Counting the Hours

We tend to think of counting as a straight-forward activity - one, two, three, how could anyone disagree? Yet many organizations have tension and disputes over how to count, especially something as seemingly simple as counting the number of hours somebody worked.

An engineering office had a 37.5 hour work week. Staff were expected to be in the office 7.5 hours per day working, not including lunch. From staff and management interviews, here are six areas where the company was experiencing a lot of tension:

1. One work group had gotten into the habit of taking coffee breaks mid-morning. During these breaks, they'd chat about a variety of things, including work. Their manager felt that this was productive time, since it helped build relationships and staff often came up with creative solutions to work issues during the relaxed interactions over coffee. Other managers didn't feel that coffee breaks should be allowed, and their employees were not allowed to count coffee time as work time. Dispute arose over whether the coffee-breakers should have to work longer days to make up for the time "lost" during coffee.
2. As part of their regular work day, some field staff would be required report to the central office, then drive ninety minutes out to a job site for the day. The drive TO the work site was considered part of their work day since they first met at the office, but the ninety minute drive back was "on their own time" since they were just driving home from work. Staff that stayed in the office worked for 7.5 hours. were productive for 7.5 hours and were paid for 7.5 hours. Staff that worked in the field put in 9 hours, were productive for 6 hours and were paid for 7.5 hours.
3. Other staff were required to travel to a nearby city, usually flying in and flying out the same day. The morning flight left at 6am, and their end of the day flight returned home at 7 pm. Counting the time from when they arrived at the terminal in the morning to when they left the terminal at the end of the day, their workday was 14.5 hours. They were paid for 7.5.
4. Yet other staff were required to travel to more distant cities, with four to six hours flying time, and usually with an overnight stay on Saturday to get cheaper air fares. Some staff loved this time away, others felt resentful that it took them away from their families, and wanted time-off in lieu for the time they were required to be away. Management paid them for the days they were working in the other cities, but didn't compensate in any way for the time away from home. Flight time that was outside regular work hours also wasn't considered work. Lots of tension and disagreement over this.
5. A few staff were able to work from home because of the nature of their jobs. Tension mounted from in-office staff who's requests to work from home had been denied; they felt their driving time to work should now be paid for, since they couldn't do anything else during that time and the work-from-home people were not required to commute as part of their jobs.
6. Managers would take staff out for lunch and dinner occasionally. Some managers would allow their staff to count this as work time, some would not. Tensions mounted.

These situations show how difficult it can be to count something as simple as hours of work. How much more difficult is it to measure more complicated tasks in ways that everyone can agree on?

Many Employees Don't Want Goals

Point #1 - About 5% of people regularly make goals for themselves. About 10% of people think about making goals but generally don't. And, the other 85% just don't tend to make goals.

Point #2 - When people set goals for themselves, their motivation and their results increase. This is well-proven and well-supported both in the lab and in practical reality.

Point #3 - When goals are imposed on people, the effect on motivation and results is negligible. In fact, motivation often decreases, and the tendency to cheat and misreport results increases significantly.

Point #4 - When we do performance management at work, we generally insist that 100% of our employees make goals and strive to achieve them.

So, if only 5% to 15% of our employees like to set their own goals, yet we insist that all employees set goals, we are obviously imposing goals on the other 85%. Even if we wrap it up in nice encouraging words, we are still imposing goals on them, and this just doesn't drive performance.

The Commitment Problem - Part 2

If your employees are not committed - to your company, to your cause, to you - there's certainly a chance they'll embezzle millions as described so eloquently in The Commitment Problem. But it's more likely that, when employees are not committed, they'll just toe the line and give you exactly what's required of them, but no more. They won't go beyond the line, they won't offer extra effort to make the company great, they'll grumble when you ask anything extra of them.

Every moment of the work day, employees have the choice of giving to the company or taking for themselves, of thinking about the long-term or of living in the moment and thinking about what's-in-it-for-me. If your employees tend to choose the long-term more often than the short-term, things are probably pretty good. If they tend to choose what's-in-it-for-me more often than not, you're probably feeling the frustration.

When exploring the personnel policies of several companies that suffered from low commitment, it was interesting to see areas where the companies demonstrated the same lack of commitment towards their employees. A few example:

• The minimum vacation allowance in Saskatchewan, by law, is three weeks per year for up to nine years of service, four weeks a year for ten or more years of service. One company never considered allowing anyone more than the legal limit of vacation, no sabbatical options, no leave-of-absence options, no flex for an extended holiday. Not very committed to long-term work-life balance.
• In Saskatchewan, you're not required to pay people who are off sick from work. One company had a policy that said, if you're visibly or audibly sick, don't come to work, but they also wouldn't pay for sick leave. A bit of an impossible choice for employees. Not very committed to the financial well-being or health of their workers.
• Another company had very rigorous time-tracking methods, requiring employees to account for every 10 minutes of their day and allowing no overtime unless pre-approved. In plain words, they would pay for exactly the legal work day, but not a penny more. Yet, the owners were repeatedly surprised when employees would resist attending a company function in the evening or on the weekend - "on their own time". Not very committed to the ideas of mutual generosity, of helping each other, of give and take.

