How Employees Respond to Business Performance Requirements and Why!

I have spent almost my entire career-27 years now, in executive management and professional training and management consulting.

I worked with people in different cultures with different backgrounds and perceptions from Americans, Asians, Arabs, Europeans, Africans.  I worked with teams of people consisting of all different organizational positions, levels of education, nationalities, ages, religions.

I once worked with a cluster consisting of 3 teams for an international leader in which teams of 8-12 members, we had 8-10 nationalities from 3 continents and ages from 26-58. We had a bit of language issues as well. I once remember long time ago I worked for a Company in Middle East whose management didn’t speak any English and of course I don’t speak Arabic. I recall my experience while working in Palestine in 1996-97 in a UN and World Bank funded project. We were visiting manufacturing companies in Gaza while the Israelis and the Hamas and PLO were throwing bombs to each other. At night you could not sleep because of the gunfires. Fear was the prevailing emotion. And of course, I had the privilege to work with Western European companies with sound top notch management and leadership and teams of highly educated professionals.  The challenges as to what drive people response to performance are similar.

You can change the response of people if you change the stimuli. You can also change the response if you take advantage of the space in time between the stimulus and the response.

I have a diversified academic background from Engineering to Management. The last 11 years I work as a Strategic and Performance Management Professional with clients of all sizes and in almost all business sectors in countries in 4 continents. Multicultural and multi-gender groups as well. Highly educated and less educated to uneducated employees. There are noticeable differences as well as noticeable similarities. I do a lot of implementation work as a resident consultant with our clients. It’s fascinating and challenging to work on execution together with management and people at all levels.

In my work I have always being amazed by the question: What triggers and motivates people at work to commit, focus and persevere to achieve and contribute to a team and company performance. After all, 70% of my consulting work is implemented in the field. I am paid to get things done. Not just put nicely on paper.

Obviously, this is a trillion or more worth of answer to nail. And even though, science and theory are massive in this area, I am always a practical guy. My initial engineering education and work is responsible for this. I like to test things in the field with real teams, real businesses, and real people. Most importantly I like to observe and measure.

So here is my verdict. This is the model I came up with over time which I keep improving along the way as people change in time today more than in the past. It’s a dynamic process. Like a business. Like everything in life.

In the diagram below… Yes, I am a diagram person! I prefer charts, pictures, and diagrams more than text. I show my experiential blended with theory model for triggering the potential of people in a team, a business or an entire organization.

Note: Random and arbitrary intervention on any of the above stages without consistency and alignment will not succeed. It’s like throwing a stone in the ocean expecting to create Waves. It’s both useless and can be expensive.

I have said it many times that the most important element of a winning culture is Purpose. What companies call Vision and Mission. I don’t particularly like the corporate terminology. By the way not many people/employees do either.

Purpose is the definition of a team’s existence. It’s Shakespeare’s question in Hamlet. To be or not to be. Why are we in business? Obviously, here is the first fundamental issue. If you are in business for the wrong reasons, you cannot define a Purpose. Or if you do, real quickly people understand the ambiguity and the manipulation. If you want more information as to the process of defining a Purpose, please go to this book I wrote a few months ago and its free.

APPLIED BUSINESS PERFORMANCE HANDBOOK

Hint: An effective Purpose is one that can be shared by people and clients not just the management. Therefore, needs to be effectively and consistently and continuously communicated.

Based on Purpose definition and deeper belief, the Values evolve. Values is what the word says. Are the things the team gives the highest importance on their route to accomplish the Purpose. They therefore, dictate everybody’s behavior day in day out. When things get rough, values are our connecting bond like Purpose is our lighthouse, our true North.

Now, be careful a team of gangsters and criminals are bonded by shared values as well. That’s where ethics come into the picture. Ethics in business depend on the principles chosen to work upon in the team. If teamwork for example is a Value but Integrity and Mutual Benefit are not Principles installed in our ethics, obviously people will eventually sense the distortion. They will take advantage as well if they can.

The third element of the recipe is actually 2 elements blended together. One is sources of fear. I have found out that in business – it’s worse the bigger the business gets in terms of number of people – over time numerous sources of fear are created or maintained and strengthened intentionally or unintentionally.

