3 Ways to Motivate Your Team Through an Extended Crisis
Another month of working remotely has passed, and many employers are beginning to flag a lack of motivation, performance, and well-being coming from team members. It's important for managers to re-energize their teams and to identify the struggles which are holding them back. Read this blog post to learn more.
As we flip our calendars to yet another month of our large-scale Covid-19 remote-work experiment, it's no wonder that motivation, performance and well-being are flagging for many. Months in, managers need new tools to reenergize their teams, to accurately identify and diagnose recurring struggles and to empathetically help employees address their problems.
A large part of a leader's responsibility is to provide structure, guidance and regulation; yet many workplace studies point to the fact that the most important gauge for a healthy work environment isn't a strong external framework, but whether individuals can foster internal motivation.
Using a well-established theory of motivation called self-determination theory, or SDT, we have identified three main psychological needs that leaders can meet to help their employees stay engaged, confident and motivated.
1. Relatedness
This means that your employees feel cared for and that you've fostered a sense of belonging. Make time to listen to your employees' perspectives and make them know that they are heard and valued. A few simple practices may help:
- Acknowledge and validate your employees' emotions as well as their reactions. ("I know it can be tough to stay focused right now, but we'll figure it out together!")
- Don't let people get lost in the crowd: Reduce team size and acknowledge each member's work and achievements to the extent possible.
- When problems arise, make sure to get full feedback from those involved. This helps you identify the biggest issues and obstacles, while strengthening connection and encouraging communication.
- Emphasize that people's contributions are unique and necessary; do not let good work go unacknowledged.
- Communicate that you care about employees' well-being, not just their productivity.
2. Competence
This refers to when a person feels effective and experiences growth. Research shows that holding employees accountable for achievable goals can improve performance, and motivational science also suggests that trust begets trust. Try these approaches to help ignite your team's internal motivation:
- Involve your employees in decisions where their input could be valuable. Asking for suggestions to optimize an ongoing process, for example, can help maximize a sense of empowerment, progress and ownership.
- To demonstrate their mastery of a particular task or skill, ask an employee to explain to their colleagues what they're working on or why they chose a particular strategy.
- Set up check-ins to regularly discuss progress on individual goals and create strategies to meet them.
3. Autonomy
Effective leaders foster internal motivation by empowering employees' sense that they are the authors of their actions and have the power to make choices that are aligned with their own values, goals and interests, as well as their team's. Leaders should encourage autonomy and be genuinely caring while also recognizing that each employee carries responsibilities for achieving team objectives. To help foster a sense of autonomy we recommend that leaders:
- Encourage self-initiation and participation. Perhaps ask, "What part of this project can you see yourself leading?"
- Avoid controlling language ("Get this to me by tomorrow!") and minimize coercive controls like unrealistic deadlines and constant monitoring of your employees. Instead, find ways to motivate them through encouragement and positive feedback, such as, "I know it's a tight deadline, but having your skills on this team will be so helpful to our client."
- Be transparent by providing the rationale behind demands. People are more willing to put in their full effort when they understand why a given task is important.
A person's work environment plays a big role in whether these three channels surge or jam, so it's no surprise that motivation is especially at risk in these pandemic times. No matter what the circumstances are, we are most energized and committed when we are internally motivated by our own values, sense of enjoyment and growth — in short, internal motivation inspires us to be our best selves. By meeting the three psychological needs, leaders help employees be engaged and feel valued at work (relatedness), feel motivated by growth (competence), and feel empowered and confident in their skills (autonomy). Employees who feel unappreciated or coerced will, at best, often half-heartedly comply with a boss's orders without whole-heartedly committing to excellence. At worst, they will lose all sense of motivation and fail to meet goals and deadlines.
SOURCE: Bradford, A.; Ryan, R. (02 October 2020) "3 Ways to Motivate Your Team Through an Extended Crisis" (Web Blog Post). Received from https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/3-ways-to-motivate-your-team-through-an-extended-crisis.aspx
The Occupational Phenomenon Called Employee Burnout
According to the World Health Organization, "burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed". Unfortunately, workplaces are dismissing burn-out as an employee's issue rather than a workplace issue. Read this blog post to learn more.