So, if you find that your employees do not seem very committed to your company. Take a deep look at whether your company is really committed to your employees, and make sure you look at it from their point of view, not yours.

Enough With the Standing Ovations!

At an investment company's recent Client Appreciation Night at TCU Place in Saskatoon, the entertainment was good, but not great.

The warm up act was Jimmie Walker, who played Kid Dynomite (J.J. Evans) on the seventies comedy show Good Times. For some reason, Jimmie kept mentioning Moose Jaw as Saskatoon's main rival (it's Regina), went on for a while about the imminent post office strike (it's a teachers' strike, dude), talked about the lousy economy (while Saskatchewan has been booming). A little out of touch with the local scene! There were a few chuckles and smatterings of applause, but noone seemed to really get into it.

The main act was Michael Winslow, the cool sound-effects guy from the Police Academy movies. He made some pretty remarkable noises with just his mouth and a few effects pedals (the Jimi Hendrix solo was great), but also spent a whole lot of time on lowbrow "man walking out of theatre footsteps" and "man taking a leak" bits. Again, a few chuckles, a few impressive moments, but mostly mediocre filler.

Yet, at the end, the crowd of a couple thousand feet was up on it's feet for a standing ovation! Why? Why is it, that no matter how average the event, we feel obligated to honor the performers with what used to be reserved for only the best? Why pretend it was excellent when it wasn't? Don't we value excellence anymore? Have we lost our ability to identify excellence?Are we trying to be so darned nice that we never criticize mediocrity?

I've been noticing this in the world of business awards lately. Now some award recipients are truly deserving, and I mean no disrespect to those individuals and companies who are honored for their accomplishments over the years. Just staying in business for 25 years is actually a pretty amazing accomplishment.

I'm more concerned with all of the awards competitions that are mostly about "Ain't We Great". Three companies apply, or are nominated, and one gets the award as the "best this or that" in the city, or the province, or even the ENTIRE COUNTRY! One Saskatoon technology company proudly displayed an Excellence in Quality Management Award in their lobby, yet the company was a chaotic mess, with inconsistent products, huge turnover and terrible morale. They looked good on paper, and had a great award application, so with this public award as the supporting evidence, management was vocal and proud of their track record.


Not all management approaches are equal, either, nor are they all excellent. Bullying isn't good management. Winging it isn't good management. Loudership is not good leadership. And chaos is not really a business strategy.

So, don't give an ovation unless the show was truly excellent. And don't pretend that your management team is excellent, if it ain't.

Five Bucks per Goal

Do you use incentive programs to get people motivated? Do you use rewards as the path to excellence? Have you ever had unintended consequences from your reward systems?

A kids hockey team had enjoyed some early success in the season, but it was largely due to the heroic efforts by a few of the better players. As the season progressed, the individual heroics were not enough, and the team started losing repeatedly to other teams that were becoming more cohesive, more organized, more cooperative.

So, in practice, the coaches worked on passing drills, on positional play, on group tactics. In practices, the team became very effective, with good understanding of their roles, and really effective team tactics. In practice, the team worked well together. But in games, they completely fell apart.

In games, the players reverted to their heroic ways; trying to stick-handle the puck from one end of the ice to the other, taking wide angle shots with no chance of success, and generally playing desperate, selfish, ineffective hockey. The team was getting demoralized. They continued to lose. What was going on?

It turns out that the main problem was the kids' parents. In their desire to help their kids succeed, many of the parents had offered their kids cash rewards for scoring goals - one kid would get five bucks from his dad for every goal he personally scored. Don't get me started on how distorted this is (whatever happened to playing a game just because you love it and want to have fun playing hard with your friends!?), but think of how damaging this "reward" system was to the team, and the kids.

In game situations, most of the kids were thinking only about themselves, about how they, personally, could score a goal. Not how the team could do well, or how the team could score, but how "I" could score. Because of this selfish thinking, the team was not playing as a team, they were losing out to teams that were, and they were on a long, painful downhill slide. The kids were stressed, the parents were stressed and on their cases, and the kids had to choose between two opposites - either play as a team and be effective, or play selfishly to try to please their parents and get the cash rewards. It ended up that this strategy wasn't making them much money anyway, since they weren't scoring very many goals against teams with better collaboration.

Rewards hurt. They damage internal motivation, and replace it with a dangling carrot. That in itself is reason enough to be cautious. But rewards inevitably produce unintended consequences, distortions and distractions from what you'd really like to have happen. Why not work on developing the love of the game, on the joy of working together to face challenges, on the intrinsic pleasures of a job well done, of becoming excellent. The research shows that this approach produces more success anyways. So next time, keep your five bucks in your pocket, and enjoy watching your kids' team play hockey. And, in business, keep your dangling performance incentives in your pocket (slightly disturbing image?), and work instead on helping the team enjoy their work, pull together, and win - together.

