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Introduction
The impact shook everything for blocks. Fire,
charged by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, sucked so much oxygen out of the
air around the impact zone that windows in nearby buildings blew out as the
towers of the World Trade Center began to wither and then collapse. On the 32nd
floor of the World Financial Center, the offices of Barron’s Magazine
shook. Computers, office supplies, and equipment flew out the windows. Stunned
workers held on for dear life. Then, they carefully made their way out of the
building to safety. The editorial and business offices of Barron’s Magazine
had been almost instantaneously decimated. The damage was so great that it took
more than a year to refurbish the offices.
Yet, on September 11, 2001, as people fled the
building, Barron’s employees had already turned their attention to the
task of publishing the magazine on time. Months later, Ed Finn, Barron’s
Managing Editor, recalled that the attack had not prevented his employees from
publishing a full edition of the magazine three days after their offices were
destroyed.
In fact, the idea of not publishing never even
came up; the only question any employee asked was how the team would accomplish
it. None of us would want to face the challenges that Barron’s -- and many,
many others -- faced that day, but we can all appreciate what the Barron’s
employees did. We can all agree that most organizations would love to have
employees who display that level of enthusiasm for their jobs, their companies,
and their colleagues.
This is a book about enthusiastic workers.
Managers at all levels often spend an
inordinate amount of time with “difficult” individual employees -- employees who
are angry, uncooperative, or perhaps neurotically demanding of attention. In
fact, the task of dealing with such behavior problems is often perceived as a
significant human resources cost. But, the reality is even worse, because the
bigger problem is the vast number of workers who are not openly troublesome, but
who have become largely indifferent to the organization and its purposes. This
is the greater problem because the troublemakers can be identified and dealt
with; the “walking indifferent,” however, are silent killers. They have learned
to expect not too much and to give not too much. Yet, these workers are normal
people with reasonable human wants. Somehow, their human needs are only
marginally satisfied, if at all, by the companies for which they work. In
return, they give to the companies a mere fraction of what they are capable of
contributing. The economic cost of this underutilization to the affected
businesses is enormous.
How does a company tackle this problem? One
approach is to more closely supervise employees, pressuring them to do more. On
a more positive note, other managers treat their workers to a procession of
“motivational” speakers, rah-rah events, and programs. Neither approach will do
much good -- in fact, the former will likely exacerbate the problem. We need to get
to the root of the matter, the source of employee indifference, and we need to
address it. The real challenge is to turn indifferent workers into enthusiastic
workers. The solution might surprise you.
First, we must understand what workers want.
Then, we must give it to
them!
This may sound absurd to some, a sure road to
insolvency. On the
contrary, it is a powerful path to business success. Why do we say this?
- Many years of research have established
that, surprisingly, little real conflict exists between the goals of the
overwhelming majority of workers and those of their employers.
It is a common, but harmful, misconception that people and their organizations
are in a natural state of conflict. This book starts by setting the record
straight, examining the source of this confusion, and providing a fresh start
to understanding what workers really want. We show that the key question is
not how to motivate employees, but how to sustain -- and prevent management from
destroying -- the motivation that employees naturally bring to their jobs.
- Workers have basic human needs that
management can and should work to address. Creating an environment in which
these needs are met results not just in satisfied employees, but enthusiastic
employees.
What is the basis of human motivation in the workplace? We discuss three key
factors of worker motivation and what they mean. We also show the
extraordinary effect of successfully addressing all three of these key
factors.
- Employee enthusiasm -- a state of high employee
morale that derives from satisfying the three key needs of workers -- results in
enormous competitive advantages for those companies with the strength of
leadership to manage for real long-term results.
Our proof is the numerous cases that we have
collected over 30 years of survey research into the effect of employee attitudes
on organizational effectiveness. We explore what the data show, illustrating our
data with case histories and comments drawn from our extensive research, and we
connect the data to business outcomes.
