Is it possible to have a large company with a motivated workforce?

This question was posed to me during a recent reunion of a few employees of a small Belgian software company that was sold off to a large multi-national a few years back. We were debating why it was that our little company had been so successful and how come we were all so motivated to work for it?

My explanation was that we were ‘David versus Goliath’. I proposed that what motivated us was the excitement of us having a few brilliant engineers working together, competing against a massive US team employed by a very large American Multi-national. Even though the odds were stacked against us, we managed to produce a better product, far quicker and obviously far more efficiently every single time. Despite all the struggles we had, we shared a common vision and each of us knew the part we had to play in order to achieve it.

Like many reunions, all of the ex-employees looked back at their 'Eonic days' as being special and the company as being the best they had ever worked for. But then the notion was raised that it is impossible to have a truly motivated workforce in a large company. I immediately disagreed and said it was possible, just as long as the company had a very clear mission and that the senior management teams found ways of engaging all their staff into the common goal, with everyone apreciating the responsibility they each have for their own role and their own part of the complex puzzle.

The question is: Does such a company exist? And where is it, what is its name?

Home working – Money for Nothing?

Not since 1764 and the invention of Hargreaves Spinning Jenny, has there been a more important tool for home working than a PC connected to the internet. As more and more companies elect to encourage a proportion of their staff to work from home, the question of management and motivation becomes evermore important. With the Spinning Jenny it was quite simple, the company delivered the machine to the home worker and each week raw material was delivered and the spun product was collected. This simple machine was one of the fundamental enablers of the rapid growth of the British economy in the 18th. Century. (Look above the door at the Bank of England and you will find that the symbol carved in stone is that of a sheep and not a bar of gold as might be expected).

This week I witnessed the dramatic proof of how complex managing and motivating PC based home workers can be. If the home worker has a measurable job, such as, typing handwritten addresses into an online database, then there is no major worry – especially if they are paid by the number of addresses completed. On the other hand, if their work is more complex or involves a variety of actions that are hard to measure – then the trouble begins.

The case that was brought to my attention was of a young professional woman who was offered a part-time (five hours per day) job working from home. The job was well paid and involved carrying out research and writing up findings and preparing white papers and reports. Everything was fine at first but very soon she became depressed because each week she would send off her weekly report and case notes, only to fail to receive any acknowledgement back. The complete lack of ‘management’ meant effectively that she rapidly became de-motivated. Each day she did less and less, until it came to the point that she did almost nothing at all, apart from hanging around at home on the off chance that her boss would call her with a special request.

Now this is an extreme example, and one might say easily fixed – but the interesting point is that you might think that being paid to stay at home to do nothing would be the perfect job (according to most tabloid newspapers it is what millions of people are doing by choice every day). But the reality is far off. In the case of our professional she became so desperate that she resigned and is now looking for a new job.

It is obvious that us humans need a purpose in life, that we need discipline and encouragement to keep us from becoming depressed or going insane. But home working is an exponentially growing phenomenon and the complexities of motivating and managing remote workers demands a complete new set of rules.

For a start, the simple question of trust emerges – how do I know, for example, if my PA (who works from her home) is busy or simply lasing around on the sofa watching daytime TV? How do I know if she is working efficiently or allowing herself to get heavily involved in a minor detail that, in an office, would get detected and set aside very quickly?

Sure you can use Skype and call each other at regular intervals, but the question of trust and self motivation always comes back. There are some pretty neat software tools such as ‘softactivity’ that allow you to monitor the number of mouse movements and key strokes and applications accessed etc. – but what does that tell us?

I am a manager that likes to walk around the office floor everyday, and observe and listen, picking up minor issues, long before they become important. Motivating teams to have fun and to deliver to the maximum without breaking down is one of the secrets of my success.