A Real Live Dinosaur

I just saw a real live dinosaur. President of a successful industrial company, this fearsome creature roared his mighty roar, in a throwback to prehistoric management practices:

"If somebody makes a mistake, I fire them! Nobody makes a mistake twice here."

"Discipline is everything. If the union ever gives me trouble, I wait a bit and then fire a couple of them."

"I've never lost a union dispute. I just send my accountant with a checkbook to settle it. Way cheaper than a severance package!"

"The only thing workers care about is money. They don't understand anything else."

This superb example of  Tyrannosaurus Wrecks was terrifying; the blood-red wine flowed, chicken bones crunched, and it took every ounce of courage not to run screaming from the darkened restaurant. Well, it wasn't that bad, but lordy it wasn't that good.

We've all had tyrannical bosses at some point in our lives, but few match the ferocity of this specimen. His proud reliance on fear, intimidation and discipline bring to mind the horrors of slavery and serfdom. Yet despite the offensiveness of his managerial approach, his company, his empire, is financially successful and has a good reputation in the industry.

There are many management styles, both in terms of personal approach and in terms of policy, and all work to some degree. Indeed, in a well-controlled study of CEO management style, Bertrand and Schoar found that the financial and investment policies of the leader accounts for only about 4% of the variance in a company's results. In terms of personal style, the research is scarce, but it's clear that some bully managers succeed, and some bully managers fail. Some respectful managers succeed, and some respectful managers fail.

In my own experience, aggressive bullying management seems to make all the good people leave. And those that stay behind tend to keep their heads down to avoid the teeth, and constantly look for increasing compensation, either within the company, or in greener pastures. Aggressive bullying can work as a management style, but there are good reasons that dinosaur managers have been going extinct. Hopefully, the remaining few will soon follow.

Human Resources Discussion Group

Dave Hunchak of Swift Fox will be facilitating an interactive discussion group for SATA (Saskatchewan Advanced Technology Association) called HRX - Human Resources Exchange. In a relaxed, confidential environment, participants will share issues and challenges and learn about current industry practices around one of the most important components of a business – people.
The 2010-2011 program runs the 2nd Tuesday of each month, from 4:30 – 5:30 pm at Ideas Inc., 207-120 Sonnenschein Way, Saskatoon. Registration is free for members of SATA.

• Tuesday Dec 7, 2010
• “Compliance is not an option”
• HR Basic Rules - Labor Standards, OH&S
• Tuesday Jan 11, 2011
• “To set policy or not to set policy, that is the question”
• HR Policies
• Tuesday Feb 8, 2011
• “Lead, follow or get out of the way?”
• Leadership Style and Practice
• Tuesday Mar 8, 2011
• “Finding them, getting them, keeping them”
• Talent Management
• Tuesday Apr 12, 2011
• “Cooperation vs. competition - what works when
• Productivity
• Tuesday May 10, 2011
• “More than just a paycheck”
• Compensation
• Tuesday Jun 14, 2011
• “Wrap-up and Review”
• And topics for next year…

For more information contact Laurel Reich, SATA Program Director at lreich@sata.ca or phone (306) 244-3889.

Misguided Incentive

At hockey practice, the kids lined up at center ice for a shoot-out, where each skater would in turn try to score on their goalie. This is a fun drill, especially for the goalies, who go head-to-head with each of their friends, their teammates. Shoot-outs are a matter of pride for goalie's; their reputation is on the line so they do everything they can to keep the puck out of the net. But, on this occasion, the coach decided to offer a prize of two dollars if the goalie could stop all the pucks on the first round of about twenty skaters. The rationale was "you have to give them incentive or they won't try."

The goalie was pretty excited - two bucks is two bucks - still a significant amount of money for a kid. But, when the fourth skater of twenty scored, this external "incentive" dissappeared, and the goalie visibly reduced his effort, even moving out of the way on some harder shots. The coach was miffed, and when he asked the goalie what he was doing, he said "why bother, I can't get the two dollars anymore."

So, by offering the perk, the bonus, the money incentive, the coach replaced the pure joy of stopping pucks with the calculated pursuit of two bucks. What the kid normally would do just because he loved it, he now stopped doing as soon as the external "incentive" was no longer attainable.

Managers, coaches, and leaders need to learn that internal incentive is the only true incentive. So set a fair wage, then take money out of the day-to-day picture, and let people enjoy their work.

No More Shakespeare!

In an attempt to bond with a Grade 11 math class, the substitute teacher provoked a discussion about how Shakespeare was too hard to understand, obsolete, and should be replaced with better modern authors in the schools. Expecting the students to join in with stereotypical complaints, she was surprised to be challenged by the whole class, who passionately defended the importance and value of Shakespeare.

