Archive for the ‘OrgVitality’ Category
Link to People and Strategy Journal article, “Why Employee Engagement is not Strategic”.
Scott Brooks and I recently published this article which we thought you would enjoy. Jeff
WYSIATI
Daniel Kahneman coined the acronym WYSIATI which is an abbreviation for “What you see is all there is”. It is one of the human biases that he explores when he describes how human decision-making is not entirely based on rational thought. Traditionally, economists believed in the human being as a rational thinker, that decisions and judgments would be carefully weighed before being taken. And much of traditional economic theory is based on that notion. Dr. Kahneman’s life’s work (along with his co-author Dr. Amos Tversky) explodes that notion and describes many of the short-comings of human decision-making. He found that many human decisions rely on automatic or knee-jerk reactions, rather than deliberative thought. And that these automatic reactions (he calls them System 1 thinking) are based on heuristics or rules of thumb that we develop or have hard-wired into our brains. System 1 thinking is very useful in that it can help the individual deal with the onslaught of information that impinges on us each and every day, but the risk is when a decision that one is faced with should be thought through rather than based on a knee-jerk reaction.
System 1 decisions are easy, they are comfortable, and unfortunately they can also be wrong. But wrong in the sense that if one learned how to take a step back and allow for more deliberative thought prior to the decision, some of these wrong decisions or judgments could be avoided. A simple example from Dr. Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” will illustrate the point.
“A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat cost $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” Fifty percent of the students who were posed this simple question, students attending either Harvard or Yale got this wrong. Eighty percent of the students who were asked this question from other universities got it wrong. This is System 1 thinking at its finest and most error prone. It is fast, easy, comfortable, lets you come up with a quick answer or decision, but one that is likely wrong. Knowing who reads this blog I’ll let you figure out the answer yourself.
WYSIATI is the notion that we form impressions and judgments based on the information that is available to us. For instance we form impressions about people within a few seconds of meeting them. In fact, it has been documented that without careful training interviewers who are screening job applicants will come to a conclusion about the applicant within about 30 seconds of beginning the interview. And when tested these initial notions are often wrong. Interviewers who are trained to withhold judgment about someone do a better job at applicant screening, and the longer that judgment is delayed the better the decision.
This notion of course flies in the face of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink” in which he talks about the wonders of human’s ability to come to decisions instantly and a whole generation of manager’s have eagerly embraced his beliefs - including a few CEO’s I know. Why? It is easy, it is intuitive, it is comfortable and it plays to the notion that I am competent and confident in my work. The only problem is that when put to serious scientific scrutiny, it is often wrong.
A few months ago I introduced this concept to an HR group I was talking to. I explained how untrained HR people in a rush to judgment will jump to conclusions about someone, perhaps too rapidly. One 30-year HR veteran insisted that this may be all well and good but of course did not apply to her. After all, with her 30 years of experience her rush to judgment was of course going to be accurate. She “just knew” who were going to be good employees. I let it drop, and I think I was labeled a trouble-maker by the group. That is a label I can embrace.
We tend to develop stories based on the information at hand; piecing the information we do have into a narrative, often without asking the question, “what information am I missing”? In the area of survey research I have often seen researchers confidently presenting the “drivers” of one type of behavior or another. Say for instance, the drivers of employee engagement. But since the analysis is based on a “within” survey design, the only drivers that can possibly emerge are those that you asked about in the survey in the first place. So the researcher, in designing the 30-50 item survey, is limiting the drivers to those items that they decided to ask about in the first place. The researcher likely has in their head a model of what is important in driving engagement when designing the questionnaire, a model that was designed based on another 30-50 item or fewer questionnaire. It becomes a tautology, it becomes true because I tested it and it came out as true, but the only thing I tested is what I already believed.
There are techniques that can be applied that lead towards more deliberative and better decision-making processes. If you were walking briskly down a busy road and someone asked you “how much is 17 x 24?” you would do what every other human would do to figure that out, you would stop and think.