Here is a recent example. I have visited a Company and while waiting for the elevator to go to the office of the Manager I had a meeting with, I observed the following. When a person entered the elevator, all others in the elevator went off even-though they were not at their destination floor.  It looked peculiar to me and when asked the person accompanying me, I was told that when a particular C-Executive enters the elevator, all other people need to exit. Good one right. I know it sounds extreme, but it happened.

Here is a less extreme example. I was working on a project for a Company of about 600 employees and at one meeting I was told that the HR Department was overwhelmed with all sorts of complaints from employees daily. Anyone who has a problem, they go to the HR. Even when they have an issue with their manager, before even talking the issue with the manager, they will go to HR. Now, here is the thing. When an HR is daily busy with all sorts of employee problems, first it means people have way too many problems and secondly, they are obviously afraid to talk to their managers.

Another example? I have worked in a project a few years ago that the gossiping and subsequent conflicting at work was massive underpinning productivity and of course morale. Gossiping and conflicts are root causes of fear.

There are too many sources of fear at work. Fear to express opinions freely, fear to disagree, fear related to equity and inclusion issues, fear to take initiative because of the risk to fail, fear to work together because our priority is to cover up our assess first. Fear to succeed.  Fear that we are not taken seriously, and the sources of fear list is endless.

Be cautious! Fear is not discipline and respect. You can get people disciplined for a period time and force them to show respect out of fear. But this is not self discipline and earned respect. I also find out that fear is related to stress and anxiety levels. Fear can create stress and anxiety to people and vice versa. Afraid people are under stress. Stress and anxiety generate cortisol by human body. It’s also called the stress hormone. Stress hormone kills the testosterone which is the self confidence and power hormone.

So, the first thing Companies and Managers need to prioritize is to identify the sources and put an action plan to decrease them. It’s not easy and I don’t know if it is possible to eliminate them, but you need to start decreasing the sources of fear at work. If you have defined the Purpose and the Values of your business, I am sure fear is not part of this.

And that’s where DEI comes also into place. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. In my view DEI strategies and actions aim mainly to shut down sources of fear and release people’s potential by freeing people from fear of inequalities, gender discrimination, educational discrimination, age, nationality, personal preferences discrimination, multigenerational and create an all-inclusive environment in which people are free to thrive and allowed to succeed as well as to fail. All people.

By the way, I have walked into companies worldwide that spend money and claim they work on DEI and Sustainable Growth, after all these 2 subjects are fashionable and catchy nowadays, but in 5-10 minutes talking with people and teams its evident that they are just isolated events/ activities which are fashionable or driven by other hidden agendas just to make an impression and noise in social media. They don’t really believe in this. It’s all related to 1 and 2. If there is no shared and clear Purpose and Values, everything further down will not have the impact on people. Actually, it has a negative impact.

Then we go to PDP-Personal Development Plans. They are Personal, individualistic so to speak. Yes, people have a great need to know where they are going career-wise in a business. They need to have their own plan, Crystal and clear. Like the Company’s Business Plan. And be able to connect their plan to the company’s business’s plan. Actually, most high performing people leave their business not because of their managers as so often written but because of lack of clear personal development planning. They have no clue where they are going. Even worse, when there is one, it doesn’t address their needs and expectations. It was never drafted with their input. It was done to meet a standard requirement and not people’s requirements.

On an annual basis, the business develops their strategic and operational plans for the year(s) ahead. Strategic objectives linked to clear strategies, corporate objectives which are specific, measurable and time bound are agreed and process (departmental, or functional) objectives or KPIs are agreed in alignment with strategic and corporate objectives including their measures.

More information on this process again can be found here.

Strategies and plans and goals are designed around the Purpose. They evolve from the Purpose. Your sales strategy, your growth strategy, your operational strategy, your HR strategy evolve or should evolve and should be aligned with your Purpose. The Purpose is the gluing power of everything.

Without a purpose people have no sense of belonging and no sense of pride and self-esteem. Let me give you an example!