It turns out this was an Honours math class, and most of the students were also in Honours English where an enthusiastic and passionate teacher had inspired a love of English literature and Shakespeare in particular. Students counted off the benefits of Shakespeare on their fingers, loudly protested her critical comments, and laughingly dismissed her anti-Shakespeare arguments.

This kind of passion happens when people are challenged by work that is hard enough to stimulate them, by a leader that makes them believe they are capable enough to handle it. As described by the work on flow experiences by Dr. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the work needs to be challenging enough so people can just handle it. Too much challenge produces anxiety, too little produces boredom and apathy.

These students were engaged and interested in their work, and surprised their substitute teacher who was fishing for complaints and cynicism. In your workplace, think about the challenge of the work compared to the skills and abilities of those doing the work. Too much challenge, and you have anxiety and worry, too little challenge and you have boredom and apathy.

If your workplace seems filled with cynicism, complaints, anxiety, worry or apathy and boredom, does it arise simply because people have bad attitudes? Or does it emerge from systemic issues, from a mis-match between the challenge of the work compared to the skills and capacity of the people? One you can control, to make things better, the other you just have to live with.

This is Not Good Enough

Sometimes you grow too fast, or you lose focus, or you lose some good people, or [insert your crisis here], and all of your talk about Customer Service and Quality goes out the window. For whatever reason, your customers end up getting it in the shorts, even though you swore you'd never let that happen.

Sometimes you have to get tough and tell your people that "This is Not Good Enough!" It may be a supplier, it may be an employee, it may be a manager, or it may be your whole company that needs to hear this message. If your company is facing a harsh reality, your people need to understand that, so they can do what needs to be done.

Speaking at an NSBA dinner meeting, Wally Mah of Northridge Development Corporation candidly spoke of the problems they faced during the intense Saskatoon housing boom in 2008. Paraphrasing his comments, "We failed our customers. We let the busy trades dictate our schedule and decide on the quality of the homes we were building. It came to a crisis. So we gave one of the owner's wives the final word in quality control. She would go to the trades and say 'This is not good enough; you have to come back and fix it.' That way it wasn't just an employee talking, it was an Owner. We had to do this to regain control, to regain the trust of our customers."

W. Edwards Deming told leaders to Drive Out Fear and Eliminate Numerical Goals from our management toolkit. Yet he also made it quite clear that communicating the facts about harsh realities that might be facing a company was totally justified. In words he might have used - "Unless our quality improves by 20% in the next six months, we will be out of business."

Yes, work on your systems. Yes, engage everyone in continuous improvement. And, yes, tell your people when your company faces a harsh reality, so they can pull together to do what's necessary.

However, if you find yourself repeatedly in crisis, and repeatedly telling people that "This is Not Good Enough," you need to read Deming's Out of the Crisis. If your people are always "Not Good Enough", it's likely your management approach that is "Not Good Enough". There are better ways.

I Just Made a Mistake

If a worker knows how to do a job, wants to do a good job, and is capable of doing a good job, why do they screw up sometimes? When somebody tells us "It's not my fault, I just made a mistake!", do we let them off the hook? Do we take them to task and hold them accountable? Do we throw our hands up in despair? Is there anything we can do to prevent these kinds of screw ups, or do we just have to powerlessly resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be human error?

John Evans (UK) of http://www.human-error.com/ talks about Risk Influencing Factors (RIF's), all kinds of little things that contribute to the risk of an error occuring. So, if a person is entering data from a paper form into a computer, there's a risk that they will enter some data wrong. Even if the person can do the job, wants to do the job well, and knows how to do the job (aptitude, attitude, training) a bunch of little RIF's added together still might conspire to produce errors. And if you ask someone why they made those mistakes, they will honestly be baffled. Holding them accountable would be damaging and ineffective.

For this example, some contributing factors might be ambient noise, a confusing form layout, a screen form that doesn't match the paper form, distraction and interruptions, poor ergonomics, fatigue or illness, stress or worry, poor handwriting, poor lighting, screen glare. Imagine that if four or five of these factors are active, the person can still do the job completely error free. But then, if the situation changes and a few more factors suddenly apply, we cross some threshhold and an error occurs.

Deciding whether and when to hold people accountable seems to be the same as deciding whether to search for the cause of variation in statistical process control. If you search for the "cause" of every random-dance common-cause variation, you are wasting your time and money. Instead, you need to study and modify the system, the tasks, the tools, the procedures to reduce the build in variation and risks. On the other hand, if you don't search for the "cause" of special-cause something-important-just-happened variation, your system is out of control and you're missing a golden opportunity for process improvement.

In the same way, if you hold someone accountable for a problem that is actually produced by the random dance of lots of little risk influencing factors, it will do nothing to reduce the risk of error the next time a bunch of contributing factors all occur at once.

