Effective Communication

Some years, ago, I retold an interesting workplace story as related in a book by Barbara Garson.

A clerk in a large insurance company happened to spot a glaring discrepancy in a form she was typing. In a certain store owner's policy, two figures had been transposed through a simple error. The result was the store was insured for $165 000 against vandalism but only for $5 000 against fire. The clerk's first instinct was to reach for the phone to inform her supervisor of the error, for the sake of the unfortunate store owner.

"But wait a minute," she then thought to herself. "I'm not supposed to read these forms. I'm just supposed to check one column against another...If they're gonna give me a robot's job to do, I'm gonna do it like a robot."

Revealing, isn't it? The president of a large industrial corporation summed up the problem well when he confessed in a radio interview: "Most companies assume you should check your brains every morning at the factory door."

What's also interesting is that in the end, the insurance clerk - against her better judgment, so to speak - did apparently inform her supervisor about the error. Garson believes this highlights one undeniable fact: "For most people, it's hard and uncomfortable to do a bad job."

That's undeniably true, but when people opt for putting their best foot forward in today's workplaces, they often find that not a few obstacles are thrown in their path. And when executives and managers set out to give their employees the self-respect they badly need and deserve and some feeling of job satisfaction, these do-gooders at the top sometimes find that the whole area is full of minefields. Further, when companies decide to reward their workers for exceptional performance, the impact is often far from what they intended.

So what's going wrong? David Sirota, co-author of The enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit By Giving Workers What They Want sheds a lot of light on the subject in a special interview with Knowledge@Wharton. According to Sirota, asking how to motivate employees is a silly question. The real question is: "How do you keep management from destroying motivation?"

He points out that people coming to a new job are quite enthusiastic, but morale, or enthusiasm, declines precipitously after five or six months. And in case you should interject that natural honeymoons always come to an end in any event, we find that in 10% of companies the honeymoon does indeed continue throughout a worker's career. So if organizations that are able to sustain enthusiasm do exist, why can't the rest follow suit?

The crux of the matter is, of course, that it's pretty hard to be wildly enthusiastic about a company that's not enthusiastic about you. Not even to mention if it couldn't care a darn about you.

Sirota is quick to counter his colleagues in the human resources industry who claim that direct financial remuneration is not in itself all that relevant nowadays. Baloney!" is Sirota's response..."If I feel underpaid and if I feel that the company is nickeling and diming me, or wants to pay as little as possible, there is not much else an organization can do to boost my morale."

But having said that, he stresses that there's another side to the equity, or sense of being treated fairly, that every employee seeks. Simply put, workers wanted to be treated respectfully, not as children or criminals.

Admittedly, a very small part of every workforce - Sirota estimates about 5% is "allergic" to work. Then you have a very small minority who not only shirk but actually make trouble. "But the bulk of the problem is not hostility. It's that people have become indifferent." But in any event, asks Sirota, who to employers have to generalize from the troublemakers to the rest of the workforce? "The mistake we make is that we feel we have to be consistent, that we have to make the same rules for everybody, so companies are consistent in treating everybody as a child or criminal."

And that, he emphasizes, is very, very destructive.

On a higher level, but not all that much, is the style of management Sirota calls "transactional", where workers are like ciphers. The attitude at the top is: "We paid you, now we are even. We don't owe you anything." The highest and most desirable level is the "partnership organization where the "because I paid you, we are now even" doesn't enter into the picture. "It's more like a relationship between mature adults -- not children or enemies, but allies. "

And what more could any employee - or any employer - wish for?

Labels: the workplace

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