The Happiness Factor
21-Nov-2011Staff can’t be expected to keep their nose to the grindstone without any thanks. These days emotional drivers are just as important as pay when it comes to employee satisfaction.
By Carolyn Boyd
Almost 60 per cent of the workforce either hate their jobs or have a ho-hum attitude to work. It's a figure that should send shivers down most bosses’ spines because, put simply, disengaged workers are bad for businesses.
Engaged workforces “are much better at impacting the bottom line in terms of employee performance, retention, customer satisfaction [and] revenue growth”, says Sam Dawson, head of engagement research consulting at Hay Group. Experts argue that most people – even those with a tendency to see the glass as half empty – can be happy at work, and often it can be achieved through some pretty simple steps.
Take RedBalloon, the online ‘experience’ store where people can buy vouchers for anything from art and craft classes to abseiling. “On the face of it I sell gift vouchers for a living,” says James Wright, RedBalloon’s employee engagement specialist. “That’s not exciting.” Yet RedBalloon scored more than 90 per cent for employee engagement in a recent Hewitt Best Employers Survey – well above the 55 per cent average for Australian businesses.
Sure, it might be easier to build engagement in a business that essentially sells happiness. But that can only go so far. What's RedBalloon’s real secret? The business lives up to its promises, argues Wright: “We just guarantee that this will be a fun place to work where you’re appreciated and you’ve got the right tools to do the job. It’s as simple as that.”
RedBalloon isn’t your usual mix of boring desks and fluoro lights. There’s oversized beanbags for staff to perch on, their laptop or iPad in hand. There’s also a PacMan machine for staff to play, and a wheel of fortune gets spun once a month; staff who have made a helpful suggestion get to try their luck.
However, Wright says what really resonates with the employees is the degree of autonomy and level of respect they are given – played out in everything from flexible working practices through to simple measures such as each worker having their own dedicated, named box in the staff fridge to stow their lunch. It begins with hiring people with shared values and continues with giving workers the freedom to make decisions – and acknowledging when they’ve done a good job.
And the latter point, it seems, is where many companies slip up. Managers often misunderstand gratitude and appreciation, says Timothy Sharp, executive coach and consultant at The Happiness Institute. And workers quickly tire of putting their nose to the grindstone without any thanks beyond their pay packets.
“A lot of managers say ‘I know they’re doing a good job, but why should I tell them? I’m paying them’,” notes Sharp. He often highlights the issue by asking managers: “If your child came home with a great report card or a certificate, would you just ignore him and say ‘he’s just doing his job?’”
“They often laugh a bit but then hopefully a little light goes on like, ‘oh, right!’,” says Sharp, who argues many managers are much more supportive as parents than bosses. “If you can take some of that into the workplace, in an appropriate way – because obviously it is a different context – then probably a few good things might come out of it,” he says.
Some companies know they need to recognise staff achievements but haven’t quite nailed how to. A common mistake can be to tie up recognition processes in red tape. “You walk into lots of businesses where their reward and recognition program has three stages of sign-off for a $100 gift card,” says Wright. “Nobody even wants to use the recognition program.”
At a company Wright consulted for, managers were not making enough of a fuss. “The manager would log into the system, order the gift card for the individual and it would simply arrive in the internal mail at the person’s desk in an envelope,” says Wright. There was no storytelling going on in the business and many achievements flew under the radar.
A slight tweak led to the rewards being delivered with three helium-filled red balloons and a lolly box attached to it on the manager’s desk – and suddenly the reward was very public as the manager was forced to create a celebration. As Wright observes: “Who knew that a piece of rubber filled with some helium would improve employee engagement?”
Recognition schemes must be flexible if they are to really work. “A lot of managers just assume that all people like to be recognised the same, and they don't,” says Steve Ewin, a specialist in engagement research with Hay Group. “People are individuals and they all like to be recognised in different ways.”
A unique challenge in Australia is the nation’s much-lauded egalitarian culture. “Australians [are] willing to give everyone a fair go,” Dawson points out. “But that actually leads to some issues internally in terms of the work culture … organisations are shying away from differentiating people in terms of their performance.”
Leaders are often surprised, notes Susan Nicholson, a business psychologist and partner with consultancy Mentors, to hear that the things they think are going to make the most difference to staff – such as remuneration and having people know what the business is about – aren’t nearly as powerful as the emotional drivers.
“The thing that will have people wanting to stay, wanting to commit and wanting to put in that extra effort is their emotional engagement with the organisation,” says Nicholson. “If they are feeling valued, if they are feeling passionate about what they are doing, if they are feeling appreciated and they enjoy their work, that has direct links with productivity and retention and requires different sets of skills from leaders. It’s the relationship skills, it’s the honesty and the trust that they create in a culture.”
These days, the key thing many job candidates are seeking is a good work-life balance, says Brett Rose, an associate director at recruitment consultancy Robert Walters. In a recent survey of 650 accounting professionals conducted by Robert Walters, more than a third of respondents nominated good work-life balance as the factor that makes them most happy and content in a job. It came in ahead of opportunities for career progression (23 per cent) and good salary and bonuses (17 per cent).
The results don’t surprise Nicholson. “We know that social networks – their relationships, not just at work but outside of work – are a critical factor in terms of predicting whether a person is going to be happy,” she says. And Generation Y in particular are pushing this very strongly. “They want a work-life balance and they also want to have positive social life at work,” says Nicholson.
Money just isn’t making the world turn quite as much as it used to. Before the global financial crisis, “there was very much a culture of people jumping ship for an extra $5000 or $10,000 right across the experience spectrum,” says Rose.
