I received the following email from a manager who reads my blog and I got his permission to post it here, to get input from all of you. What would you do?
Here’s the email:
I have a team of 10 people doing admin based work. The job can be busy but mundane and this can lower the “fun” factor within the team. I have introduced some nice changes to help their day go better as like you, my philosophy is enjoy coming to work and never be stressed about it.
However, like everyone else I can get stressed but its not the workload, it’s the team that bring me down.
Some ideas, I have introduced are:
Listening to music while they work
Be flexible with the shifts that they do
Let them have their moment where they need to walk away from an issue to calm down without any repercussions.
I could go on and we do the team lunches and have events, but there will still be the people that I can’t make happy.
The big issue I have is motivating all of the team. Some of my team are motivated and up for some fun or keen to get on board with a project but there will be a few that will put up the objection obstacles and flatly refuse to get involved, this can bring others down and ultimately put me down which really affects me.
At times it makes me want to move jobs and try again with a new team.
What would you do, as a manager in this situation? Please write a comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Two Danish bosses decided to greet their employees in a special way one Monday morning. Each employee got an energetic, friendly (and loud) greeting and a breakfast plate to take to their desk.
Many companies look to sports for cues on motivations and performance and star athletes and coaches and make big bucks as corporate speakers. There is this unquestioned assumption that if you’re successful in sports, you can teach workplaces something that will make them more effective.
I’d like to challenge that assumption :)
In fact, I believe there are so many fundamental differences between running a business and (say) coaching a football team that it becomes almost impossible to transfer any principles or practices.
Here are 5 things businesses should definitely not copy from sports:
5: Abrasive coaches
It seems like sports team coaches are given license to be complete jerks. They can throw tantrums, yell at referees, badmouth opposing players (or even their own players) in public – and be celebrated for all of this because it shows “passion”.
4: Adulation for star players
Sports teams have a few stars and many supporting players. In a workplace you need everyone to perform at their best.
3: Intense competition
It’s a common belief that competition makes people perform better, but research shows that it’s actually the other way around – competition makes people achieve worse results.
2: Rewards for results
Athletes are almost always rewarded for results – win that tournament and there’s prize money. Again, research shows that bonuses in the workplace make people less productive on any task that requires creativity and independent thinking.
1: Focus only on the next game
In sports, the focus is often only on the next game. In business, you need to be able to think long-term and create success not just for this week but for years in the future.
Each of those 5 practices are very common in sports but just don’t work in business. That being said, there are a few practices in sports that businesses should absolutely emulate. Here are three:
3: Make time for training
Athletes spend many more hours training for matches than actually in matches. This gives them a chance to improve their skills and a risk-free environment where they can try out new approaches and plays and see how they work.
In the workplace however, there is rarely a chance to try out new ideas without risking failure. Employees are always playing for points and never playing to learn.
2: Celebrate success
Athletes are very good at celebrating wins. They even celebrate partial progress towards a win when they score a goal or similar.
In many workplaces, success is met with a shrug and wins are rarely celebrated.
1: Include restitution
Every successful athlete know that you get stronger by training and THEN RESTING. Without restitution, you’re actually just continually weakening yourself.
Workplaces on the other hand consistently underestimate the need for restitution. Employees are worked hard constantly and breaks and time off work are seen as a necessary evil. In fact, employees are implicitly told that they can show “commitment” by giving up weekends and vacations and working more hours.
There is no reason why we should try to follow the lead of athletes and coaches in our efforts to create better and more successful workplaces. Many of the practices from sports just won’t work in a workplace – you could even argue that many of them don’t even work that well in sports.
And don’t even get me started on copying practices from the military :)
Your take
Has your company ever had a star coach or an athlete come in and speak? What did they say, that you found useful? What do you think workplaces should or shouldn’t copy from sports? Write a comment and let me know your take.
A CEO of a large Norwegian company once told me that “you know a corporate values program is doomed to fail, when they start distributing mouse mats with the values printed on them.”
Many companies today have taken great pains to identify and communicate their core values, but often this kind of thing sinks below the surface like a stone, leaving very few ripples.
In this short video that I shot for one of our clients a while back, I talk about what it takes to create corporate values that have value and I give a great example from one workplace that’s done so very successfully.
My first “real” job was for a large and very famous Danish company who’d hired me fresh out of university to work on one of their big new products. One day, about a month into my employment there, I was sitting at my desk thinking big thoughts.
To other people it might have looked like I was slacking – I’d put my feet up on the desk and was staring into the air – but in reality I was considering if the approach I’d chosen to solving a particular task was the right one or of there was a smarter, faster way.
And for that I was reprimanded. When my manager walked by and saw me sitting there, he criticized me for goofing off. As long as he could see me pecking away at my keyboard, he felt confident that I was productive. Seeing me with my feet up automatically made him assume that I was wasting time.
Companies everywhere are looking to increase productivity. Employees are asked to work more efficiently and get more done faster. But it seems to me that the constant focus on short-term productivity gains is hurting long-term results because employees’ work days are filled to capacity (and over) with tasks, meetings, deadlines, projects, etc.
What’s missing from that picture? Free time. Or as some call it: Slack.
In the excellent article ”In Praise of Slack: Time Is of the Essence” from The Academy of Management Executives M. B. Lawson writes about the importance of having time during your work day that is not already taken up with tasks. From the article:
Slack is important for organizational adaptation and innovation.