Employee burnout is fast becoming prevalent in many workplaces and is also a recurring theme in my day-to-day conversations with people. Unfortunately, many workplaces dismiss the subject and make it more of the employee’s issue than a workplace issue.
“Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy.”
— World Health Organization
An organization’s culture and the work expectations in those organizations can foster employee burnout. Below are examples of situations that make employees prone to burnout:
- Digital Culture: A digital workplace, according to Deloitte, is one where many operational activities are performed over technology devices. These days, you can access your work emails, phone and video conferencing applications, instant messaging tools, and work documents through a single device. It is even more tempting to resist the notifications that continuously nudge you to respond to work-related matters. While I appreciate the digital workplace and understand that it is here to stay, it often implies that we need to be available around-the-clock, even during weekends. You have managers or coworkers sending work requests during early or late hours of the day, leading to a work-life imbalance for the employee. When work begins to encroach into an employee’s personal life, then they are at risk of burnout.
- Excessive Meetings: Collaboration is a skill required in many workplaces, and there’s no doubt that it is essential. However, some organizations tend to go overboard with their expectations from employees. Study shows that the average employee spends approximately six hours in meetings per week, while senior managers spend about 23 hours in meetings per week, and this increases by the size of the organization. Meetings, whether in-person or virtual, provide excellent opportunities for collaboration. When meetings become excessive and leave employees with little to no time to decompress, this can cause stress for employees and eventually lead to burnout.
- Dysfunctional Work Environments: In these work environments, employees face issues such as bullying, micromanagement, gossip, favoritism, or microaggression from coworkers or managers. A workplace that encourages such undermining behaviors can cause undue stress, which can eventually lead to burnout.
- Overworking Top Performers: It is quite easy for managers to overwork the best-performing employees. While the managers have the assurance of quality work, such employees become the victims of burnout because it seems like the reward for top performance is more work. Worse still, burnout is likely to occur when these employees do not receive fair compensation for the work they do.
What are the Signs of Employee Burnout?
The following are some signs of burnout in your employees:
- Reduced drive and work performance
- Increased absences from work
- Frequent tardiness
- Mental health conditions like anxiety and depression
- Poor concentration at work
- Increased sick days
- Visible frustration
- Lack of trust in the company and its leaders
If you or your colleagues are exhibiting any of these signs, you might be burned out.
Some Data
- A 2018 Gallup report states that “two-thirds of full-time workers experience burnout on the job.”
- A Harvard Business School article reports that “the estimated cost of workplace stress is anywhere from $125 to $190 billion a year.”
- An article by The World Economic Forum states that “the annual cost of burnout to the global economy has been estimated to be £255 billion.”
- Research by Stanford Graduate School of Business states that “workplace stress—such as long hours, job insecurity and lack of work-life balance—contributes to at least 120,000 deaths each year and accounts for up to $190 billion in health care costs.”
The data shows that employee burnout is now a workplace epidemic. To prove the seriousness of this issue, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently classified burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” in its latest revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
Ways to Reduce Employee Burnout
- Create and Maintain a Positive Work Environment: You can do this by being aware of your actions and how they impact those around you. Do not bully or micromanage your employees, or gossip about them to other employees you manage. When making decisions about your employees, be fair and consistent to avoid feelings of favoritism. Also, empower your employees to apply their skills by giving them autonomy. These help to increase satisfaction and create trust in the workplace.
- Set Realistic Goals: Plan projects ahead of time with your employees, set realistic deadlines or meetings, and be mindful of their personal commitments when assigning projects with tight deadlines.
- Show Support: Create communication channels for your employees to share their concerns or frustrations with you. Having an open-door policy or weekly check-in meetings where they can share their concerns with you can make your employees feel supported. Listen to them and help to address their issues.
- Show Appreciation: Recognize your employees for their contributions to your team. Recognition makes your employees, especially your top performers, feel like their work is impactful. When employees feel appreciated, they are more likely and willing to do great work.
- Promote Self-Care: Encourage your employees to practice self-care by permitting their requests for personal time off or vacation when they need it. You can also encourage them to fully unplug while they are out of the office by not sending urgent requests. Another way to promote self-care is to remove all expectations that employees need to be reachable around-the-clock. Also, do not encourage employees to stay long hours at work.
