If you’re happy and you know it.....

So what did you get up to this weekend? If you went to a concert and go every now and again, you may feel better about life. A study from researchers at Victoria’s Deakin University surveyed 1,000 Australians and found that those who attended any sort of communal musical experience, be that a festival or just a night out dancing reported higher levels of satisfaction with their lives.

This is probably no surprise. Most cultures have a tradition of people meeting up and belting out a few tunes, from the Cheile House in Ireland, to Jamming Sessions in more modern times, to singing at Sunday Service, to rhythmic rituals in ancient or indigenous cultures. Shared communal musical experiences have always been with us and according to Deakin University for good reason - our emotional well-being.

However, in recent times, musical experience has become much more personalized. We have our own playlists on Spotify, shuffle our MP3 collections or stream our favorite artists on YouTube. There is less of a shared musical experience and more of a niche  individual one. That is not all bad, it reflects our choice and preferences.

Many organisations which look at staff well-being have devised appreciation days, team building events and other initiatives to motivate and create a buzz. There has been a move away from the once common company or department night out.

You are now more likely to lift a work colleague over a wall on a team building day than you are to show them a near perfect Moon Walk routine on the dance floor. According to the people at Deakin University, we may need to swing the pendulum back a little and have a few more nights out, be that to concerts or just a night on the tiles, and do so regularly.

If for all kinds of logistical reasons, company nights out are hard to organise, create a scheme where your department regularly has subsidized concert tickets or allow staff to leave early / come in late to make attending events feasible. This could work both ways, staff get a perk and organisations get a workforce that is more satisfied with life.

As artists find it harder to get revenues from singles or album sales (because of the aforementioned Spotify), more and more are now touring. There has never been a better time for live music. Encourage people to leave the playlists at home, pack their dancing shoes or air guitar and enjoy their music.

Too Much Information

We are all familiar with TMI, Too Much Information. Usually we hear it when we are exposed to some gory or elicit detail we’d rather not hear. It has however a more serious application when it comes to how we make decisions.

In these days of big data, ubiquitous connectivity and apps at every hands turn we often have lots of data about the choices we need to make in life, be that at work or at home. Too much information however can impede our ability to make decisions.

On the face of it, this is counter intuitive. We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we'll be. Knowledge is power and information feeds knowledge.

However when presented with loads of facts, we have difficulty in selecting out the items that really matter, it takes time and effort that we may not have. Worse still, the key pieces of information that should influence our decisions remain hidden and unused.

Malcom Gladwell makes this point in his book Blink. He tells a story about Cardiologist Lee Goldman at Chicago's Cook County Hospital.

Goldman used some statistical rules which mathematicians designed for telling apart subatomic particles. He fed a computer data of hundreds of files of heart attack cases and crunched the numbers into a “predictive equation” or model.

Four key risk factors emerged as the most critical tell tale of a real heart attack case:

1. ECG (the ancient electrocardiogram graph) showing acute ischemia

2. unstable angina pain

3, fluid in the lungs

4. systolic blood pressure under 100

Previous to this Cardiologists took quite an amount of time looking at patients, got information on weight, gender, lifestyle, how they came to be admitted, what their living conditions were at home. Goldman got Cardiologists to park their instincts and thirst to find out everything about a patient and used his 4 simplistic reference points. 

Outcomes improved on wards and fewer of the patients who were sent home from ER represented back at a future date with a heart attack. Using four simple facts that mattered led to better decisions.

Gladwell makes another point on how knowing less can improve our decisions. Not quite as serious as heart attacks but still interesting. For years it was believed that women could not play in orchestras as well as their male counterparts. Men dominated the ranks. 

Then someone had the bright idea to put in a screen for auditions where the musician was only heard and not seen. The blind audition was born. The number of women in major US orchestras increased fivefold. Decision makers knew less about their applicants (their gender) and now made their call on what was the core question, how well someone could actually play.

