Employee Engagement Painkillers- April 2019

Samin Saadat at CPHR Conference + Tradeshow, Vancouver, BC, The Employee Engagement Painkillers.

Your Employee Engagement Program might have a positive short term impact but a negative long term impact.

Here are the 8 Employee Engagement painkillers:

1. Recognition Programs are NOT Reward Programs

You don’t have to spend money to recognize and acknowledge good performance and good behaviour. When we mix this with external reward, something that the person already has the self-interest to do suddenly becomes conditional and externally motivated. When you remove the monetary reward, the interest and motivation to behave that way drops.

2. Make Your People Happy With Time, Not Money

Studies reveal that most of us have more discretionary time than ever before. How can we feel so starved for time? Data suggests the answer is Money.

“Most of us fall into the trap of spending time to get money because we believe money will make us happier in the long run” — Ashley Whillans.

This will get us lost in three illusions:

1) We always think we have more time in the future than in the present

2) we feel important by being busy

3) we feel guilty by spending money to buy time.

The happiest people use their money to buy time. Use your company’s budget to buy time for your employees, either through outsourcing their disliked tasks, working fewer hours, more vacation time or more time for creative tasks.

3. Uncertainty Hurts More than Negative Information. Embrace Transparency

Some leaders avoid telling their followers the direct truth. When situations are bad, they sugarcoat the reality or selectively reveal the facts. A team of psychologists at the University of Toronto found that individuals would react better to clear negative feedback/information than to uncertainty. Results showed that individuals experience an immediate, uncomfortable response to uncertainty, even more than when they are faced with clear negative information or negative feedback. This suggests that individuals would rather receive clear negative feedback/information than uncertain feedback, even though the outcome of the uncertain information could potentially be positive.

4. Goal Setting Impairs Motivation

Goal setting is great to set clear direction, but we need to focus on evaluating the progress and the systems that help us achieve our goal. Imagine you want to clean up your room. You motivate yourself to tidy up your room, you feel good for a day, but your room will soon be a mess again because you did not focus on the system and the behaviours to keep your room clean.

Goal setting has a yo-yo effect. You sacrifice a lot to achieve a goal then as soon as you achieve it, you go back to your old habits because you focus on single achievement not continuous refinement.

Goal setting limits our happiness from future events. You might think “when I achieve my goal, I will be happy”, but when you focus on the progress, as long as improvements are being made you will allow yourself to be happy over an extended period of time.

5. Social Events Don’t Build Meaningful Relationships

The most meaningful relationships are achieved when you and others can speak openly to each other about everything that is important, learn together, fall together and win together. Spend your company’s budget on creating challenging and rewarding opportunities and projects for your team. Then, they will use their own money to grab a beer together.

6. You Can’t Lecture Compassion and Empathy

Want to encourage compassion and empathy? Stop lecturing people on being nice to each other. Empower and train them to see the system they operate in. “The discipline of seeing interrelationships gradually undermines older attitudes of blame and guilt. We begin to see that all of us are trapped in structures embedded both in our ways of thinking and in the interpersonal and social milieus in which we live. Our knee-jerk tendencies to find fault with one another gradually fade, leaving a much deeper appreciation of the forces within which we all operate.” — Peter Senge. In our experience, as people see more of the systems within which they operate and as they understand the pressures influencing one another, they naturally develop more compassion and empathy.

7. Overcome Your Ineffective Policies to Encourage Creativity

Here is the story Of Stuart Little: Stuart orders milkshake at the hotel.

• “Stuart, I’d like a vanilla milkshake, please,”
• “Sorry, we don’t have milkshakes.
• “All right, Stuart, let me ask you this: Do you have any vanilla ice cream?”
• “Yes, of course!” he responded with renewed enthusiasm.
• “Okay, Stuart, I’d like a full bowl of vanilla ice cream.”
• “Yes sir, right away, sir! Is there anything else I can do to serve you?” Stuart asked.
• “Yeah . . . do you have any milk?”
• “Yes, we have milk!” he replied confidently.
• “All right, Stuart, here’s what I would like you to do. Please send up a tray with a full bowl of vanilla ice cream, half a glass of milk, and a long spoon. Could you do that for me, please?”
• “Certainly, right away, sir,” Stuart responded triumphantly.

No one is stupid in this story, the system is flawed in a way that kills our creativity and problem-solving skills.

“We need to reconsider our Stupid Systems, Pointless Policies and Muddled Management to Realize Real Growth” Stuart Little.

8. Diversity is a Must-to-Have

“A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate — that boy is my son!” Who is the surgeon?

Only a small group of people get this right? The surgeon is the mom.

We are all biased. Don’t let your decision makers be too similar in qualities and characteristics. The only way to overcome bias is to have a diverse team. Believe it or not, you do need women, people from different cultures, different first languages and different educational backgrounds, etc. to make better decisions and grow your business.

The human brain, behaviour and interactions with their environment never fail to intrigue Samin Saadat . After spending long hours in psychology labs at UBC and completing her Masters at the Sauder School of Business, she entered the workforce and observed a gap between what research suggests and what companies actually do to increase productivity and profitability. Now, Samin is on a mission to bridge this gap through Jalapeño Employee Engagement — leveraging technology and professional human services to bring research findings to life to help companies save invaluable dollars and to help individuals enhance their quality of life.