OrgVitality 2012 Milestones
| As the year winds down, the folks at OrgVitality wanted to take a step back and share with you what we have accomplished this year and what 2013 seems likely to bring. |
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Top Client Employee Survey Lesson of 2012: Surveys should be uniquely “You” – If you can’t find elements of your organization’s unique strategy or you can’t even tell your industry from your survey (or other measurements), then you aren’t doing it right. |
| 2013 January Workshop:
Maximize Performance While Preparing for Growth: Business Insights Successful Leaders Gain from Employees. We are rolling out a hands-on Workshop Series on Strategic Organizational Metrics, with a January 29th kickoff workshop in New York City at the SUNY Global Center. For more information see: OrgVitality Workshop. |
| 2012 Company Accomplishments: |
We signed a multi-year contract to conduct Starwood’s employee survey covering 155,000+ employees. The survey will be offered in 41 languages and the reporting will be available in 17. Starwood owns 9 hotel brands including Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis, W, Le Meridian, Aloft, Four Points, Element, and the Luxury Collection. Under our General Services Administration MOBIS award, we completed our first employee survey for the US Army. Other types of projects conducted in 2012: employee surveys, customer surveys, linkage and statistical analyses, metrics, strategy meeting facilitation, executive coaching, 360 assessments and merger-related research. Industries served included: Financial Services, Hospitality, Insurance, Manufacturing, Non-Profit, Retail, Technology, HR Consulting, Education, Government & Policing Agencies.
Significant updates were made to our survey technology suite, called OrgView™, including modules for Org Coding, Ad-Hoc Reporting, Action Planning and new version of PowerPoint report generator. Our “Manager as Coach” training program and 360 Assessment were developed and implemented.
OrgVitality is pleased to announce the establishment of a technology development center (TDC) in Zikhron Yaacov, about 40 minutes north of Tel Aviv. This technology group will have staff in both Israel and the USA. We are also excited about new locations opening in 2013 in Stuttgart /Zurich and London. Our OV Stuttgart/Zurich location will be headed by Dr. Ingwer Borg, a long-time survey research guru. Our London affiliate (Batson Consulting) will be headed by Deborah Smart, who was responsible for the employee survey for many years at BP. Along with Geneva, these new locations will greatly enhance our European presence. Additional project management, programming and statistical staff have been added in New York and San Francisco.
For the United Nations:
We support Save the Children by providing management coaching services
We have helped support/been involved in/delivered speeches, papers at a number of professional organizations including: the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Human Resources People and Strategy, and Mayflower (an international consortium of corporations to share survey norms and practices). Awards/Publications:
Our migration of servers to a Chicago-based SAS 70 Type II Data Center (currently highest standard in use) has been completed. The new facility is SSAE 16 SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliant, audited by a 3rd party, and is currently undergoing a PCI Level 2 audit. (I have no idea what most of that means but the tech guys made me put it in.) Additionally, we renewed our Safe Harbor Certification by US Department of Commerce for handling personnel data from European Union, Swiss Federation and Canada. |
If you would like to learn more about us, do not hesitate to call or email: 1.914.747.7736, ContactUs@OrgVitality.com.
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What Makes an Employee Happy?
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
Dr. Seuss
There has been much attention paid to happiness lately. It is a hot topic. Economists have been talking about the role of government in producing happiness and how it could be used to measure the success of an economy. Measures of happiness have been discussed as a supplement to the traditional measure of GDP or even to replace it. The Organization for Economic Cooperative Development (OECD) has a formal program to measure happiness across their member countries and at their conferences there are presentations on the importance of and how to measure “Gross National Happiness”. The United Nations has a Commission on Happiness which commissioned Columbia University’s Earth Institute to create the first World Happiness Report.