The take away is that when you have a decision to make, look at the information available to you. Try to critique what is important what and what is background noise. Write down the facts that influenced your decision, were these the facts that really mattered? Try to resist gathering KPI after KPI just because you can. 

Anger Management

Some leaders in work or on the sports field (think Roy Keane or Bill Belichick) use anger as a tactic to get people moving, cut out mistakes and improve performance. And whatever you may think of it, it has been known to concentrate minds and get results.

I recently read a paper that put another perspective on this. In the Journal of Applied Psychology, Ella Miron-Spektor looked at how witnessing an angry outburst can dampen lateral thinking and blunt creative solutions.

Miron-Spektor works at the William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management. She got engineering students to imagine being a customer service agent and they were given a written problem to solve. Before working on the problem, they listened to another customer service agent talking to a customer. In some cases this conversation was neutral and well mannered, in other cases it was hostile and had plenty of anger from the caller.

Students who heard the angry call, did better at problems that required analysis and diligence. The anger did focus minds on the task in hand (justifying Keane and Belichicks approach). However, these students performed worse at problems that required lateral or out of the box thinking (the candle problem).

Miron-Spektor then looked at the students emotional state and suggested that witnessing the angry exchange led to people being more defensive. People were keen to avoid punishment or being the target of anger. She felt this could cause them to narrow their focus on the immediate task in hand and get it complete, thereby avoiding anger. This narrowing of focus however closed their mind to broader solutions and hence a dip in performance for lateral thinking.

The takeaway here is that if we want people to think creatively we may need to provide an environment where they feel secure and don’t witness other people on the receiving end of abuse. If you want your software developers to complete their unit test plans, have them sit near the customer service people, if you want them to come up with the next big idea for your product, keep them well away from any conflict zones. 

This ties in with other studies which show that narrowing our focus ( such as through bonus schemes) kills creativity. In the open office and shared work spaces most of us now have, avoiding angry out bursts might be hard to do. Allowing anger, be that from co-workers or customers, to become part of the office landscape can create a risk adverse culture and blunt our approach to innovation or problem solving. 

Bad at saying 'No'? That's a probem

I read a good article by Peter Bregman about how to say 'No'.

This is a very under-rated skill to have. Saying 'No' is vital to keeping work and customer expectations at manageable levels.Failing to say ‘No’ when we instinctively know that we may not be able to deliver is a bad move that can come back to bite us over and over. What ensues is usually a lengthy and awkward process of realigning customer expectations and eventually telling them ‘No’. In the meantime, you probably have damaged customer relationships, frustrated staff and wasted time figuring out how to limit the damage.

This happens quite a bit in software start-ups that code their own product. Feature creep can set in and it’s easy to say ‘Yes’ to an important client when they inevitably ask for a function or change request. At start-up phase pretty much any client is an important client.However, you will find yourself making promises you can’t keep, burning the candle at both ends (working late / weekends) to come good on commitments when you should have said ‘No’. That leads to endless firefighting where you neglect the basics of making sure your strategic business systems are running properly (sales pipeline, support documentation, credit control, cost benefit analysis of activity).

Key staff will get demotivated at constantly working under pressure or jumping from one ‘priority’ to another and probably leave (if you have more than three priorities, you don't have any). You will more than likely rehire in a hurry because you need someone straight away. Because you have taken your eye off the ball on the fundamentals of the business you may neglect your sales process, prospect call backs etc, so the clients that made the initial request now become even more important (as other sales haven't grown as planned ). It then gets even harder to say 'No' to their next change request. On and on it goes.

If you are a start-up company in firefighting mode or constantly find yourself avoiding calls from clients, end up working weekends, late at night, ask yourself how often you have said ‘No’ to a request in the last week. Chances are it’s not very often. There is nothing wrong with being busy and firefighting, just so long as it’s for a strategic or commercially sound reason. If it’s purely because you could not say ‘No’, then it’s a problem. 

As someone once said, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions', failing to say 'No' might be just laying another stone on that road for your projects or organisation. 