Originally published on Osasu Arigbe blog.
SOURCE: Arigbe, O. (13 June 2019) "The Occupational Phenomenon Called Employee Burnout" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://blog.shrm.org/blog/the-occupational-phenomenon-called-employee-burnout
Why employee performance management needs an HR tech overhaul
Are annual performance reviews necessary? A recent survey by Adobe reveals that 58 percent of people feel that performance reviews are not necessary. Continue reading to learn more.
According to a recent survey conducted by Adobe, 58% of people feel that performance reviews “are a needless HR requirement.” Adobe, in fact, no longer has an annual performance review process and instead has adopted an approach involving ongoing discussions between managers and employees that emphasize talent development and future productivity instead of formal ratings and rankings based on past performance.
Still, the vast majority of companies continue to persist with a backward-looking evaluation process that is time-consuming for managers, demotivating for employees and of negligible benefit to the business as a whole. They do this because, as Adobe’s survey respondents suspected, performance reviews are more about “compliance than customer service.”
Focusing on past performance is an industrial-era hangover from when employees were mainly required to hit targets in easily measurable, repetitive tasks. Although most people’s jobs have evolved to be more complex and creative since then, the process and the tools used to manage their efficacy and performance in those roles have not.
In many respects, HR is still a defensive function whose role is to protect the business from its own employees. This is reflected by HR technology that is built for compliance, rather than helping managers and employees become more productive.
HR’s on-premise or enterprise resource planning systems can track performance reviews to prove a dismissal was not unfair, rank employees to justify compensation distribution and demonstrate effective people management to the board or shareholders. What they can’t do is react positively to the ever-changing demands of the modern business world and help employees and managers meaningfully improve their skills to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
Performance management is changing — but HR tech is not
These days, a company’s and individual employee’s goals can change dramatically in the time between end-of-year reviews. Individual roles are more specialized and require frequent skill updates, while cross-functional teams have long since replaced the siloed departments that were standard just 10 years ago. In this environment, HR’s focus on past compliance is detrimental to future development.
Forward-thinking companies are changing the performance process to focus on development and continuous feedback that makes managers and employees more productive and engaged. The success of these trailblazers will encourage other businesses from a wide range of industries to follow suit.
This new model of performance management needs help from technology, but existing HR tech vendors are not keeping up. Their services are so embedded in the world of compliance, they cannot change to support the development needs of managers and employees. Fortunately, the solution already exists.
Creating a connected system of productivity
One of the key issues with performance reviews is that so much of the process involves looking back to gather the data. For managers, it is a huge time investment. For employees, end-of-year feedback about an issue that occurred months beforehand is too late to be useful.
The process seems doubly inefficient when you realize that real-time, instantly-actionable performance data is already available in productivity systems like JIRA and Salesforce that are used by different teams. The problem is HR’s defensive mindset has made it difficult to integrate existing internal or ERP systems with these tools.
Dedicated performance management services that connect to both HR systems and the departmental productivity tools can take HR technology out of its silo. This will create a connected system of productivity that uses real-time data alongside transparent and flexible goal-tracking to drive ongoing development conversations between managers and employees.
It’s time for HR to evolve from a defensive function to make a positive contribution to key business goals and become what HR analyst Josh Bersin calls the “chief of productivity.” This demands a shift from a performance review process based on compliance to a human-centered, development-focused experience.
Adopting new performance technology that integrates with widely-used productivity tools is a key step to ensuring everyone from employees to managers to HR can work on what matters most in order to meet today’s goals and tomorrow’s challenges.
SOURCE: Dennerline, D. (15 October 2018) "Why employee performance management needs an HR tech overhaul" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.benefitnews.com/opinion/why-employee-performance-management-needs-an-hr-tech-overhaul?brief=00000152-14a7-d1cc-a5fa-7cffccf00000
Flexible Work Schedule Doesn't Hurt Productivity
Original post benefitspro.com
Schedule flexibility should not be perceived as a gift to employees, suggests a new study. If it were, the employer would be giving up something, presumably employee productivity.
