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

Learning links

Good stuff on learning from various blogs:

From Cognitive Daily: how using gestures help us learn. The article describes an experiment with children, but I'd suggest it works for adults, too. And here's how an eye exercise can improve scores on a memorization test, at least for the right-handed.

From The Frontal Cortex: what's it like to be a baby, with a wonderful first comment about tight vs. open focus. And more on focus and creativity in a post about neuroenhancing drugs. Comment #2 is especially interesting here.

From Developing Intelligence: what happens to memories when we forget them (kind of technical, but fascinating nevertheless).

Enjoy!

Drawing a lesson

A new study shows that people who doodle during boring meetings or classes actually retain more information than those who don't. The theory is that doodling at least keeps your mind in the room, instead of tuning out altogether and daydreaming.

Note: it works in dull settings. So, fellow learning leaders, next time we encounter doodlers, rather than getting snarky about their lack of attention, maybe we need to find ways to engage them more fully. (That's our mission at Workplace.)

Probably not the best thing to point out to the boss, though, during that endless monthly meeting...

Illustration via FlickrCC on a Creative Commons license.
Can't you just imagine the meeting this came out of?

Raisin' brain

Fascinating article at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer's blog, on the mental effects of intimidation. Seems that when the brain feels overwhelmed by too much choice or competition, it tends to shut down instead of working harder. (And I thought it was just me!)

I'm looking forward to Lehrer's new book, How We Decide, due out next month. Oh, and if you haven't read Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping, give it a look. Whether you love shopping or hate to cross a store's threshhold, I predict you'll find lots of insights that may be useful for training design as well.

Face facts

Wonderful article in Discover Magazine this month about facial expressions. Humans, it seems, have a "deep instinct" to mimic faces. When we see an expression on another person, we make the same face, fleetingly -- which helps us understand what that person is feeling. Mirroring facilitates empathy.

I'm trained as an actor, and actors have long understood that assuming a facial expression can create the emotion associated with it. Try it right now. Allow the inner edges of your eyebrows to rise up. Feel the corners of your eyes pull down. In other words, make a sad face. And stay with it for a little. Suddenly feeling sad?

Now look at the kid in the picture. Grin along. Feel better?

As Carl Zimmer says in the Discover piece, "When humans mimic others' faces...we don't just go through the motions. We also go through the emotions."

What implications does this have for communications training? It's fascinating to think.

Photo by CARF, Creative Commons

Let me hear your body talk...

No, I haven't been ignoring you. It's been a few weeks of intense work on a bunch of new programs for Workplace Productions, including a new diversity program we piloted yesterday.

To me, one of the most fascinating aspecsts of diversity work is nonverbal communication. How much is innate and species-wide? How much is learned and cultural? We know some specific gestures don't translate well: for example, the American "OK" sign, which is exceedingly rude in some places, as a friend of mine found out after she used it to thank a sweet little old Brazilian lady who had helped her find the right bus.

But the facial expressions that express the basic human emotions seem to be universal, according to research by Paul Ekman and others. And a very clever study of blind Olympic athletes suggests that full-body gestures of pride and shame may also be inborn. And like the facial expressions, we share many of them with our fellow primates.

Why these specific gestures? Here's a study that suggests that the spontaneous expression of fear may have a practical advantage...the better to see you with, my dear!

Frogs and ears

Not much to do with workplace learning, but I loved this story about how pure research can lead to useful things -- in this case, the discovery of a frog's ability to block out extraneous sounds while listening for a mating call, and what it might mean for hearing aids of the future.

(By the way, the image comes from an online store called Frog Nirvana, which sells an unimaginable variety of merchandise featuring frogs: rugs, wind chimes, staplers, birdbaths, music boxes...and, of course, earrings.)

Cyberspace -- you gotta love it.

Blog crawl

Some interesting stuff on blogs:

How sleep, practice and testing consolidate memory on Sharp Brains.

More on power naps from the Boston Globe.

Everyone wants leadership development, but what are leaders without followers? Harvard Business School's blog reviews the new book Followership by Barbara Kellerman.

And the wonderful Jonah Lehrer in "Grape Expectations: What wine can tell us about the nature of reality":

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.

Enjoy!

Old dogs and new tricks

Could walking into a room and forgetting why you came in there actually be a sign of wisdom? This New York Times article suggests older people have wider (not longer) attention spans, enabling them to think more creatively, retain more detail, and solve problems more effectively.

Take that, whippersnappers!

FHA Old Dog with New Tricks is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Son of my laptop ate my brain...

The wonderful Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. weighs in on our fading ability to sit patiently and read. Like me, Pitts has been finding himself dozing off over material that would have been a treat a few years ago.

I've decided to get back to reading books, at least an hour a day. (Shocking to make a program of something that used to be a guilty pleasure!) I hope to renew my ability to sit still and lose myself in nuanced material, without craving a hyperlink to another story, and then another, and then just one more...

Join me? Let me know how it's going for you. I'm heading back to Pierre and Natasha, and that little rat Napoleon.

My laptop ate my brain...

Finding it harder to concentrate on books these days? You're not alone. It might be that online reading is changing the way our brains work.

That's what Nicholas Carr's fascinating article in the current Atlantic Monthly explores. Carr writes:

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also
has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost
totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Uh-oh. My copy of War and Peace, bookmarked at page 390, has been staring at me sadly for several months now. How could I leave Pierre at the mercy of his steward for so long?

I think Carr may be on to something. How about you?

Learning watch

There's a feast of a story in the New York Times about creating new habits. Dr. Dawna Markova and Mary Jane Ryan, of Professional Thinking Partners, also talk about learning styles, comfort zones, innovation, and the neurology of the new. I especially liked their discussion of what they call the three zones of existence: comfort zone, stretch zone and stress zone. Great stuff!

Kid in a candy store

Just found a fantastic site for all of us who are fascinated by science: ScienceBlogs.com. I'm having a great time gobbling down the blogs on behavioral and neurological research, such as Cognitive Daily and The Frontal Cortex. But the site also links to blogs on physical science, environment, medicine and health, and more.

Gotta go -- I'm only halfway through that article on the collective mind and the neurology of human interaction...

Learning watch: new research

Here's an article by Howard Wolinsky about gender differences in processing language. Doug Burman, a researcher at Northwestern University's Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, says that language areas in girls' brains are more active than in boys' -- and girls process language differently than boys do.

Scientists aren't sure if these differences persist into adulthood, but the research suggests that males rely more on sensory vision and hearing centers in working with language, while females use more abstract brain regions for the same tasks.

The result is that how information is given -- through the ear or through the eye -- is more important to males than to females.

In your workshops, have you noticed any differences between men and women in processing language? Are visual aids stickier for one gender than for the other? What's the best way to get your message across?