You are your Habits

Aristotle once said "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit". If you want to know why your life is where it is today, look at your past habits. Better still, if you want to know where your life will be ten years from now, look at your current habits. Our levels of exercise, diet, work routines and pretty much everything else we do on a daily basis decide much of our future success and current choices.

A 2006 study by Duke University found that up to 40 percent of what we do every day is driven by habit rather than deliberate decisions. The autopilot kicks in as soon as we get out of bed and includes how we dress, what we do for lunch, how we greet the family when we get home from work, how much time we spend relaxing, playing or chatting. Eventually bed time routine takes over and the day is done.

This raises a simple point. If you want to change your life, (be that career, fitness levels or work life balance) your habits should be first port of call. There is no shortage of self-help books that will tell you how to quit a habit, start a habit, what sort of habits exceptional people have. It is all very interesting stuff, but in reality how difficult is it to create a new habit or better still, ditch a bad one?

Habit formation research from University College London suggests that there is no one standard length of time required for a habit to form. It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days. It will come as no great surprise that this period of time depends on how hard the new activity is and how much effort and commitment is required. Getting your 5 a day of fruit and veg might be a little easier and quicker than learning Chinese for half an hour every evening.

The research does suggest however that, for most new tasks the 66-day mark is when repetition becomes automatic and the habit takes root. These researchers did note that if you’re going to miss a day from your new found daily routine, skip a day that is further along in the 66-day period, since the pay back for habit formation counts more in the early days.

Another tip in learning a new habit is not to go for the complete personal makeover. Especially coming up to New Year it’s tempting to go for it all in one fell swoop. You start changing your exercise, diet, how you work etc. That is a lot of new behaviour to adhere to, especially in the critical first 2 months. Changing one habit can be difficult enough and is no mean feat so don’t spread yourself too thin and try changing everything at the same time.

CharlesDuhigg, has written an interesting book on habits, “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.” Duhigg uses some good examples to explain how habits work. He looks at N.F.L. coach Tony Dungy, who, with lots and lots of practice, taught his players a small number of important moves they could perform without thinking, particularly at crucial moments in a game. When the players were exhausted, autopilot kicks in and everyone does their job. You don’t have to be an NFL line-backer to appreciate this. Pretty much the same thing happens when we get home after a night out, maybe feeling a bit groggy, take off our shoes and socks and barely know we did it.

As well as personal habits, we also have shared social habits. Some of these have been around for generations, such as shaking hands when we meet. Others are continually changing. We have seen this in the recent past where wearing a seat belt in the back seat of the car is now a well ingrained social habit; it was a very different story in the 1980s. These habits are changed by policy makers altering the norms in our society. This is the same principle behind de-normalising smoking via bans in bars, the work place and some public areas. The idea is to make not smoking the default social norm and hope that becomes our shared habit or custom.

Having habits is ultimately a good thing. They allow us to do routine tasks without wasting mental energy or having to make the same decisions over and over every day. Habits also allow us to operate within acceptable social norms so we can function as a society. Ultimately we humans are creatures of habit and it’s a case of trying to have more good habits than bad habits and being aware of how to change the habits we don’t want. List your daily habits and see which ones you want to keep. Bet you have more habits than you realise.

Why a bonus might be a bad idea

You have a business problem to solve or a new project to get live. In order to make sure your people deliver, you decide to offer a bonus, stock options or some other incentive to get the job done. This might be a really bad idea and here is why.

Way back in 1945 Karl Duncker had his candle problem experiment posthumously published. It was a task based on problem solving. Participants were given a candle, some matches and a box of tacks. They were then asked to fix the candle to a cork board on the wall. They needed to do it in such a way that when lit, the candle wouldn't drip wax on the table underneath the cork board.

The solution (spoiler alert), is to use the box holding the tacks as a candle holder, attach the box to the wall and put the candle in it. Most people solve this eventually but they solve it a lot quicker if the tacks are out of the box and the box is seen as a separate piece of equipment.

When the tacks were in the box the participants saw it only as a tack-box, not something they could use to solve the problem. This phenomenon is called ‘Functional fixedness’.

