A New Tack for Slack: Motivate Workers

Managers can boost everyone’s productivity by praising successful workers in company-wide messaging

Based on the research of Wen Wen and Andrew Whinston

Workplace communications platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are sometimes accused of reducing productivity by distracting workers with constant messages and the need to respond to them.

But new research by Wen Wen, associate professor of information, risk, and operations management (IROM) at Texas McCombs, shows that companies can use them to do the opposite: to motivate workers.

How? By praising successful employees in all-staff channels that everyone can see — especially when they can’t see one another face-to-face.

“One important challenge faced by many companies is how to motivate remote workers and keep them productive,” says Wen. “Our research gives practical advice on how to construct the right messages regarding peers and how to share them on digital platforms in order to achieve a significant productivity gain.”

Power of Praise

Wen — with fellow IROM professor Andrew Whinston of Texas McCombs, Stephen He of The University of Texas at San Antonio, and Haoyuan Liu of Nanyang Technological University — scrutinized data from a Chinese internet technology company with 340 sales employees spread across 28 branches.

Whenever a sales representative landed a deal, human resources representatives would alert all branch workers on a Slack-like app. The notes were lengthy, individualized, and garnished with emojis.

The researchers classified the messages into two types: ones that praised employees’ efforts and ones that praised employees’ abilities. How would those messages affect the performance of other employees, as measured by the number of phone calls they made to prospective subscribers?

The team found both kinds of messages boosted overall productivity.

• For a 10 percentage-point increase in the intensity of messages praising efforts, other workers averaged 0.9 more calls a day.
• The same amount of increase in messaging about abilities inspired other workers to make 1.2 more calls a day.

Distance Makes a Difference

But the two kinds of messages had different effects, depending on whether other employees knew personally the ones being praised. Dividing relationships into “socially close” and “socially distant,” the study found:

• Effort-focused notes boosted sales calls made by both close and distant colleagues, with no significant difference between them.
• Ability-focused messages had strong motivating effects on close co-workers. For distant co-workers, however, call numbers were virtually unchanged.

The researchers got similar results from a second study, which surveyed 228 U.S. workers from a variety of companies.

Why did commending effort inspire more workers than commending ability? Wen points to prior psychological research.

People relate to another’s effort because they see it as controllable, actionable, and contributing to success, she says. “Individuals often exhibit heightened dedication when they perceive that the goals they pursue are more achievable.”

It’s a different story for ability-focused messages. People who are socially close see themselves as having similar abilities, and they work harder. But those who are distant are less likely to believe that they possess similar abilities or that they can acquire them anytime soon.

That’s a particularly important finding for companies with many remote workers, Wen notes. “They usually do not know each other due to the physical distance,” she says.

“For a distributed workforce, managers should probably consider crafting effort-focused messages when sharing peer successes, instead of ability-focused messages. People can be influenced by effort-focused messages about peers whom they don’t even know.”

“Peer Influence in the Workplace: Evidence from an Enterprise Digital Platform” is published in MIS Quarterly.

Story by Kiah Collier