Our knowledge of what makes people happy has radically changed over the last 20 years. Positive Psychology has played an important role in the rise of happiness as a measure and one finding is that a significant portion of how happy people report they are has been linked to genetics. There are some people who are simply more inclined, through genetics, to be happier. One question that arises revolves around what can people do, if anything, to influence the natural level of happiness they are born with? Is it all genetics or can the environment or certain behaviors influence your base level of happiness?
From a business performance perspective, do happier employees result in happier customers? Is there a linkage? Do happier employees result in higher levels of organizational performance? And before organizations run off and start looking to hire only genetically happy workers, the latest research findings imply that the happiness gene can be impacted by environmental conditions. Happiness is not a specific set point or a specific degree as determined by your genes, rather it appears to be a range and your environment and your behaviors will determine where you will live within that range. Some people have a naturally higher range and others will have a lower range. A person with a higher natural range who is doing all the wrong things can have a lower happiness score than a person with a lower natural range but are doing all the right things. The interplay between nature and nurture (and other environmental factors – such as drug usage) is both more subtle and more complicated than has been previously thought.
Happiness can be thought of as a formula, as difficult as that may be for some people. Happiness equals your biological set point/range (S), plus the external conditions you are living under (C), plus the voluntary activities you undertake to improve your happiness (V).
Happiness = S + C + V
As I mentioned “S” in the above formula represents your biological pre-disposition and is a range of potential happiness you are capable of experiencing. The level you are experiencing can change day-to-day. For instance, if your son or daughter just got into the college they always dreamed of attending your happiness score will rise (as will your pride in your child), but when you get the first tuition bill your happiness score may plummet (as will your bank account balance). Yet you operate within your genetically determined happiness range.
“C” represents external conditions that matter for your happiness. These fall into 2 main groupings, those you can’t change such as race, age and gender (or at least things you can’t easily change) and those you can change such as marital status, where you live or your income level (sometimes also not so easily changed).
“V” represents thing you choose to or don’t choose to do. These are voluntary activities that can change where you fall in your happiness range. These things can include exercise, education and learning new skills, volunteering your time, charity work, meditation, playing a musical instrument or even taking a vacation. Total immersion in a task that gives pleasure is one sure way to increase the “V” component of happiness.
Things in the above formula can get a bit tricky as we are dealing with complex humans after all. In order to maximize the “happiness effect” of both “C” and “V” you need insure that you do not become adapted to or too used to the activity. If, for instance, you are always on vacation, then taking a vacation loses some of its specialness and the impact on your happiness can diminish over time as you spend more and more time on vacation. Playing a musical instrument may be a real pleasure in your life until you are forced to practice for hours at a time. This pattern of adaptation is why wealthy people tend not to be as happy as you would think. They become acclimatized to being wealthy and it loses much of its impact. But don’t get me wrong it is a lot easier to be happy when you have money than when you don’t have any. And if I had to be unhappy, I would rather be unhappy and wealthy than unhappy and poor. The point is not to look at a level of wealth as a never ending source of happiness. That won’t happen.
Physical pleasures which are voluntary and intermittent, such as eating rich food or having sex (people report the highest levels of happiness immediately after having sex) follow the same pattern. If you become satiated with an activity, but continue with that activity, the ability of that activity to impact your happiness will diminish. And at the extreme level continuing with an activity, perhaps eating ice cream well past the point of satiation, can create a state of disgust, lowering your happiness level.
Within the world of work, happiness can be increased by giving people more control over their work and working conditions. For instance, having an IT department dictating exactly which laptop a worker gets, based on their level or position in the workforce is one sure way to reduce happiness overall. Giving workers a menu of acceptable choices and then giving them control to choose the best choice for their own situation is a very simple example of how to improve happiness. The same holds true if you can give workers more control over their work schedule or locations. In general when people feel that they do not have control over their lives, including aspects of their work situation their happiness will diminish.