Sam Glucksberg added a very interesting step to this in his 1962 paper, “Influence of strength of drive on functional fixedness and perceptual recognition”. He decided to incentivise people to solve the candle problem. One group got money for solving the problem, the quicker they solved it, the more money they got. Another group were offered nothing, they were just asked to solve the problem.

When the tacks were presented outside the box (making the solution more obvious) the group that were incentivised out-performed the group that were paid nothing. This is what we would expect, rewarding results improved performance.

However, when the problem was presented in its more complex form with the tacks in the box, the incentivised group did significantly worse than the group paid nothing. Incentives killed performance and results. The bonus for getting it right back-fired big time. Participants with no financial incentive took 7:41 minutes to solve the problem, the people who were incentivised, took 11:08 minutes to solve the problem.

Glucksberg found that not only did the financial incentive make people slower at problem solving, the slowness increased with the incentive. The higher the monetary reward, the worse the performance. This was not a one off, the result has been replicated over and over in other experiments.

The key point is that incentives narrow our focus. When participants are incentivised, they can’t see the solution to the problem (the box holding the tacks). They think mechanically not creatively. Narrowing our focus inhibits this creative thinking and gets us straight into the task as we see it.

The lesson here is that if your employees have to do something straightforward, like putting regular parts together or following a specific instruction on an assembly line, financial incentives work well for these mechanical tasks.

However when we need do something that requires any creative or critical thinking, financial incentives damage performance. When we need to think out of the (candle) box, offering a financial incentive keeps our focus in the box. We don’t see the big picture and solutions prove more elusive.

For the types of jobs many people have in the 21st century knowledge economy, bonuses and incentives are a bad motivator. Worse than not getting results, they damage performance, it’s not that they don’t do any good, they actually do harm.

Giving a bonus to software developers to get a project delivered on time or Business Development Manager to get a new commercial product live or a Marketing Executive to hit a sales figure are all the types of tasks that Glucksberg and others have shown, suffer when people are incentivised.

This has been well documented and repeated since 1962 and yet pretty much ignored in most management strategies. It is a mistake that companies continue to make today, more than 50 years since Glucksbergs first publication. 

It could go some way in explaining the disastrous performance of our banks, which had a well embedded bonus culture in senior management, the guys who should have been watching the big picture. It may explain why many well-funded start-ups disappear shortly after venture capitalists arrive. Most VC funding involves the current management staying on for a while and the company or its share price hitting incentivised targets for set time period. The creative thinkers that set up and got the company going now have their creative thinking dimmed and their focus narrowed by VC penalties or bonuses.

The next time you offer or are offered a bonus think again. Fifty years of research suggests that you will lose sight of the big picture and your days of thinking outside the box could be over.

Daniel Pink has an excellent TED talk which covers this and is well worth a listen.

The Bigger they are, the harder they fall

We have all heard the cliché ‘The Bigger they are, the harder they fall’. Some recent research backs this up. Jennifer Marr and Stefan Thau in the Academy of Management Journal looked at how high status individuals coped with drops in performance.

Marr and Thau suggest that the people with the bigger reputations find it more difficult to work through and deal with a an episode of poor performance. Part of their research involved a field study of professional baseball players. They found that although low-status players’ performance quality was unaffected by status loss, the quality of high-status players’ performance declined significantly after losing status. Guys who were not very well regarded were not that bothered about a poor performance but the marquee players took it much worse. If you are a golfer, think Tiger Woods or Padraig Harrington.

In a way this makes complete sense. Individuals who have the pressure of being the best in their field have more much more to lose when their form dips. Their professional ranking, commercial value, earning potential etc make the stakes pretty high compared to the low achievers who may have very little to lose from a bad day out.

However, there is more than professional ranking and commercial opportunities at play here. High status individuals also have more of their own identity mixed in with their achievements. Being World No.1 or a top professional athlete is part of their identity as a person. When this is threatened or removed then who they are in the eyes of the public and how they see their own identity is potentially damaged.