Now, to put the record straight, I am very satisfied with the work my PA does, but the nature of the working relationship means that we need to speak with one another at least two to three times per day, if not more. However, this means that the usual management ratio of one to six is rather difficult to maintain over a long period of time, especially if the manager has a pile of work to do themselves, which is more often than not the case.

Over time, I am sure many management books and seminars will be written on the subject of motivating remote employees. But until we have adjusted and mastered the art of remote management, the best solution for self employed home workers is in the form of an online task agency such as 'Pajama Nation'. This amazing concept allows the home worker to review each day jobs that need doing and they have to bid to win them. Just like at Amazon and E-bay, suppliers are awarded satisfaction points for the quality of the work delivered. A whole new world of variety is open for those that do not need the physical company of others to motivate them. After all why sit in a traffic jam burning up precious energy and hours of your life, when staying at home can be even more rewarding? Money for nothing it isn’t but I guess it is as close as it can ever be?

Nothing but Fun

This year I have been too busy with my projects to follow the Olympics, however there is one name that keeps being mentioned on the radio: Michael Phelps. I didn’t even know his name before the Olympics but I find it simply amazing that he has achieved so much.

In business, when we are confronted with what appears to be insurmountable problems, the energy needed to tackle the complexity is often too much for many people to handle alone.

Someone asked me today if I thought their team was of sufficient quality to achieve the objective ahead of them. My reply was simply: You do not always need to have the very best around you. Most businesses don’t even get 50% of efficency out of the teams they employ. Companies that attain an average 80%, or more, can achieve incredible things. The most important points being:

1. Know your team, understand what everyone is capable of and utilize them wisely. Forget what they are doing right now and create a new page for each and everyone of them. You might find that some maybe optimally deployed but I am sure that the majority will not be.
2. Learn how to motivate each and every team player and make the time to keep them motivated.
3. Install belief, sell a vision that everyone can believe in and you will be amazed how much can be done by so few.

As Michael Phelps put it: "Nothing is impossible”. “With so many people saying it couldn't be done, all it takes is an imagination, and that's something I learned and something that helped me”. “It's been nothing but an upwards roller-coaster and it's been nothing but fun."

Creativity in the workplace – who needs it?

What do successful leading edge technology and high end fashion apparel companies have in common? Answer: The need for creativity.

I need some help here because there is a difficult compromise that is hard to identify.

For both the above mentioned types of companies to perform, they need highly original designers to come up with stunning new ideas year in, year out. They also need extremely creative marketing people to find new ways of targeting and attracting their public. The problem is that by encouraging highly creative working environments, the net result can be that everyone ends up trying to be creative and having their own say, even on matters that are obviously way outside their area of expertise and responsibility.

In the good old days companies used to have an ‘ideas box’. (This was usually strategically placed by the exit to the canteen). The assumption was that during the lunch break, employees would eagerly discuss business opportunities and exciting new ideas would be materialize. The employees would then scribble them down on a napkin and, as if by magic, wonderful things would emerge such as: a whole new product range, or, a new way to assess staff performance that everyone would agree with and support.

In reality, after three months, the only thing you were likely to find in the ideas box would be a very old sandwich, a cigarette butt and, just possibly, a badly written request for a longer lunch break!

When I punch in an equation into my desktop calculator, I do not want it to be creative, so why is it that we encourage all our staff to think and behave in this way? Being ‘creative’ (= questioning the way our bosses and colleagues in other departments do their work) is obviously more fun than carrying out the tasks we are expected to perform to justify our take home pay. But I see it far too often. In some companies 'creativity' is like a contagious disease. So much so, that they become extremely inefficient.

After listening to 'creative' ideas we far too often feel depressed, simply because even in the unlikely event that the idea might be a good one, we instinctively know that it has no chance in hell in getting through.

I gave a training course last week on assigning tasks to people. The course also included modules on ‘finding peoples’ hidden agendas’ and ‘motivation’. What came to the surface is that a good manager needs to be extremely creative in the way they motivate people to take on and execute tasks, especially tasks that come in as extras on top of their normal workload.