One experiment which demonstrated the impact that control over your living situation can have occurred in a nursing home. Residents were given control over relatively simple aspects of the lives within the nursing home (e.g. which art work would be hung on the walls). Nurses reported that residents who were given more control over their living conditions had higher levels of happiness, as rated by the nurses. But beyond happiness these resident also had fewer deaths within their ranks than a control group. So happiness levels that someone was experiencing had a physical affect.
Combine this with the finding that people are more positive about many things when they sense positive movement on an issue, movement having even more of an impact than absolute levels, and you begin to get a sense of what makes an employee and people in general happy. For instance in one ongoing study of employee positiveness, the most positive employees did not come from countries with the highest levels of economic performance or GDP, but rather from those countries with the most rapidly improving GDP levels. In other words things were perceived as getting better for people economically.
A special mention needs to be made about task immersion, a state called “flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly one of the founders, along with Martin Seligman, of Positive Psychology. When someone is in the flow, they are totally immersed in a task that is appropriately matched to their skills. They give examples such as painting, writing, photography, singing and dancing. I could add examples such as solving work related problems, building a house, writing a program, fixing a machine, etc. When a worker is in the flow, happiness will be greatly increased. These are the pleasures a worker experiences in simply doing a good job at work and when the work is matched to the appropriate worker. And as mentioned above however, if the work is past the point of satiation the happiness that the work can bring decreases until the activity can disgust the worker.
There are many ways to impact an employee’s happiness. Among them pay, benefits, job security, recognition, advancement opportunity, respectful treatment, working for an organization that is viewed as having effective leadership all have roles to play. The relatively recent research on happiness implies that increased levels of happiness can also be achieved when a worker is accomplishing something (something they feel is important), learning something (new skills to prepare them for the future), or improving something, moving the outcome in a positive direction (a product, a process or themselves). Happiness is positively impacted by giving people as much control over their environment as possible by making them feel in control of their lives. Happiness is also generally positively impacted if people can help others, building and strengthening social connections.
There is still much to be learned about happiness, especially in the area of its impact on organizational goal attainment and customer satisfaction, but it does seem clear that well-run organizations can benefit from doing some relatively simple things that can increase employee happiness.
© 2012 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
Visit OV: www.orgvitality.com
Why Improving Employee Engagement is not Strategic
Employee Engagement is often viewed as a magic bullet. All we have to do is increase our levels of employee engagement and all will be well. Is your engineering done poorly? That is because your engineering employees are not engaged enough. They would exceed your customer’s expectations if they were more engaged. Putting your stores in under-performing locations? That would not happen if your real estate people were more engaged. Are your customers unhappy with the quality of your products? If only you could make your sales people were more engaged. This kind of thinking is of course nonsense, but there is a deeper issue here.
Some, if not many organizations have bought into the notion that increasing employee engagement should be part of an organizations’ strategy. But that is like saying reducing an ill person’s fever should be the strategy to get them well, without addressing the underlying cause, like the tumor that is spreading rapidly in their pancreas. Maybe if we brought the fever under control that tumor would resolve itself? Not likely.
As we conduct employee surveys there are several distinct kinds of questions that are used to gage what is happening within an organization and how it is functioning. One question type is called an independent variable. These are items like “do you have the training you need to get your job done?” They are directly addressable if the response scores are low. Another question type is called a dependent variable, such as “I am proud to work for XYZ”. These kinds of questions are dependent on other things driving them high or low, such as, we were just caught up in a bribery scandal, so I am not so proud to work here. How would you address pride in that circumstance? While there may be other underlying issues, simplistically, you would address ethics in order to bring pride back to higher levels. There are other kinds of questions we use in surveys but discussing these two types will make my point.
Good strategy for an organization is strategy that is simply stated, easily understood and directly addressable. Good strategy could be thought of as independent variables. Is your engineering done poorly? Good strategy may be to upgrade or bring resources to your engineering group. Maybe you hire or maybe you acquire or maybe you outsource, but the hallmark of a good strategy is that you can directly address the improvement needed of the engineering function. The engineering employees will become engaged when they have what they need to do their jobs well, are treated in an equitable fashion, with respect etc.