This can also have lessons for the work place. If a sales person is hitting record targets and is employee of the year one year but then runs into a dry spell the next year, their performance can really dip and fall off a cliff. Like the baseball players or golfers, they come under professional and personal pressures that threaten both their livelihood and identity.

It is not all bad news. Marr and Thau found that self-affirmation restored the quality of high-status individuals’ performance after a dip. Getting them to remember that they still have the skills, ability and track record to be successful makes a difference. To use another sporting cliché ‘You don’t become a bad player over night’.

So keep an eye on your star performers and if you see a dip, remind them that they still have it, they are still good at what they do and their worth as professionals or as individuals is not damaged. The dip will hopefully only be a glitch and your star performer will quickly get their ‘A Game’ back on track. 

Motivation via The Goal Gradient Effect

Charting progress is important. If you are a software developer, keep a list of the bugs you fix and knock them off one by one. If you are cold calling, keep track of the calls made and hopefully a few sales too. This sounds a bit obvious, we are likely to track work we have completed. The point here however is that it’s a good idea to visually display the work completed as progress, so you can see a list or some other evidence that you are getting places. This is known as the Goal Gradient Effect.

An article on Business Insider explains this in a neat way. It cites a study in the Journal of Market Research which looked at a coffee shop that uses frequent buyer cards. Regular customers were given frequent buyer cards. Each time they bought a cup of coffee they got their card stamped. When the card was filled they got a free cup of coffee. However there were two different scenarios:

Card A: The card had 10 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card all the boxes are blank.

Card B: The card had 12 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card the first two boxes are already stamped.

The research looked at how long it would take to get the card filled. Would it take longer or shorter for scenario A vs. scenario B? After all, you would have to buy 10 cups of coffee in both scenarios in order to get the free coffee. So does it make a difference which card you use?

The results say it does. Card B gets filled faster than Card A. It is the Goal-Gradient Effect in action.

The goal-gradient effect was first noticed in research with rats where they would run faster as they got to the end of the maze and closer to their food reward.

The goal-gradient effect makes us accelerate our behaviour as we get closer to our goal.

The take-way here could be these two points. Firstly, the closer we get to our goal the more motivated we are. Therefore structuring peoples work schedule (to have goals tangibly close and not weeks or months away) or sales targets becomes an important part of ensuring people are motivated and pushing themselves.

Secondly, the progression towards a goal can be an illusion or contrived (as shown the in coffee shop research). Giving someone a ‘head start’ or making it look like you can start progressing straight away improves motivation. Getting back to the software developer, give them some short ‘easy’ bugs first to get the ball rolling. For the cold caller, have the early targets based on getting the sales script right rather than closing any sales.

For the marketing people, maybe the coffee shop customer behaviour has lessons for how we distribute loyalty card points or explain bulk purchase schemes. We like our goals, almost as much as our coffee. 

Surface Acting, a silent meeting killer

Ever been in a meeting and felt one way but acted another? Most of us have. This behaviour is also quite common in the medical profession when a doctor fakes empathic behaviours toward a patient. They act concerned because that is expected, deep down they might be more worried about their waiting list or getting home on time.

Psychologists call this ‘surface acting’. I recently read an interesting BPS article on how surface acting affects meetings and employee burn out.

It referenced a study in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology which focused on how masking our real feelings could negatively affect our contribution to meetings and our long term well-being.

The central idea is that surface acting requires significant self-control and this puts a strain on our mental resources. This can prove distracting and restrict the attention we give to what is really going on in the meeting.

The study collected online data from 178 participants from a variety of roles with a range of meeting regularity (from just over 2 per week to less than once per week). Participants rated items like 'I tend to fake a good mood when interacting with others in the meeting’ to produce a surface acting score. This score was negatively associated with their rating of typical meeting effectiveness, in terms of networking, achieving work goals, or learning useful information. The more they surface acted, the less effective they found the meeting.