In the absence of strong evidence of incompetence, maliciousness, ignorance or maybe even intoxication, we may still be tempted to hold the person accountable. But we're more powerful if we take this as a cue to look for factors that we can control, rather than fall back on the ineffective blame game.

Do You Treat Your People With Respect?

Do you treat your people with respect? I know you'll say "Yes" - everyone says "Yes". But do your actions really demonstrate respect? Would your people say "Yes" if asked the same question?

Without respect, both given and perceived, managing becomes infinitely more difficult.

Here are a dozen ways that managers disrespect their slobbering, unwashed, incompetent employees...(oops, did I say that out loud? make that thirteen ways)...

1. Do you hold people accountable for the results of the system? Deming said that 95% of results come from the system, yet we seem to direct 95% of our management efforts into fixing "bad" people.
2. Have improvements resulted in layoffs?
   Do you think anyone will help you make further improvements if their jobs, and their friends jobs, will be at risk?
3. Do you identify who causes each problem?
   Root cause analysis is not about finding culprits, it's about changing the system so problems can't recur.
4. Who designs the work?
   Engineers? Managers? Bosses? The people know how to do the work; the people know how to improve the work. Most of the details of the work are probably never known to those who don't actually do the work.
5. When asked a question do you typically respond with an answer?
   Decisions should be made as close to the work as possible. People need the information, the understanding, and the support to make their own decisions about their own work.

6. Do you use carrots and sticks?
   Performance management in all it's flavours implies "I'm OK, but you need to be motivated and controlled."
7. Do you “roll out” changes?
   When you assume that a success in one area can be rolled out to another area, it implies that people are interchangeable. They're not. They're all unique and every change must be adapted and adopted, not imposed.
8. Has there ever been a strike or a lockout? Have people had to work without a contract?
   Pretending that labour-management disputes somehow evaporate after the contract is signed is naive. Of course it damages trust, destroys respect.
9. Do you blame people for absenteism and sick leave?
   People miss work because they have to; they're trying to survive in the system.
10. Do you set targets and quotas?
    Systems have capacities. Imposing arbitrary targets with no idea how people will achieve them isn't management, it's wishing, it's abusive
11. Do you tell people that they're the problem?
    If you've ever put up a poster saying "Do it right the first time," your true thoughts are clear - people screw up because people aren't careful enough.
12. Do your people ever truly get to contribute to the improvement of their daily work?
    In most companies, only an elite few ever get to change the work. This is insane.

Respect is the core of Lean, of Continuous Improvement, of the Toyota Production System, of effective auditing, of teamwork, of communication. It's crucial. Yet so many of the things we managers do are deeply disrespectful. Belittling. Condescending. The damage is vast, as are the opportunities as you start to turn it around.

Nobly Ignoring the Incentive Program

A professional association had an incentive program to reward members for signing up new members. In order to get "credit" for the referral, an existing member would have to be specifically named on a new member's application.

Several energetic members took it upon themselves to create a series of interesting and informative events that drew many new members into the association. They worked as a team behind the scenes to create these events, so none ended up named on new applications, and none got credits for referrals. As a team effort, it would have been impossible to identify a specific, single member which should have gotten the credit for any one new application anyway.

The idea of the reward program was to create incentive, to create motivation. But for these people, the reward program actually served as a demotivator, a disincentive, a source of discontent and potential conflict. They saw that even though they did more than any others to help the association grow, others would be rewarded and they would not. They saw that, in order to succeed in their team effort, they could not seek to get their individual names on new members' applications; it would not be fair if one team member were rewarded and the others were not. So, in order to excel at the task, these people had to nobly set aside the incentive program. They had to consciously ignore it, actively work against it, in order to let cooperation grow within their team to create success.

Incentives damage internal motivation. Incentives damage teamwork. Incentives are a poor, desperate substitute for a truly inspiring, engaging vision.

I See You Shiver, With Antici...pation

You're faced with a choice between some sizzling bacon and some raw brocolli . Do you choose the brocolli with its anti-oxidants and nutritional goodness, or do you choose the bacon, with its mouth-wateringly delicious fatty yummy-ness? You won't really know the health impact for years, and even then you won't be sure what effect this choice really had on your long term health.

The immediate feedback is about flavour and pleasure, and the bacon wins easily (be honest!). The long-term feedback is about health, but this has little effect on our immediate motivation. When we expect to receive feedback on our choices has a big effect on the kind of choices we make.

In the workplace, it turns out that when we expect to get feedback also has a big effect on how well we perform. Keri Kettle at the University of Alberta School of Business published some interesting findings in his paper Motivation by Anticipation: Expecting Rapid Feedback Enhances Performance. University students performed objectively better (22% better) when they anticipated immediate feedback on their speaking presentations, compared to when they were told to expect feedback in a couple of weeks. The effect was strong and linear, meaning that an anticipated delay of eight days for feedback reduced performance by about twice as much as an expected delay of four days.