Now, things are a little different. “What that 18-month timeframe taught us throughout the financial crisis is that sometimes there are more important things outside of work and you can sell yourself to the devil, as it were, in terms of your working life,” says Rose. “As soon as things turn, some of these big corporates are quite ruthless in terms of how they treat people.”
Workers are still smarting from the pain inflicted during the economic downturn. “It was pretty much the people who were left behind in those big corporates that were really bearing the brunt of retrenchment policies,” says Rose. “Businesses that made cuts didn't allow for their existing staff to really have a good focus on quality of life [and they] are now suffering and we are seeing a consistent flow of people out of certain businesses as a result of that.”
Depending on the industry, though, even if employees want to move on they might not be able to, leaving bosses stuck with unhappy workers. “We have got these pockets of activity [in mining, resources, infrastructure and engineering] where we’re seeing consistent flow and consistent demand for quality people, and others, literally nothing,” says Rose. Workers in retail and manufacturing, for example, are staying put.
Showing You Care
The key to engagement is getting people aligned to their jobs, and workplaces. That means deliberately striking up conversations with the disengaged staff member about their meaning and purpose as seen through the staff member’s eyes, says Peter Doyle, who is a member of the Australian Psychological Society and founder of Guidelight Psychology.
They need to discover “what touches, moves and inspires that individual”, Doyle says. “Most HR professionals and managers nearly always default to the wrong level of conversation. They start to talk about goals and strategies or they start to talk about operational outcomes, and those things are worthy of discussion but not before you’ve seen the world through that staff member’s eyes and had a conversation of alignment as to their values and their purpose. That is the most powerful way to get high-level performance.
“It’s like a pyramid: the values are the core, the base, the strongest level of alignment you can possibly get. If you see the world through that staff member’s eyes, even letting them be heard and taking on some of their perspectives, it will give you much better engagement than if you just start to talk to them about rules and procedures and policy and disciplinary consequences and all that stuff. That’s operational and procedural – there’s nothing wrong with it but it needs to come secondary to the conversation of alignment about the values and purposes.
“The French had a great phrase for it, ‘raison d'être’ – what’s the reason for being? Why does that person do the things they do?” In terms of making a real difference, middle management is where it is at. A worker with a poor relationship is four times as likely to be unhappy and to leave, says Nicholson. And if middle managers aren’t positive towards an organisation and feeling happy in what they do themselves, alarm bells should really ring. “If it’s at that level, gosh you can really expect to have major problems throughout the whole organisation,” warns Nicolson.
But what to do with an unhappy worker? First, managers shouldn’t write off staff as simply being the type of people who can’t be engaged. Nicholson says there certainly are individuals who tend to have a less positive outlook on life, but “people change all the time”.
“People can change the way they think, the way they look at their life and look towards creating an environment that is more likely to lead to their satisfaction and happiness,” she says. The key is individual workers having – and realising they have – the power to do that.
Spend more time zoning in on employees’ good points, rather than constantly highlighting their areas for improvement, advises Sharp. “Managers who are better at helping their people focus on and utilise their strengths tend to get much more out of their people,” he says. “Those particular teams outperform comparable teams on pretty much every measure.”
A sense of purpose also results in happier employees. “The people who are happiest are the ones who can say ‘what I do makes a difference, a positive difference’,” says Nicholson. Many employees pine for a meaningful job, but they don’t necessarily need to be in traditionally caring industries, such as counselling or the not-for-profit sector, to get it. “It could be making widgets but they know widgets improve the quality of people’s lives. And there’s a belief that the organisation is really keen to do that; it’s not just about making money,” Nicholson says. That’s a really powerful link that leaders can make with their employees to promote that sense of purpose [and really link] them with a healthy, solid vision and mission.”
Engagement only gets you so far. What really helps people to be happy and more engaged at work and more productive is enabling these people to do their best. “We're seeing a lot of frustrated employees, and these are employees who want to do their best,” says Dawson. “They want to come in and be proud, and put in discretionary effort but they are just not enabled in their job.”
Enablement comes from “making sure they're in the right roles, that they've got the right skills and abilities to do the job, and really making sure that their immediate working environment is as supportive as it can be”. Sadly, keeping engagement high can sometimes mean letting go of staff, Doyle concedes. “It’s quite reasonable and respectful if in the conversations of alignment, a particular individual makes an appropriate choice that the organisation is not right for them,” he says.
“Ideally, you would have liked to have picked that up at the recruitment stage but sometimes you can recruit a person who does have alignment, but three or five years later their life circumstances, their values and their perspective shifts, and quite legitimately and reasonably the organisation and they come to a mutual agreement that they need a job-role change. And if the organisation can’t meet it, then of course they vote with their feet and go somewhere else. But it’s a win-win, not a negative.”
That’s not to say – as long as bridges aren’t burnt – that employees won’t come back, re-empowered, at a later stage in their career.
Time Out
Stress, both in the workplace and out of it, can drag engagement levels down. “It’s in the employer’s best interest to give people advanced stress-coping strategies, even if the stressors are non-work related,” says Peter Doyle, founder of Guidelight Psychology.
Sometimes, people just need to have fun – appropriate play and fun, that is. “I'm not talking about mucking around, but appropriate enthusiasm and play and fun can be very energising and can facilitate all sorts of things like creativity and innovation,” says Timothy Sharp, executive coach at The Happiness Institute.
It’s a myth, he argues, that fun and play equate to bludging or reduced productivity. “We know from the research that … appropriate fun and play actually correlate with higher productivity. “The question then becomes ‘what is appropriate?’ Because that will vary quite a lot from person to person, team to team and organisation to organisation.”
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