A strategy that states, we will increase employee engagement as the strategy itself, is not directly addressable and does not give the management team any insight into specifically what needs to be done to accomplish that goal. Without insight into the direct strategic actions that must be taken you get warm and fuzzy words that are not directional and will be impossible to accomplish.
Having high levels of employee engagement is a good end result, but it is an end result of other strategic actions you take and is simply not strategic by itself.
© 2012 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
Visit OV: http://www.orgvitality.com
Sense of Direction
“You are going to have to help me with this people thing.” That was what the ex-McKinsey consultant turned CEO of a major Fortune company told me years ago. He was the nicest guy. He explained to me how he could handle all of the financials to run his company but this whole people thing, what motivated them, what concerned them, he just couldn’t get his arms around that. He was baffled. What to him seemed like simple business decisions, trim here, reorganize there, in order to fine tune his company’s financial performance resulted in all sorts of emotional morale issues. “Why didn’t people see the obvious?” He thought that there should be no emotions involved in financial business decisions, that if he did what was best for the company, to ensure its survival, that people should not mind (or at least not get emotional about) being moved around like pieces on a chess board, even if it meant losing their jobs. While this company had solid financial performance, it also had a fairly high degree of turnover, with some employees after a pretty short period of time feeling burned out and not being able to continue with the firm. Yet this company also had a high degree of employee commitment and employee loyalty. How was that possible?
I participated in a graduation recently. A group of MBA student’s to whom I taught a leadership class were graduating with their degrees in hand. It was extremely emotional in a positive way for the students, their families and friends that were present. The students were smiling from ear to ear and the parents were beaming. As each student came across the stage, amid the flashing of cameras, I rose shook their hands and congratulated them on their achievement. As each student passed me, I wondered “what direction will their lives now take?”
Sense of Direction. Having a clear sense of direction, a sense of mission regarding what the organization (an organization can be anything from a poker club to a nation state) is going to accomplish, and how people can personally and meaningfully contribute to that goal will affect one’s overall sense of well-being and happiness. It helps to increase a sense of purposefulness which in turn can greatly impact people’s sense of commitment and loyalty to the organization. Most people struggle with this, looking for a sense of direction and purposefulness for at least a portion of their lives, others struggle with this for most of their lives. For the newly-minted MBA’s, they are at an inflection point, where they will be examining the decisions they have made so far and will be reflecting on a host of choices they now have which will affect their own sense of direction and sense of purpose.
For an organization, clarity on this subject allows members to self-select, for if I don’t agree with the goals of the organization (stated or otherwise), or what the organization perceives as my role in helping it to achieve those goals, it is pretty clear, that if I can, I should leave. Over time, with a clear sense of direction (stated or otherwise), what an organization can achieve is a fairly tightly knit core of people who are extremely dedicated, ferociously loyal to helping the organization achieve its goals. And yes, there is a risk that too tightly knit of a group will put goal achievement and gain for this core above all else including societal or customer well-being, potentially bending or breaking various articulated operating standards, societal rules, regulations or laws. An inner core can arise, and as C.S. Lewis pointed out a long time ago, people will do almost anything to become part of the inner circle. As with everything there needs to be a sense of balance, swinging too far in any direction is generally not good for people, the organization or society at large.
Knowing where an organization is going, what it stands for and the values it will employ while getting there can be critical to actually getting there. Each person having a sense of direction and knowing how they can contribute to that direction is a fundamental building block for organizational performance and morale.
One aspect of sense of direction having a positive impact is movement, or the direction of the sense of direction. People tend to get frustrated with stagnation and get unhappy pretty quickly about what is perceived as a backward slide, even if that slide is relatively small and from a very high place or performance level. People notice and feel positive or negatively about the direction things are headed, oftentimes more than the absolute level of the measure suggests that they should.