This suggests that our traditional best-practices in performance management are crap ... or, to be polite, marginally effective. The annual performance review is so far in the future that it provides little motivation and no feedback day-to-day. Moving to quarterly performance reviews is little better (remember that a two-week delay in Kettle's study resulted in twenty percent poorer performance). So, annual and quarterly performance reviews are useless, monthly reviews are still weak, and weekly performance reviews not much better, but this starts getting ridiculous - we can't have daily performance reviews, can we? That's crazy talk!

In the traditional world of performance management, daily performance reviews would be crazy. But we can find effective ways to provide immediate feedback, and leverage this principle of Motivation by Anticipation to improve our desire to perform well and avoid dissappoinment.

Consider the daily, tiered accountability meetings of Leader Standard Work from the world of Lean, or the daily Scrum meetings from the world of Agile Software Development. When done well, these approaches shift the feedback towards short, structured meetings about immediate daily progress. Visual displays of status also constribute to making progress understandable at a glance. In Lean, the feedback time frame is further shortened to match the takt time, the heartbeat of the process, which may be as short as a few minutes depending on the facility. Imagine getting non-judgemental feedback about your performance every few minutes. This aligns perfectly with Kettle's work, and suggests why working in a well-run Lean or Agile organization can be such a pleasure, and produce such good results.

When we choose bacon over brocolli, we're choosing immediate feedback over future feedback. If there were a way to make feedback on the health benefits immediately concrete and real, we would likely choose the healthy alternative more often, and our personal health performance would improve dramatically.

Kettle shows that expecting rapid feedback enhances performance. If our corporate Performance Management efforts are truly intended to improve performance, we need to shift away from the disconnected, long-term evaluation inherent in our current review processes. We need to shift towards providing immediate, concrete feedback - daily, hourly. We need to foster an expectation of immediate, concrete feedback amongst our people. And this means that management needs to change. Management needs to do standard daily work. Immediate feedback one day and no feedback the next is not enough. Management needs to step up its consistency.

By building the expectation of rapid feedback, we can get better performance, better intrinsic motivation, and better results. It's like getting the health benefits of broccoli with the flavor goodness of bacon. Yum.

Fudging the Numbers

If you want to encourage your people to cheat
Set them a goal, a challenging feat.
Make them report on their progress to you,
And watch them distort by a number or two.

Now goals are quite useful as management tools

But if you impose them, you're acting the fool
Goals from within drive hard work and persistence
But goals from above demand nagging insistence

Also, from goals, do some problems arise

As the worker reports and, in ways, justifies.
He tries to do well, but when late or overdue
The ethics will suffer, and reports won't be true.

Research by Schweitzer, Ordonez and Douma
Suggests that goal setting causes us gloom. A
problem occurs when the task isn't complete,
unethical behaviour emerges, they cheat.

Especially when people are close, but not quite
Their target eludes them, try as they might
The closer they get, the more likely they are
To toss out their ethics, and report that they're stars.

What does the research suggest that we do,
To set goals but not bid our ethics adieu?
A prescription, it seems, that can be quite effective
Is to ask, please, that reports just not be defective.

For more information, read "Goal Setting as a Motivator of Unethical Behaviour", by Maurice Schweitzer, Lisa Ordonez and Bambi Douma, Academy of Management Journal 2004.

For even more information, read A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance by Locke and Latham.

Don't Eat at your Desk

In a call center, as part of a wellness program, the customer service reps were told not to work through their staggered lunch breaks. Since lunch was the only break they were given in the day, management felt it was important for the reps to stretch their legs, go to the lunch room, take a break and chat with colleagues.

On the other hand, management also imposed Service Standards on the reps, which required orders to be processed within a certain amount of time. Because the workload was consistently beyond capacity, most of the reps ended up having to work through lunch, staying at their desk.

So, the reps would be chastised for violating the company's wellness policy, but the consequences were even greater for not meeting the Service Standards. Employees chose the lesser of two evils, and often ate at their desk while they worked through lunch, without pay.

Some people might celebrate or criticize this as a devious management success, but management at this shop truly had good intentions. Unfortunately, they hadn't been able to hear the voices of their employees or of their processes, and truly thought that the workload was manageable. These kind of conflicting job requirements make workers crazy.

Disconnecting Pay from Performance - Are You Crazy?!

As parents of young kids, we whip them into a frenzy about Christmas by talking about toys, candy, Santa, presents, cake, Santa, toys, and more toys. Then, when our kids get rabidly excited about "toys, toys, toys!" we're shocked and appalled. We self-righteously blame the media for making Christmas so commercial without recognizing our role in creating these little monster-consumers. We also unknowingly do exactly the same thing in business management.