But an increasing body of research indicates that flexible workplaces are no worse for wear than others with stricter schedules.
The most recent study, published this month by Phyllis Moen, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, analyzed the effect that flexible work policies have on IT workers at a major firm.
Half of the 867 workers continued working under the company’s existing policy, with standard schedules and exceptions occasionally granted by supervisors.
The other group was given an entirely open-ended schedule, with no restrictions, so long as the employees completed their assigned work. Supervisors were also encouraged to think about ways to reduce work-family conflicts for employees, and were even prompted twice a day reminding them to come up with such ideas.
The study found that those who were granted the additional flexibility were not any less productive than those who labored under the traditional schedule. Those with the flexible schedules also reported being much happier because of the reduced stress of trying to make time to pick up kids and other typical work-family conflicts.
The study prompted a major feature story in the New York Times Magazine, “Rethinking the Work-Life Equation,” which profiled the growing ranks of experts in favor of flexible scheduling. Employers are under increased pressure to help their workers strike a work-life balance because of shifting gender roles, as more and more married couples commit themselves to both career advancement and child-rearing.
Even employers that are generous to employees seeking schedule flexibility may not produce the same level of stress-reduction as a policy that explicitly grants unlimited flexibility.
‘‘What people told us, over and over again, was that the new policy removed the guilt,’’ Erin Kelly, an MIT professor who collaborated on the study, told the New York Times Magazine. ‘‘We heard that word a lot.’’
What’s the Difference between Performance & Proficiency?
By Mykkah Herner, MA, CCP, Compensation Consultant at PayScale.com
Here at PayScale, we often talk about compensation philosophies answering 3 main questions:
- How do you define your market?
- How competitive do you want to be relative to the market?
- What do you want to reward?
In working with clients, I find they know the answers to the first two questions within a heartbeat. The third question, however, often leads them to stumble and to look to me for guidance. What are the options? What should we reward? At that point, I have to dig in deeper to their organization.
There’s no single right answer for what companies *should* reward. In some orgs, there will be just one thing to reward, in some it will be a combination of factors. At a time when most companies are focused on pay-for-performance, I want to explore this third question a bit further.
What do you want to reward?
Performance
Ultimately, for me, it will always come down to some variant of performance. If your employees aren’t going above and beyond, exceeding expectations most of the time, it’s likely that your organization will stagnate. Stagnation is close to death in a highly competitive environment. The number one question I ask myself when defining a compensation strategy is how am I going to motivate employees to perform? In measuring performance, it is about setting clear expectations, in the form of metrics, for what it looks like to excel and then following up on those expectations.
Proficiency
What’s the difference between performance and proficiency anyway? I see proficiency as one’s ability to perform the tasks required to do the job, having the right skill-set, etc. Performance refers to how well one performs those required tasks, exceeding expectations vs. meeting expectations, and so on. I know that’s simplistic, but breaking it down to that level helps me then think about how I might measure proficiency. Some measures for proficiency include checking that one has skills and ensuring that tasks have been completed.
Tenure
The average tenure in my parents’ generation was 5+ years. My generation can boast a meager 3 years. The average tenure in newer generations to the workforce can be measured in months, not years (usually 12-18, according to one researcher). With that in mind, rewarding tenure can sometimes be helpful to the continuity of your organization, but it still may not be the right motivator for performance. You may have better luck achieving continuity through structural means rather than through compensation.
Other options?
There are plenty of options besides the big three listed above. For some, it will make sense to reward certain skills. I’ve worked with clients who couldn’t get by without their technical staff. For them, targeting a higher percentile for their technical staff was crucial to accomplishing their business goals. For other clients, security clearances are a hot commodity. You know what’s important to your organization. Put your money where your priorities are.
Remember, you don’t have to reward all things equally. You may decide that you want to tie a large part of your compensation to performance, but still give token acknowledgments for proficiency and tenure. But be sure to keep it simple. Explain it easily and succinctly – and maybe you will avoid a few headaches for your payroll team.
Whatever you decide, live it as an organization. Make sure your managers and leaders buy in to your decision around what to reward. Explain your philosophy to your staff so they are clear about what’s important to your organization. And, as with all policy decisions, once you decide what you want to reward, stick to it.