It gets worse, the long term consequences of surface acting were also measured. Participants who indicated higher surface acting felt emotionally exhausted and were prone to burnout. Acting one way and feeling another was emotionally draining, both in the meeting and afterwards. Habitual surface actors were more likely to have an intention to quit their job at short notice. That is not good for anyone.

Guess the point here is that masking how you really feel in work, while required every now and again, it not a good idea in the long term. If you chair meetings try and make it possible for people to express how they really feel. They may be a little more attentive and focus better on the agenda items or discussions.

Aside from meetings, if your organisational culture requires people to surface act or hide their feeling on a regular basis e.g. when dealing with customers, superiors, other departments, be aware that burn out and sudden departures may follow. If this is hard to avoid and the ‘customer is always right’, then give staff some recovery time and let them vent a little. Everyone might feel better and get more done.

It's OK to check your smartphone

So do you take a sneaky look at your smart phone in work every now and again? Would you do it if the boss was watching? How would you view a colleague you saw checking their phone regularly during the working day? It turns out that maybe we need to take a relaxed approach to this. Sooyeol Kim at Kansas State University got 72 employees to put an app on their phone that tracked their usage throughout the working day.

While it might sound a little big brother like, the findings were interesting. The employees averaged 22 minutes on their phones during a standard 8 hour day, or just about 5% of their work time. In case you think 5% is a bit of a waste, it’s less than the time we spend at water coolers or bathroom breaks (which we rarely take a dim view of). Considering a lot of people eat ‘al desko’ and only take minimal meal breaks, the 22 minutes per day seems fair enough.

Sooyeol Kim also looked at how people felt once their day was done. The workers who took smartphone breaks were happier after their days work. The researchers suggest that the smartphone breaks, even if they are just for a few minutes, allow us to feel connected with family or loved ones. The odd little game or reading the sports news can be a welcome distraction from the stress of the job. This can help us get back into work a little more refreshed.

There are other studies out there which suggest all distractions are bad for productivity and that it takes us a while to pick up where we left off. From a pure productivity point of view this may well be true. However the Kansas State study is more concerned with our well being. While productivity may be a little down, the employees might feel better, be less prone to burn out or other stress related conditions.

This could lead to a more sustainable way of working, beyond smartphone breaks. It could well apply to any similar micro breaks that we take. So the next time you see someone taking the scenic route to the water cooler or checking their phone, don’t judge them. Try it yourself, you will probably feel better at the end of the day. 

Use a Pen to get the Point

So you can picture the scene, people gather in a room for a meeting, the laptops open up and as the agenda is worked through, the hum of the keyboard is heard as people take notes of the major points, tasks and agreements. We can often type faster than we can write, so using a laptop for note taking allows a more complete record of what was said and more detail to be recorded. Using the laptops in meeting would appear a great idea. Hence it is a familiar sight. 

 

It turns out that the story may be a little bit more complicated than that. Research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer from Princeton University and University of California, Los Angeles suggests that hand writing notes may be more effective than the laptop option.

 

They conducted a number of experiments where they had students take notes in a classroom setting and then do a test which checked for recall of factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students took notes with a laptop and the other half wrote out the notes out by hand.

The students on the laptops took more notes and recorded more detail. However, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those wielding the laptops.

The improved understanding among the pen and paper users could be a function of ‘Levels of Processing Theory’. The idea is that the physical act of writing involves more cognitive effort and thinking about what to write is a more deliberate act. As we cannot write as fast as we can type, we need to think about the key points, be more discerning about what to write and more accurate in our summary of events. We need to understand what we are listening to. 

While a fast typist can record everything that they hear, they are not thinking about the content as much, they are merely producing a written record.

If you want to trap all the detail, crank open the laptop and work away. If you want to understand and recall the points made, use the pen and paper. Laptops are optional and don’t feel corporately under-dressed if you show up with just a refill pad and Biro at your next meeting.

On a separate point, this may have implications for the increased use of laptops and tablets in the lecture theatre or training room . While the volume of notes may increase, the level of understanding may not. If you do give a class or provide training where you are trying to get key conceptual points across, insist on the pen as the weapon of choice. 