I worked with a manufacturing company in which 80% of their staff were uneducated employees working in production stations. During my first visits I asked a few of them, what is your job. The answer from all of them was, I am a worker in the factory. How much pride and self-esteem do people draw from this job title. How much pride to the feel when asked by strangers or even their family members what is your work? By the way, most factory workers are responsible to a larger or lesser extent for the quality, productivity, deliverability of a Company’s products.

They are most importantly responsible for customer satisfaction even though they have never seen or spoke to a customer. So, we designed workshops to redefine their role in line with the Company’s purpose and Values. We asked them to redefine their job titles. Before that we conducted a morale assessment and measurement. After the workshops we measure it again. The improvement was evident. Actually, we didn’t need to measure morale. You could feel the change in the air. That is the power of Purpose. That is the power of an inclusive culture.

And that is where PDP, Training and Development meets Performance and Skills. Based on how people perform on periodic basis, performance measurement leads to skills, namely knowledge, practice and strong will to excel. Anytime performance is low it means a gap in skills. Either the person needs knowledge based training, or practical on the job training or coaching to address his motivation. Any outcome from this assessment is feedback to the person’s PDP. Of course, the performance evaluation framework is also important. The traditional annual so called performance appraisals are nonsense with all respect for 2 reasons. First, when you refer to performance appraisal you need to be clear what do you mean. Is it a performance evaluation based on performance criteria or is it a potential assessment. That is assessing the potential of a person for more?

Performance Evaluation and Feedback to each of the employees is a continuous process not an event. In my experience a performance review needs to be provided based on objective evidence, measurable performance indicators on a monthly basis and on the basis of year to date in every evaluation identifying among other things skill gaps explained above and a quarterly potential assessment which focuses mostly on qualitative criteria and the performance trends. The end of year assessment becomes a twofold source of valuable and meaningful information both with regards to performance in line with team and corporate objectives and potential assessment that feeds among other things the PDP. Training and Development planning process is also enhanced by this process.

Now, I come to the last part which is the rewards and incentives. Again, there is a lot of confusion as to what constitutes incentives. An incentive by definition (and I quote the science and theory) is anything you provide an employee without being obligated; it is provided as a recognition of success. Therefore, a number of things that are provided to employees as incentives, are not incentives. A salary raise is not an incentive, providing coffee or other amenities consistently is not an incentive. A performance-based remuneration is an incentive. Recognizing verbally successes of people is an incentive. Remember an incentive needs to meet both requirements. Provided without obligation and provided as a recognition of certain achievement.

The number one incentive for people is money. Why? Simple! 95% of employees still have needs to meet for themselves and their families for which they need money. This is not a surprise. What is a surprise is what I found being the second in terms of importance incentive after money. This is recognition and development. That’s why I smile when I see Companies spending money on trivial things, they consider incentives and of course they don’t work.

That is why I smile when I see companies hiring what they call talent acquisition experts (a fancier title for recruitment or even Firing Experts), yet they are in the business of hiring and firing really big numbers of employees monthly. That is why I smile when I see so many team building and bonding so called events organized when the sources of fear including non-Inclusive and unfair to people cultures, in a company are huge. That is why I smile when people are often behind deadlines, lagging on their performance measures consistently, are continuously looking for another job, are often unprepared in meetings, they massively lack on in innovation even though some of them are creative and intelligent, that is why they come late at work and leave early that is why they lack on execution by more than 70%. And then of course I smile when management talks about disciplinary and other administrative procedures to deal with these issues. It’s really funny.

Setting the solid ground to design, strategize, plan and execute the 6 ingredients in the above diagram will improve a team’s and a business performance dramatically but most importantly it will create the culture in which people and not only management will drive performance sustainably. It will enhance alignment, agility, commitment and morale.

One last point from my experience. Change is not driven by plans. It is driven by execution. The best change plan will be no good if not executed in a timely manner. Make no mistake. Planning is necessary but execution is vital.

This is my field test experience.

Yiannakis Mouzouris
Strategy and Performance Management
Expert / Business Consultant / Trainer
B.Sc. Mechanical Engineering
M.Sc.Engineering Management, US