Increasingly complex systems and technologies require more, not less, time for monitoring and processing information. Future demands for strategic flexibility and for integrating learning and knowledge throughout organizations highlight the need to reexamine the importance of time in organizational work – and to recognize that all organizational resources cannot be committed to immediate output efforts if we are to have time to pay attention, think and benefit from the knowledge gained.
Some managers (among them my first team leader) see all free time as wasted time, but they’re completely wrong. When every moment of the work day is taken up with tasks and work, it damages the organization in many ways. Here are some we’ve seen among our clients:
Creativity is lost because there is no time to come up with and act on new ideas.
No one helps anyone else, because people are booked 100% (or more) on their own tasks
There’s no time to learn new skills
We end up always doing things the same way because there’s no time to optimize processes
Customers become less happy because there is no time to go the extra mile and deliver great customer service.
Everything becomes a chaotic mess because there is no time to organize and structure things
Flexibility is lost because everyone is too busy to deal with changing circumstances
Employees become less happy and more stressed because there is no time to deepen your skills
In short, organizations without slack become stiff and brittle and lose the ability to lift themselves out of their current problems and create ongoing improvements. These organizations become extremely fragile in the face of any unforeseen changes.
So slack is great for employees and for the workplace. But it must be created consciously. Workplaces must make a concerted effort to show employees
How do you do that in practice? Here are 5 ways we have seen work well in practice.
Hackathons are well-known in software companies. Employees are given time (frome 1 day to several days) to work in groups on any project of their own choosing. At the end, teams present their results.
20%-time (popularized by companies like 3M and Google) means that employees can devote up to 20% of their work week to projects they come up with themselves.
Training and development is crucial. In the company I co-founded, every employee had an annual training budget of 2 weeks and 8,000 USD, which they were required to use.
Minimize time spent on useless meetings, status reports and similar.
Plan for slack so that employees’ work week can not be booked 100%. Software company Menlo Innovations in the US, only let their people budget for 32 hours a week – they know that the rest is spent on planning, training, coordinating, etc.
Of course workplaces need to become more competitive and productive. Of course we must constantly try to do more with the resources we have. But we can’t expect people to become more effective, if they never have time to reflect, plan, learn or try out new ideas. That takes slack.
Your take
Do you have free time at work? Or is every minute filled already? Are people in your workplace rewarded or punished for stopping what they’re doing, so they can figure out a better way to do it?
The authors raises some issues around helping behavior and point out that helping co-workers may not come naturally:
Helpfulness must be actively nurtured in organizations, however, because it does not arise automatically among colleagues. Individuals in social groups experience conflicting impulses: As potential helpers, they may also be inclined to compete. As potential help seekers, they may also take pride in going it alone, or be distrustful of those whose assistance they could use. On both sides, help requires a commitment of time for uncertain returns and can seem like more trouble than it’s worth. Through their structures and incentives, organizations may, however unwittingly, compound the reluctance to provide or seek help.
In their study, they looked at what mattered most:
In our survey of the entire office population, people were asked to click on the names of all those who helped them in their work and to rank their top five helpers from first to fifth. (See the exhibit “What Makes an IDEO Colleague Most Helpful?”) Then they were asked to rate their number one helper, their number five helper, and a randomly suggested “nonhelper” (someone whose name they hadn’t selected) on several items. Those items assessed three characteristics: competence (how well the person did his or her job); trust (how comfortable the respondent was sharing thoughts and feelings with the person); and accessibility (how easily the respondent could obtain help from the person).
The kicker:
Trust and accessibility mattered much more than competence.
When looking for help, people don’t necessarily go to the smartest colleague but to the one they trust the most and have easy access to.
All in all, the article is a fascinating look into an organization that has succeeded in creating a culture where asking for and offering help is a natural part of the culture.
I believe that a culture of helping is essential for creating a happy workplace because everything is easier, if you know you’re not alone and you can get help when you’re stuck.
Also, I believe that the desire to help others is much more common in happy workplaces. We know from several studies, that happy people are less selfish and more helpful towards others.
Another excellent example is New York-based Next Jump who make software for employee engagement programs. They transitioned their internal employee awards, so they no longer go to the best or most skilled employees, but to the ones who help others succeed the most:
In short, I believe that a culture of helping is both a tool to create a happier workplace and an indicator of workplace happiness.
What kind of manager are you? Are you a happy boss or do you spread fear and misery all around you? We’ve created an online test that you can use to find out.
Being the boss used to be about making tough, ruthless decisions. This is changing. More and more wildly successful leaders today devote themselves to creating happiness – for employees, customers, shareholders and themselves.
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, committed his company to “Delivering Happiness” to both clients and employees. Richard Branson has said that “more than anything else, fun is the secret behind Virgin’s success.”
… about half of American employees in all sectors are either explicitly prohibited or strongly discouraged from discussing pay with their coworkers. In the private sector, the number is higher, at 61 percent.
…
We don’t know whether gag rules directly cause wage discrimination, but they undoubtedly open the door to it. Employers who keep pay secret are free to set pay scales on arbitrary bases or fail to give well-deserved raises because of social norms. “When you don’t have transparency and accountability,” Hegewisch told me, “employers react to these pressures and biases and women tend to lose out.”
The article also makes the point that workplaces can not legally keep employees from revealing their salaries or retaliate in any way when they do.
I examined this topic in an article way back in 2006 and I am convinced that keeping salaries secret harms not only employees but also workplaces.
I have had the pleasure of visiting some of the world’s happiest workplaces and while some people think that they’re happy because they don’t have problems, that is just not so.
And if you need a great way to identify and fix problems in the workplace, check out this article.
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