An organization delivers on its mission through its employees. This fact is often expressed in corporate communication statements such as “Employees are our most valued asset.” However, despite best intentions, not every organization is able to create an environment in which employees feel valued. This is true even in companies that competitively compensate their employees. To understand this, we, therefore, need to go beyond monetary incentives.
Fundamentally humans are motivated by same basic factors Daniel Pink explains in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.” The top factors that make knowledge workers more motivated and satisfied are: 1) Belief that their work connects to a bigger purpose; 2) Have the ability to develop mastery, and 3) Have freedom to perform work autonomously. Daniel Ariely, the behavioral economist and author, also offers evidence that the amount of effort put into the work and appreciation received by others are just as important.
So, what should an organization do to make employees happier at work? Here are some suggestions:
Have a compelling purpose
A well-articulated company vision and mission can go a long way to engage employees’ heart and minds. Google’s “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible,” Walmart’s “to save people money so that they can live better,” Disney’s “to develop the most creative, innovative and profitable entertainment experiences,” and Zappos’ “to provide the best customer service possible” are great examples of simple purpose statements that call out what these companies stand for.
Create a culture of trust, empowerment, and innovation
Erika Andersen in her Forbes article defines culture as “patterns of accepted behavior, and the beliefs and values that promote and reinforce them.”
Trust in a work place is such a critical factor that the Trust Index© Employee Survey of Great Place to Work makes up the two-thirds of the evaluation criteria in picking the annual Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.” In a trusting culture, employees are given autonomy and authority to perform their jobs and make decisions aligned with their work and company purpose. A great example comes from Zappos: one time an employee mixes up an order, and ships out an Xbox to a soldier stationed in Iraq on active duty. As soon as this mistake was realized, the correct order is shipped. However, a dilemma occurs: what to do with the Xbox? Zappos employees decide to let the soldier keep it. But, realizing that he cannot do much with an Xbox without games they also chip in and send a huge care package, including the video games and other gifts from Zappos, to this soldier.
Leaders’ sponsorship of desired employee behaviors is just as critical in creating the right culture. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO in a 2013 Forbes article says “I encourage our employees to go down blind alleys and experiment. We’ve tried to create tools to reduce the cost of doing experiments so that we can do more of them. If you can increase the number of experiments you try from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically increase the number of innovations you produce.” Bezos is clearly empowering Amazon’s employees to try new ideas, experiment, take risks and fail smartly - all critical ingredients of an “innovation culture.”
Asking employees to come up with business building ideas can be just as powerful. Well known examples are 3M’s 15% time projects, Google’s 20% time projects, and Atlasian’s FedEx days which are all about giving employees autonomy to work on their ideas.
Invest in your employees’ development, and growth
The best employees will want to understand their potential for growth at your company. Will the company provide training to improve its employees’ skills? What are the company policies if employees want to get advanced degrees while working? Will they have a chance to learn on the job by experiencing different parts of the company? Will employees be given challenging assignments to stretch themselves? Be prepared to respond to these questions. Having a formal training program in which employees can learn the skills they need to move up, allocating the time and budget for external training, and actively working with employees on their career planning will likely to create employee loyalty and higher performance.
Investing in training to improve the people management skills of managers is just as important. Research indicates the skills that are most critical are: Inspiring, Empowering, Listening and Speaking, Collaborating, Caring and Developing, and Sharing and Celebrating.
Create a sense of community
People have a need to feel connected, belonging to a larger whole, and that they are valued as members of a team and community. This "sense of community" is created in environments in which there is open and honest communication; ideas and information flow freely and individuals can easily connect with others whom they trust and with whom they share common interests. There are, however, challenges confronting large organizations in creating this sense of community. The top one is global dispersion: employees are diverse in nationality and background, and there is limited time for meaningful human interactions. There is huge potential in leveraging social technologies to overcome connectivity and collaboration challenges in large, dispersed organizations. As an example, see the CIMdata article by John Mannisto, Engineering Director for Simulation-Based Design at Whirlpool Corporation where he makes a strong case for companies to adopt “new age” behaviors and social technologies to collaborate more effectively globally.
Adopt practices to tap the collective intelligence of your employees
Progressive companies have long been leveraging formal “Communities of Practice,” in which people can network through their expertise or interest areas. Social technologies have made community formation and management much easier. However, adoption challenges exist when the organization has not yet embraced an open, trusting, and collaborative culture. In addition, engagement of collective intelligence requires adoption of collaborative work processes such as open Q&A, conducting “Peer Assists,” e.g., inviting non-project team members to help solve problems in projects, and crowdsourcing ideas.
In closing, remember that culture and employee empowerment are essential to success. The Russell Investment Group in the US found that the best workplaces featured by Great Place to Work® Institute and Fortune magazine consistently out-perform major stock indices at least by a factor or two.
I would love to hear your stories. What are your practices and what have you learned in regards to employee empowerment and the culture of innovation?