Asking the Questions
How do we claim to know what workers want? It
is not by untested hypothesis, imagination, or philosophy. It is not by thinking
“out of the box” as the vogue term goes, nor is it by generalizing based on a
series of anecdotes. The only real way to learn what’s on workers’ minds is to
ask them! This involves asking them simply and directly using inquiry methods
that assure that the results are representative and valid.
Real data are the best antidote against jumping
to conclusions based only on personal biases, the latest fad, or anecdotes. By
using real data, we know what workers want, why they want it, and what it means.
We have been asking workers questions for more
than 30 years . . . or, more accurately, a talented group of industrial organizational psychologists at Sirota Consulting, along with the authors, have engaged in
employee-attitude research for more than 30 years. In that time, we collected
over 4 million survey responses from employees around the word. The data have
been collected on various general topics or dimensions of attitudes. Over the
course of time, we organized those dimensions into a model that aligns employee
attitudes with bottom-line business outcomes.
Asking the Right Questions
Although it is certainly a positive thing that
we have collected extensive attitudinal data by actually asking workers about
their opinions, we imagine that a few readers are now wondering how we know
which questions to ask. The answer to that question requires a little
background.
In 1972, David Sirota
organized a small business to pursue his mission of improving organization
performance through the systematic assessment and management of employee,
customer, and community relations. From 1959 through 1972, David was a director
of behavioral science research and application for IBM. There, David’s
activities included the establishment of IBM’s worldwide employee-attitude
survey program.
David has a broad industrial and academic
background. With a doctorate from the University of Michigan, he was a study
director at that University’s Institute of Social Research. He now serves on
that institute’s Board of Advisors. He has taught at the School of Industrial
and Labor Relations of Cornell University, at Yale University, the Sloan School
of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as associate
professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
He is now Chairman Emeritus of Sirota Consulting.
Co-author Louis
Mischkind is, likewise, steeped in survey research, with over 35 years of
experience in the field. Prior to joining Sirota Consulting, as Senior Vice
President, Lou was the program director of executive development at IBM, advisor
on human resources to the president of the General Products Division, and in
charge of opinion surveys and management assessment for IBM’s technical
community. He has taught courses in social and organizational psychology at NYU.
He holds a master’s degree in experimental psychology from Columbia University
and a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from New York University.
Co-author Michael
Meltzer comes to the subject from a different background. Michael is a
lawyer, practicing business and related law since 1976. He has been an advisor
to diverse businesses, including financial consulting, real-estate development,
sales and distribution, labor law, construction, and business-management
companies. Michael also served as an adjunct assistant professor at Pace
University, teaching business organizations, real-estate law and trusts and
estates, and he has served as a New York City civil court arbitrator. Michael
received a B.A. from The George Washington University in Washington D.C., in
1972, and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School in 1975. He joined Sirota Consulting
in 2001 as
Managing Director and General Counsel.
As David’s reputation grew, both for superior
research and for an ability to collect meaningful data that could be used for
real business improvement, the small business expanded into an internationally
known and respected consultancy. Sirota Consulting is now one of the larger
independent privately owned companies in the U.S. that specializes in
organization survey research. Sirota consultants have conducted a wide variety
of surveys for hundreds of organizations around the world. The company’s mission
remains much the same as it was when David first started it: to use survey data
to help organizations build strong, productive relationships with its key
constituencies such as employees, customers, suppliers, communities, investors,
opinion leaders, and the public at large.
Our experience, although extensive, is not the
only basis for the statement that we have asked the right questions. The
research done by Sirota Consultants over the years has followed a widely
accepted protocol for attitudinal research: individual interviews, focus groups,
and reliability and validation testing. You can find more detailed information
on our methods in Chapter 2, “Employee Enthusiasm and Business Success,” in
Appendix A, “Administration and Composition of the Survey Population,” and
Appendix B, “Reliability and Validity of the Data.”
Our years of research, experience, and testing
have resulted in an enormous pool of responses from which the data for this book
have been drawn.
Copyright ©2005 David Sirota,
Louis A. Mischkind, Michael Irwin Meltzer
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