We want our employees to be engaged in the work, to contribute their energy and ideas, and to be internally motivated to provide excellent service and get satisfaction from a job well done. Then, we constantly distract them by making their pay conditional, by holding up bonus plans and trying to get them excited about incentive pay, about perks, about contests, about quotas, about bonuses! And, for some reason, we're then surprised and annoyed when our employees constantly think about whether they're getting paid enough for the work they do.

Disconnecting pay from performance IS a controversial topic, and I'm sure I won't do it justice, but let's take a look at it all the same.

"Every board in corporate America is an advocate of pay for performance," says Hewitt Associates.
"Pay-for-performance needs to be embedded in your culture," says Workscape Institute.

Pay-for-performance is almost universally assumed to be a good thing, especially among HR professionals and HR consultants. It's touted as an effective motivator, a solution for reducing costs, and a way to entice workers to greater achievements. You probably have, or have considered implementing, a pay-for-performance system in your organization. You probably believe that people will work harder, faster, and smarter when their rewards are based on their results.

Yet research on human motivation clearly shows that intrinsic motivation, the personal, internal drive to do a good job, is the best and only true motivator. Unlike mice and chickens and dogs, research with humans shows that extrinsic motivators (like cookies, gold stars, prizes, bonuses, perks, praise) actually damage our intrinsic motivation AND (here's the surprise...) produce inferior results. In the short term, we'll work for a perk, but in the medium and long term, we'll end up only working for perks, destroying our innate desire to do good work and master new skills.

Throughout the corporate world, and more commonly in government, health care and education, managers and HR departments rely extensively on extrinsic motivation systems like pay-for-performance in attempts to get people working. Yet the research actually points us in a different direction, towards disconnecting pay from performance. Scary stuff kids!

If you think about it, there are basically three ways to reward people for doing a task. (I'm talking here about conditional rewards, rewards that are only distributed if certain conditions are met. Of course, we still pay people for their work. What we're looking at is how and whether we should dangle additional carrots in front of them.)

The first approach is Winner Take All, common in business, where one or a few top performers get a reward, and the others get nothing. This is the Employee of the Month mentality, the inspiration for the vacation trips for Top Performers, the Bonus Programs for those at the top of the heap. Competition and desire for reward will supposedly motivate everyone to work harder and strive for the top spot.

The second method, even more common in business, is Proportional Distribution, where each person gets rewarded in proportion to their ranking, so the higher performers get more than the lower performers. This is the familiar Pay-for-Performance mentality, the Commission Sales approach, the Ranking of people, the Piece Work approach, the Performance Appraisal approach. The theory is that people will work harder and strive to do more and better quality work under these systems in order to earn more.

Third, is the Equal Distribution approach, rare in business, where groups are rewarded equally, or not at all. Elements of this are sometimes seen in Profit Sharing plans, or Team Reward, but this approach is most often dismissed without consideration. Ideas like this are labelled pie-in-the-sky, impractical, or as leftist / communist / socialist mumbo jumbo.

So, most managers are surprised to discover what research shows to be more effective. And I mean "more effective" from a hard-nosed, results-based, profit-oriented point of view. It turns out that Equal Distribution (all the same conditional rewards or no conditional rewards) outperforms both Pay-for-Performance AND Winner Take All systems, for most human activities. Pay is why people take jobs, but Pay is NOT an effective motivator when it comes to the details of the daily work. It turns out that if you want to get exceptional performance from people in their daily work, you are better served by disconnecting their pay from their actual performance, by decoupling the tasks from the rewards.

Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards, suggests a revised basic principle for compensation: "Pay people generously and equitably. Do your best to make sure they don't feel exploited. Then do everything in your power to help them put money out of their minds. The problem with financial incentives is not that people are offered too much money; earning a hefty salary is not incompatible with doing good work. Rather, the problem is that money is made too [prominent]. It is pushed into people's faces."

So, instead of contiually whipping our employees into a frenzy about pay issues, about rewards and bonuses and incentives, let's establish a fair pay structure and then set it aside. Let's allow our people to focus on their work, on their customers, on mastering tasks and processes, on pride of workmanship, on nurturing teamwork and relationships, on job satisfaction. Let's support them in improving the work, and stop with the dangling carrots.

It may seem crazy, but consider disconnecting pay from performance. It's a relatively simple systemic shift that can produce deep and far-reaching improvements in your organization.

They're Just Lazy

Some points of view just aren't that helpful. Recently, I've been hearing "They're just lazy" far too often, from parents about their kids, from managers about their staff, from over-worked employees about their coworkers. Other phrases that fit the same mold are "They don't care", "They're not trying" and "They don't have any common sense". The implication that's hidden in these comments is always some variation on "I'm OK but there's something wrong with them."

Interestingly enough, whenever I talk with "them", I don't get the impression of laziness or apathy. Usually, with the vast majority of workers I interview, I get the impression of people who care deeply about what they're doing, people who are trying hard to do a good job, and people who are doing their best to succeed in the circumstances. There's a big disconnect here - on one hand, employees who are trying hard, often to the limit of their capacity - on the other hand, managers who are seeing their people as lazy.

