What really makes employees productive?

Powerful article in the New York Times over the weekend about employee satisfaction and productivity.  The authors, Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and Steven Kramer, point out a connection that should be obvious but isn't:  dissatisfaction on the job connects directly to a lower bottom line. 

Employee engagement may seem like a frill in a downturn economy. But it can make a big difference in a company’s survival.... Conventional wisdom suggests that pressure enhances performance; our real-time data, however, shows that workers perform better when they are happily engaged in what they do.

What do employees find most engaging?  Amabile and Kramer's study showed a clear result:  "of all the events that engage people at work, the single most important — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work."


Managers can facilitate this progress.  But Amabile and Kramer found that they're missing the boat:

Unfortunately, many companies now keep head count and resources to a minimum and this makes progress a struggle for employees. Most managers don’t understand the negative consequences of this struggle. When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.

Here's a clear call to action:  let's humanize the workplace, encourage creativity and meaning, and help people feel that their presence makes a difference.  It's not just good-heartedness; it's good business sense.  


Photo:  Creative Commons

Good words

Part of creativity means keeping your learning curve as high as possible, and part of teaching is learning. - Yo-Yo Ma

Two to tango, four to square dance

Excellent article in Slate that looks at creativity in partnerships and takes on the pervasive cultural myth of the lone genius.  Joshua Wolf Shenk even takes on the whole notion of a separate "self" - an idea that's been questioned by such paths as Buddhism and Advaita.  
Do we really exist outside of relationships?

I've always been annoyed by the phrase, "We're born alone, and we die alone."  I can't speak about the death part of it, but having given birth, I can say most emphatically that we're not born alone!  Some woman (and likely a whole bunch of other people) are on the scene and working very hard to make that birth happen.  And, as the article points out, babies are interrelating right from the start.

We Americans seem to be especially in love with what Shenk calls "the atomized person."  I can't help thinking that this notion is partly responsible for the polarization of the country today, and the apparent loss of the sense of the collective good.  If we saw harming our neighbor as actually harming ourselves, we might have a different view.  In the piece, John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago says:  "We're ready for a Copernican revolution in psychology." 

Which sets me to thinking about how what aspects of learning design may be based, unknowingly, on this underlying belief in individualism.  Are there ways to do it better?

At Workplace, we adore collaboration.  From the basic pair who run the company (Dan and Beverly Feldt, who are husband and wife); to our fabulous interactors; to our clients, whose great ideas are always incorporated in our "flight simulators"; to our focus groups and participants, whose grappling with the situations we present creates the learning - it's all glorious groups.  Could we be the wave of the future?

Yummy food for thought.  Maybe I'll go talk to Dan about it...

Good words

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success. – Thomas J. Watson

Good words

To confront a person with his own shadow is to show him his own light. - Carl G. Jung

Getting to "Aha!"

Great blog post by Mitch Ditkoff on helping the fiercely left-brained learn to be more creative. I especially appreciate his emphasis on giving linear thinkers a mental map of the brainstorming process to reduce their anxiety.

I also like his suggestion that those leading creativity sessions mention repeatedly that chaos and disorder precede breakthroughs; so many people take that wheels-coming-off moment as a sign that they're lost, rather than as evidence that they're finally beginning to get somewhere.

Most of us are heavily rewarded throughout schooling and career for being orderly, linear thinkers. Predictable. Correct. Logical!

New research (and a lot of old intuition) is showing that this left-brain approach is only a tiny part of the real capability of the brain -- and not the smartest part, either.

As trainers, we can help people trust their mental resources by giving permission to be playful, non-judgmental, and experimental. And by setting aside time for analysis and logic, when they're appropriate -- but not letting them run the show all the time.

Image via Creative Commons