As an interim manager, I make it my duty to realize genuine improvements, no matter who suggested them, and I do this by finding ways of empowering people to make a difference to the environment they find themselves in. However, I firmly believe that for a company to become really succesful, every manager should be encouraged to focus their creative energies on motivating others to do what they are best at (this sadly, too often, has very little to do with the job they currently have). In this way, companies become far more efficient and much more fun places to be in. We all know that when we are motivated to deliver, the hours fly by and we find more time to laugh and be creative in the way we solve the problems confronting us.

Most companies start out with good intentions by promoting creativity in the work place, but often end up in a negative spiral of criticism and general apathy. One of the secrets of good management is to listen to others and be receptive for new ideas, but listening is not the same as encouraging the moaning of wise amateurs that have no intent of trying influence real change. You can detect these people easily because they normally come out with statements like “If I were running that department, I would… (the word ‘would’ is usually followed with a radical idea that has obviously not been thought through, such as:’ fire half the staff and send the other half off for re-habilitation’, or ‘show them that financial control is not about knowing the numbers’).

Have a good week!

Harley

How much willpower does an interim manager need?

Sometimes, when I am driving through a new initiative and need to lobby a pathway for the subsequent change management and project teams to flatten out and widen even further, I ask myself why am I doing this? What can start out as a good idea can become a nightmare, especially if the change is big and the lobbying needs to start at the very top and work its way down. At these moments I tend to go back to the project charter and remind myself of why the project was set up in the first place and what needs to be done. The project charter becomes like a religious reference book, a document to return to, to digest and to reflect upon a given situation. But a project charter is not a religious work, its authors are not divine, it is (presumably) a document that contains the method and reasons for increasing shareholder value in some way or another, either in the long or short term.

If it can be considered that it is willpower that drives interim managers, and to a large extent it is true (many interim manager’s profiles reveal people that like to make an impact on their environments, and to do this they need a great deal of willpower), then willpower becomes the energy source that drives them and their desire to influence their environment becomes the motivator.

On a corporate level bringing about change is relatively easy for those professionals with the right skills and experience. However with change on a personal level, everything becomes so much harder. Motivating oneself to change is never easy. We begin with the best intent and motivation, telling ourselves that this time it will be different, but so often we fall back into our old ways. In his book ‘The Monk who sold his Ferrari’, Robin S. Sharma gives the reader all the tools to bring about significant personal change and growth.

I said in my blog ‘Who is Your Guru?’ back in November 2007 that I would report back on this book, it has taken me much longer than planned because I have been unsure about it. On the one hand, its meaning is good but Sharma tends to repeat the same concept in too many different ways and thereby adds unnecessary complexity and it becomes a little tedious. In fact, I think that if his book was half its length then it would become an even bigger international best seller than it already is.

If you are seriously looking to change your life in any significant way, I can recommend Sharma’s book, even if you only adopt one suggestion, it can be enough to justify the purchase and the investment of reading it. (I quite like the idea of dedicating at least 10 minutes per day looking at an object in detail). When I was a student, it was my pint of beer, today its something else. But Sharma’s style might not be to your liking. It is rather mystical and you are always aware that it is a story beyond belief.

Being the pragmatic person that I am, in my book I suggest some exercises to discover just who you really are and how to set about creating map a new path or ‘life map’ forward for yourself. However, what is becoming more and more obvious to me is that although we maybe very good at reading other people and motivating them to change, when it comes to ourselves it is very unlikely that a book on its own could ever do it, not even mine!

So when Robin Sharma mentions “Willpower gives you the energy to act. …..It gives you the control to live the life you imagined rather than accepting the life you have”, you will need to remember that you first have to understand your past and establish an environment in which you will be able find the energy to change into the person you would more like to be, to have the career that you would more like to have. To do what you want, without feeling guilty or a burden upon others.