Once we've labelled people as lazy, and decided that they don't care, aren't trying or lack common sense, what can we DO about it? How can we get better results from them? The logical approach is to try to fix these perceived problems directly; to try to fix these people; to cure them of their laziness. So, we use cookies to entice people to work, we use golden handcuffs and velvet hammers to whip them into action, and we resort to training to adjust their attitudes and instill common sense. But, unfortunately, if people are already working hard, trying hard, and doing their best, all of these interventions will be ineffective as there's little room for improvement in those directions. And managers, seeing little improvement and feeling frustrated and powerless, will escalate their efforts to fix the people, causing further problems and perpetuating the cycle.

To become more effective at creating positive improvements, managers need to set aside this ineffective thinking. When we can shift our thinking, and honestly believe that our people DO care, DO have intelligence and sense, and DO want to do a good job, then we can become more powerful and effective. With the same amount of effort, we can now begin to produce better results. We start looking for deeper causes - causes built into the systems, policies, culture, tools, procedures that we as management have set up - we start looking for deeper opportunities for growth, and begin to see all of the barriers, limitations, and stresses that have been preventing our people from doing what we expect of them.

If you've lived through a major corporate transition, either from good work place to bad, or bad work place to good, you'll be able to relate to this. You'll know that an engaged, high-performance individual can magically become a lazy, cynical dropout if you put them in a toxic work environment. And you'll know that supposedly lazy, apathetic workers can become engaged, high-performers when you fix a broken work place over time.

If you want to be more effective as a manager, stop seeing your people as lazy, and start honestly looking for the structures and stressors in your workplace that are the real sources of your problems; those are the real sources of your opportunities as well.

Bonus Program Kills Cooperation

Jan worked in a large food sales organization. All the sales people had independent territories but were grouped within regions, and often shared ideas and suggestions with each other about what was working well. New management implemented a significant new bonus program, with a reward trip for the top performer and cash prizes for the most improved sales people in each region. Jan reported that she completely stopped sharing ideas with colleagues, since she wanted to win the bonus rewards. For two years, all cooperation amongst sales people in the region essentially stopped. A quick analysis showed that overall sales had not shown any real improvement.

We Treat Our People Like Family

Is there fear in your organization? Are your people scared to speak up, to be open, to volunteer information, to risk? Are your people off-balance, concerned about their performance, and scared that they might be replaced, or let go?

A phrase I heard from five different managers this week is "We treat our people like family", accompanied by lists of all the good things they do, like their companies' open door policies, fun work environment, 360 reviews, training programs, performance management process, benefits, bonuses and incentives. I can only think of one manager in my experience who readily, publicly admitted that he wanted his people to be constantly scared, to realize that unless they performed, they would be replaced. He was a mean man, who I believe enjoyed the fear in his underlings. He is the exception. Most of the leaders and managers I've worked with feel a little offended at any suggestion that their people might be scared - leaders want to be liked, managers want to believe that their people can speak freely and trust them.

In Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming spoke repeatedly about the need to "drive out fear, so everyone can work effectively for the company." Ryan and Oestreich speak of building high-trust organizations instead of high-fear organizations in Driving Fear Out of the Workplace. And, though twice as long as it needed to be, Steven Covey's The Speed of Trust makes a compelling case for how trust, and lack of fear, contributes to the bottom-line.

Now all of the five managers I heard from this week are very nice, very accomplished people. They work hard to blend a clear vision with compassion and polite kindness. But still, from discussions with people in their organizations, it is clear that their employees feel fear. The fear isn't about whether the manager is nice or mean; it generally isn't a personal fear at all; it is fear that's built into the structure of their companies.

I don't know about your family, but mine seems very different from the way these companies are run. It doesn't seem to go over very well when I give my wife a performance review. She doesn't seem to appreciate it when I let her know how she compares to other women I see on TV. Similarly, when I make my kids compete for parental affection, and promise to withhold love from the one that gets the poorest marks in school, it doesn't seem to promote the free exchange of mutual support and encouragement that I'm hoping for.

We don't (or shouldn't) do this stuff in our families. We shouldn't do it at work.

At work, we rank our people and compare them to each other. We hold people accountable for the randomness and results of our systems. We use carrots and sticks that trivialize their efforts and take away the inherent joy that comes from doing good work. We set targets that are outside the capacity of our systems, and blame people when they don't achieve it. We believe that someone who is totally dependent on us for reward and promotion will be able to give us open, honest feedback. We set up competitions between our people, then wonder why they don't work together.

We don't do any of this because we are mean people, and most of us try to very nice and respectful when we do these things. That's not the point. It is not that we are mean people who are trying to induce disabling fear in our people, it is that we are nice people using management tools that inherently produce disabling fear.

There are better ways.