A little acknowledgement goes a long way

I have known a few mangers in the past who paid lip-service to the idea of ‘valuing peoples contribution’. You don’t need to be a genius to know this is a motivational killer.

In his book “The Upside of Irrationality“, Dan Ariely describes an experiment where he puts some science behind this all too familiar situation.

The researchers paid participants to identify and circle instances where the same letter appeared side-by-side on a page of text. They were paid on a descending scale, the highest amount for the first page they completed and less for each page after that until they figured the money wasn't worth it and they quit. People were randomly assigned to groups that would have one of three variations on this basic idea.

The first group wrote their name on page and the examiner looked over the page and verbally acknowledged the work before placing the page on the pile of worksheets.

The second group did not write their name on page. The examiner just placed the finished page on a pile without looking at it or acknowledging receiving it.

The third group did not write name on page. The examiner immediately placed their finished worksheet in a shredder.

If it was just a matter of money, each group should quit working at approximately the same pay rate (remember the descending pay rate). The results showed that the group that had its work shredded when handed up, stopped working at almost twice the pay rate than the group that had its work fleetingly acknowledged. The group that had its unnamed work placed on a pile without acknowledgement stopped working at very nearly the same pay rate as the group that had their work shredded.

The similarity between the last two groups is interesting. “Ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort before their eyes,” Ariely says. “The good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivation seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don’t think about it carefully, we might overdo it.”

It is striking how little acknowledgement it takes to motivate people. Just taking a little time to acknowledge and thank employees is critical to maintaining a happy and productive staff. This can be more effective than payment incentives and expensive corporate culture projects. A little acknowledgement really does go a long way.

We care about what we do - a Lego Lesson

Sometimes in work you can feel like a cog in a wheel, working away on your specific task, over and over again without ever seeing the finished product. This could be an admin assistant processing orders or marketing material or it could be a computer programmer writing server side functions for some application.

Dan Ariely, working with Harvard University has thought about this and asked the question, “Does Seeing the fruits of our labour may make us more productive?”

The researchers had participants build characters from Lego’s Bionicles series. All the participants were paid decreasing amounts for each subsequent Bionicle: $3 for the first one, $2.70 for the next one, and so on. However, one group’s creations were stored under the table and disassembled after the experiment. The other group’s Bionicles were disassembled as soon as they’d been built. They were built, taken apart and built again and again and again. “This was an endless cycle of them building and we destroying in front of their eyes,” Ariely says. This is not unlike Paul Newman digging and filling in the hole in the classic movie ‘Coolhand Luke’.

The results between the two groups were very interesting. The first group (who saw the end product which remained intact) made 11 Bionicles, on average, while the second group made only 7 before they quit (in case you are wondering Paul Newman quit digging the hole too).

The point here is that while reward did not differ i.e. one group were not paid more or had better working conditions or other motivational perks, seeing the fruits of their labour seemed to lead to greater productivity and a willingness to keep on going. Just being given the same task over and over with no tangible end product to look at, seemed to dull enthusiasm and results. You could speculate that this group may have felt that they were just assembling but not really creating anything.

The lesson here for the work place is that we may need to think of work as less of an assembly line where each person does their bit and instead give staff a chance to see what their contribution creates. That could be allowing admin staff to see marketing feedback or meet with clients and see the difference they make in getting a sale. It could be having the computer programmer seeing how safe, fast or easy their functions make the system for end users.

This could explain why some start ups find it easier to get staff to work long hours, take on multiple tasks, often with minimal additional financial reward. I’ve worked in a few start ups where this was the case. Perhaps in these scenarios, staff see the difference they make to the big picture, growing the company and building a product that end users enjoy. To paraphrase Ariely, “They see the fruits of their labour”.

Make some time for staff to see the point and end product of their work. Efficiency is more than figuring out ways to doing more stuff. How we think about our jobs and what works means to us plays a big part in motivation which in turn drives job satisfaction and productivity.