There’s a popular utterance – often combined with a smirky, knowing stare and a roll of the eyes – used to convey the sentiment, “Well, of course, you idiot, how come it took you so long to figure that one out?”
The expression, of course, is “Duh!” And I think “Duh” is the perfectly appropriate response to stories about employee motivation that appeared recently in two of the country’s most influential newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
The first, in the Journal, was headlined, “Firms Discover that Employees Matter.” Now, for years, I was convinced most companies thought of employees as Disposable Labor Units. Sure, they said nice things about DLUs in annual reports: “Our people are our most important asset;” “We don’t have employees, we have associates.” “We want to be the employer of choice.” All nice blah blah. Some companies actually may have meant what they said. But most printed the PR fluff to keep the lawyers off their backs and to make themselves sound enlightened. In the day-in, day-out world of work, most companies act as if employees are the chief impediment to bigger profits, a sky-high stock price and induction into the CEO Hall of Fame.
In the Journal story, we read that the worldwide hunt for good employees has put companies on their toes.
“People are much more important on the corporate agenda these days,” the Journal quotes Lynda Gratton, dean of the London Business School’s Master of Business Administration program. She says that the new dot.com companies face the challenge of finding ways to motivate people beyond money, while older companies have to loosen the purse strings and their bureaucracies and allow entrepreneurial employees to run with their ideas.
How’s that for deep managerial insight?
Over at the Times, we learn “The Wisdom of Thoughtfulness: In Tight Labor Market, Bosses Find Value in Being Nice.” Seems to me, my mother the management guru taught me about the importance of niceness during my under-under-undergraduate days at P.S. 188. But then again, that was many years ago and my mother didn’t have an MBA.
According to the Times, which quotes a Gallup Organization poll, most workers rate having a caring boss even higher than they value money or fringe benefits. In fact, interviews with two million employees at 700 companies found that how long an employee stays at a company and how productive he is there, is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor. “People join companies and leave managers,” said the survey’s primary analyst, Marcus Buckingham.
So here, free of a $100,000 consultant tab, is advice for managers on how to act in order to retain the most productive employees:
- Treat people as you would want to be treated.
- Don’t try to manipulate people. They quickly catch on to your game and lose respect, motivation and the desire to contribute.
- Use more kind words than nasty ones.
- Look for people who are self-motivated to begin with.
- Understand that people have a life outside of work. Be reasonable, and if you hired the right people, they will be too.
- Don’t hire or promote jerks.
- Work hard, but lighten up.
Duh!
Article – Copyright 2000 Evan Cooper. Syndicated by ParadigmTSA
