Employee Hierarchy of Needs

Money isn’t everything, especially when it comes to motivating employees—but it’s also not irrelevant.

Chip Conley’s Joie de Vivre hotel chain in the San Francisco Bay area struggled after 9/11. In an interview on FastCompany’s Web site (click here), Conley talks about turning to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid to understand how to connect to the higher needs of employees, customers, and investors. He developed an employee pyramid with three basic themes: “survival at the base, succeed at the middle, and transformation at the top. Applying that to employees, it’s money, recognition, and meaning.”

Conley and his leaders worked on building a culture of recognition and meaning:

• Senior leaders ended their meetings on a positive note.
• They created an environment of recognition throughout the organization.
• They made a rule that the person giving recognition needs to be from a different department than the person being recognized.
• They added questions to the twice-annual work climate surveys measuring performance on the top-of-the-pyramid attributes.
• They held offsite retreats with line level employees to promote recognition and instill meaning.
• They measured relationships to help evaluate manager effectiveness.

Joie de Vivre’s focus on the employee pyramid seems to have produced results: It was named one of the top ten “Best Places to Work in the Bay Area for the fifth year in 2010.

One note of caution: Recognition and meaning cannot replace fair pay. Wages in this country have been stagnant for so long, and jobs are so hard to come by these days, that senior leaders seem to give little thought to increasing wages in…

Engage Employees to Improve Performance

A study of 245 firefighters and their supervisors has shown that job engagement is a significant predictor of task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. The study, which is behind a firewall, is described by Bret L. Simmons on his blog.

The researchers measured job engagement through 18 questions organized by physical engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement. According to the article abstract, they found that “engagement, conceptualized as the investment of an individual’s complete self to a role, provides a more comprehensive explanation of relationships with performance relative to well-known concepts that reflect narrower aspects of the individual’s self.” The researchers were able to evaluate the impact of other factors including job involvement, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation on performance and behavior; they concluded these factors did not predict performance and behavior while engagement did.

According to Simmons, the researchers identified three antecedents of engagement: value congruence, perceived organizational support, and core self-evaluations. In other words, hire people who share and support your organization’s mission and values and who are self-sufficient and confident, and then provide development opportunities that align with your organizational values and your employees’ developmental needs.

In “Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement,” I wrote about a Gallup report that came to similar conclusions. Gallup defined a fully-engaged employee as emotionally attached to the unit and rationally loyal and found that “organizations that employ performance optimization management principles have outperformed their competitors by 26% in gross margin and 85% in sales growth.”

In “Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line,” I pointed to two specific…

Get Out of the Office

A recent post by Seth Godin got me thinking about a question in the Baldrige Criteria: How do you design and innovate your overall work system?

Godin’s post, Goodbye to the office, asks why people go to their office, plant, or factory. As he notes, “If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show ‘The Office’ will be seen as a quaint antique.”

I’m not so sure about that. True, we’ve already seen a trend toward more telecommuting, but the office mentality is so ingrained that it will take a few organizations revolutionizing the way we work—and making it fun, desirable, and profitable—to really get this ball rolling, and I don’t think that’s going to be widespread in ten years.

Having said that, the organizations that abandon the office concept in favor of something more efficient and relevant to today’s world will carve out an immediate competitive advantage. Young workers in particular will be attracted to the idea. They are already used to a more flexible environment with their phones and their friending and their connecting with friends through their phones. If they want to get together, they figure it out on the fly and it seems to work. There’s no reason meetings couldn’t be organized the same way. People worry about the social aspect of an office but, as Godin writes, “You can get energy from people other than those in the…

Is Your Job Ideal for You?

If you had to guess, how many of the people who work at your organization would say that their jobs are ideal for them?

Gallup asked 18,000 U.S. adults this question in January. Survey says: 70% think their jobs are ideal.

While that number is higher than I would have expected, the breakdown of the data provides fewer surprises. For those whose annual household income is less than $12,000, 57% said their jobs were ideal, a pretty high number for minimum wage jobs. At the top end of the scale—those making more than $120,000—77% say they have the ideal job. I guess the remaining 23% are just in it for the money.

Business owners topped the list of people who think their jobs are ideal (87%) with farming/forestry/fishing a close second. The bottom five are manager/executive at 68%; sales/retail at 64%; manufacturing/production and clerical/office at 61%; and service at 60%. In other words, pretty much anyone who works in a cubicle, manages people who work in cubicles, or stands for hours on a retail sales floor or a production line, which sounds like most of the workforce.

The older you are, the more likely you think your job is ideal. Seventy-eight percent of people 50-65 years old said so while only 52% of workers age 18 to 29 years agreed.

Education is a mixed bag. Those who had done postgraduate work ranked highest (77%), while those who completed some college were lowest at 63%—a full seven percent lower than those who had less than a…