For instance, as we have measured Employee Confidence over the years, what we see are increases and decreases in Employee Confidence on a national level that are related to the direction of a nation’s economy and not the absolute level of economic performance. Employee Confidence goes up if conditions (e.g. unemployment levels, GDP growth) are seen as improving and it declines if conditions are perceived as dropping, regardless of the absolute levels of those conditions. Employee Confidence can be very high in rapidly developing economies as people feel that conditions are improving and that their economy is on the rise, even if the absolute economic standards are pretty low. Likewise, Employee Confidence can be low in highly develop economies with high standards of living if economic performance is seen as in decline.
As humans, we tend to perceive events and make judgments on a relative basis and not on an absolute basis. What tends to becomes normal is relative to what we routinely experience. But every once in a while we are able change the standard dramatically when a critical mass of organizational members compares what they are experiencing to other extra-organizational standards.
Let me illustrate relative decision-making in a simple fashion. Say you needed a pair of shoes and had your eye on a pair that normally costs $300. You are prepared to spend $300 on those shoes. You open the Sunday paper and see that a store 40 minutes away across town has those same exact shoes that you have been thinking of purchasing for half-off or $150. Would you be motivated to drive across town to buy your shoes at half-price? Many people are inclined to do that. Now say you needed to purchase a new car. You are looking at a car that costs $27,900 at a new car dealer near your house. You are prepared to spend $27,900 on that new car by financing it with the bank and paying it off over 5 years. You open the Sunday paper and see that same exact car for $27,750 at a new car dealer 40 minutes away on the other side of town. Would you drive across town to buy that car? Many would say no. Yet in these two examples in each case the buyer would save $150 on the purchase price. You could use that $150 to purchase the same exact things, regardless of where the savings came from, 2-tickets to a Broadway show (partially obstructed view), or a hot dog at Yankee Stadium. Yet there is a tendency for people to be more willing to save $150 when it represents a larger portion of the purchase price, rather than when it represents a smaller percentage. We make relative and not absolute judgments on how worthwhile the savings are.
The same holds true at the organizational level. If organizational performance is seen as improving relative to where it currently is, employees tend to be more upbeat regardless of the absolute starting level of that performance and if it is perceived as in decline, employee spirits will also be in decline (even if you are still the best in your industry). So how could the CEO I mentioned lead a company that achieved high levels of employee commitment and loyalty, even as people were burning out? The answer is that it was an exciting place to be, they were cutting edge, an industry leader with rapidly rising levels of performance, beating the competition and with a clearly articulated vision of where the company was going.
© 2012 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
Visit OV: http://www.orgvitality.com
OrgVitality Needs Your Vote For Job Creation Grant
A business development grant program is being sponsored by Chase and LivingSocial called Mission: Small Business℠, your vote could translate into a $250,000 grant for OrgVitality, which would be designated for job creation. We need at least 250 votes at missionsmallbusiness.com to qualify to be included in the competition.
To vote for our business:
1. Go to missionsmallbusiness.com and log in using Facebook.
2. Search for our business by name (OrgVitality) OR filter by our State and City.
3. Click on the blue Vote button next to our business name to show your support for our business.”
Organizational Micro-Organisms
“When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.” – Will Rodgers
Go outside and pick up a handful of dirt. Your life and the life of most creatures on this planet is possible not because of what you see in the dirt but largely because of what you don’t see. At the micro-scale the Earth teems with life, much of it overlooked by us as we wend through our daily routines. This largely unnoticed life is more than important to the health of our planet for it forms the very foundation upon which other life can exist. Without the smallest of creatures, the mirco-organisms which create the conditions upon which other life depends, the earth would be barren, unable to support our existence. Being human, a good chunk of us do our utmost to destroy these foundational creatures, or due to our obliviousness, like the grandfather who fell asleep at the wheel, make their existence as tenuous as possible.
