posted by: Paul Hebert | February 27, 2009 at 05:20 AM