Organizational surveys as they are often currently conducted like to measure the “big picture”, but I have begun to wonder if those of us who conduct surveys for a living are missing the leaves because all we tend to focus upon is the beauty of the forest. But without the leaves the forest will die.
The notion is this. There are fundamental underlying conditions that need to be present within an organization for that organization to truly thrive for the long term. These fundamental conditions form the basic building blocks of organizational life and hence success. I think we have intuitively known about this and there are historical questions, which I now think of as primitive attempts to get at these conditions that have existed on surveys for a long time.
Take for instance an item that asked employees to rate their co-workers. This item tries to go beyond the formal structures of the organization, training or lack-thereof that the workers have received, the pay or benefits they obtain etc. It tries to get at something more underlying – do you like/respect/want to be around the people you interact with day-to-day? It was pretty much a constant in surveys up until about 5 or so years ago. The typical response to that item was in the mid-80 percent or higher on favorability. In other words people in general liked their co-workers. It was really unheard of for this item to be unfavorably rated. It just did not happen.
When all else in an organization was rated poorly, you could always turn to the management team and say, well at least people like their co-workers, that is a starting point, a place from which you can build. But now I think it was simply a poorly written question, for while people did indeed like their co-workers it clearly did not get at the fundamentals, the micro-organisms necessary for the organization to thrive. There is also an issue with very positively rated items, in that they have imbedded in their response pattern less information then items that are more moderately rated and hence the organization can learn little from these items. The same could be said of the generally derided item about having a best friend at work.
Physicists use something called an effective theory approach for problem solving. It is an approach that utilizes the theory that makes most sense at the distances or object size that you are studying. Newton’s theory of gravity is just fine if you are on the earth’s surface studying an apple falling from a tree, but Einstein’s approach to gravity is necessary if you want to be able to solve problems that involve planetary distances. And Einstein’s theory does not work at the sub-atomic or quantum level. For that you need string theory. This approach implies that organizational surveys should ask about only those things you could hope to measure and see within the organizational world at the distances or sizes you are studying. The physicist’s approach implies that measuring the forest and ignoring the leaves is just fine if you can show that the forest is what leads to the outcomes that you desire, such as customer repurchase intentions. What is left out is that the forest will in fact perish if the conditions do not exist for the leaves to thrive, to create the forest in the first place.
It is very clear today that many approach organizational surveys without having a real understanding of the unifying state that allows us to measure the basic building blocks of successful organizational functioning, those things that are foundational to creating the conditions that allows an organization to thrive, to become vital over the long term.
I was recently sent a note about a document new Apple employee’s see it goes like this:
“There is work and there’s your life’s work. The kind of work that has your finger prints all over it. The kind of work that you would never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end. They want their work to add up to something. Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else. Welcome to Apple.”
Whether those conditions exist for each and every employee of Apple is of course a good question and one that I can’t answer here, but the notion that there is more to work than work is very clear. If everyone in every organization felt that way just imagine what we could accomplish.
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© 2012 by Jeffrey M. Saltzman. All rights reserved.
Visit www.orgvitality.com
Complimentary Webinar – Employee Assistance Programs Applied to the Executive Level
| Upcoming Complimentary OrgVitality Webinar | |
| Employee Assistance Programs Applied to the Executive Level Presented by Walter Reichman, Ed.D, VP and Partner, OrgVitality May 10, 12:30pm-1:30pm Eastern, 9:30am-10:30am Pacific |
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| What do you do when high level executive, who after years of excellent performance, is no longer performing at the level of expectations? Not only is the company suffering, the senior executive is suffering too. How can an organization deal effectively, productively, and compassionately with this executive?
OrgVitality presents a webinar on how to deal effectively with such a problem. Dr. Walter Reichman, Vice President and Partner in OrgVitalty will discuss the most productive way of dealing with poorly functioning high level executives so that the executive, his/her superior and the organization benefit. |
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https://ovevents.webex.com/ovevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=666125349 |
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