Transcript The Effect of Head and Heart on Municipal Employee Retention

Stone Soup:
Sustaining and Motivating During Change
ACMA Winter Conference
2:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Thursday, February 6, 2003
Sedona Arizona Hilton
Meet the Panelists and Format
Dr. Patrick Sherman
Facilitator
Organizational Consultant
University Faculty
former City Manager
Bill Pupo
City Manager, City of Surprise
Wendy Kaserman
Staff Assistant, League of Cities
Ryan Gregory
Management Assistant, City of Phoenix
Panel/Audience Discussion
Prescriptions for Keeping a Motivated and Committed
Workforce During (and Past) Times of Uncertainty
Motivation Theories and Differences
Generational Applications
Observations from Your Employees
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions
Keeping Yourself and your Organization Motivated
Dr. Patrick Sherman
What People Are Not Motivated By...
People are Not Motivated by Money.
Can be Demotivator if perceived as unfair.
Factors that do not Motivate
- Extrinsic Factors do not motivate
pay,
working conditions,
policies.
What People ARE Motivated By...
Factors that Motivate:
– Personal growth opportunities, recognition,
responsibility,
– communication, relationships.
– social, esteem, self-actualization,
– existence, relatedness, growth,
– Needs and desires for achievement, exercise of
power, and for affiliation,
– Specific and challenging goals and objectives with
good feedback and communication.
What People ARE Motivated By...
Different Scientists and Theories of Motivation Enforce and
Reinforce the Same Patterns of Human Needs
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Maslow
McClelland
ERG
Goal Setting
Herzberg
McGregor
All relate to motivation being a factor of Recognition and
Appreciation, Relationships and Communication,
Self Development and Personal Growth, and
Achievement and Responsibility.
Generational Impacts of Motivation
Motivational needs are different in different individuals
and in different generations.
To be successful today you must Know your
employees well enough to access the specific need
that makes them tick, gives them passion, enhances
their feeling of making a difference, makes them feel
welcome and feel appreciated, and reinforces the
reason they came to your organization in the good
times.
Or Does This?
Generational MotivationTips
Veterans: honor hard work with tangible awards such as plaques as a symbolic
record of accomplishment. Interact personally and be respectful and directive.
Boomers: Give public recognition,opportunities for them to prove their worth, ask
for their input, and recognize long hours and sacrifice, allow them to question,
give status symbols.
Gen Xer: Give constant constructive feedback, assign multiple types of projects,
give them control over work priorities, give them flexible schedules, give
constant training and development opportunities, let them utilize new
technology.
Gen Y: learn about personal goals, educate and skill build, mentor and develop.
Common Themes: Flexibility, Training, Communication, Recognition
Resources to Help Manage and Motivate:
Geeks and Geezer’s: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape
Leaders (Bennis)
When Generations Collide: How to Solve the Generational
Puzzle at Work (Lancaster)
Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers and
Nexters in Your Workplace (Zemke)
Managing Generation X (Tulgan)
1001 Ways to Energize Employees (Nelson)
First, Break All the Rules (Buckingham and Coffman)
“Organizational Eavesdropping”:
Observations from your employees….
Over the past year I have taught 400 graduate students and consulted with
organizations 3 states that represent thousands more.
Conversations are similar….and troubling for the future of public
organizations and leadership….WE are out of touch with our
employees….we just don’t get it….and employees are just waiting for the
economy to turn around to bail out….
Common Themes from “Organizational Eavesdropping”
• Telling not Empowering
• Not Listening
• Not enough flexibility
• Have to ask permission
• Fear of Risk
• No real communication
Observations from your employees..
• Time at desk more important than producing
• Not enough flex scheduling/telecommuting
• No one says “thank you”
• No recognition by boss. Recognition comes from coworkers.
• Rules more important than outcomes
• Not enough training
•I don’t have input on training
•I don’t have input on my career
•Short term focus
•No mentoring
•No career development
•Won’t let me make a difference
•Work/life balance is a joke
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions:
Observations
We have a crisis in recognizing and appreciating employees.
A New “Organizational Disease” exists:
“TDD” or Thank-you Deficit Disorder
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Generational Differences of Veteran/Boomer managers not
knowing or caring about how to relate to Xer’s exacerbate it.
The words “Good job”, “Thank you” or “Tell me what you think”
happen infrequently. They are not signs of manager
weakness…They are
signs of manager and organizational
excellence.
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– And it doesn’t cost a dime!
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions: Recognition
Truisms from Non Gen Xers:
“Brains, like hearts, go where they are
appreciated” - Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense
1961-1968
(Nelson, 1994, p. 89).
“Two things that people want more than sex and
money are recognition and praise”
- Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay
Cosmetics
(Nelson, 1994, p. 9).
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions: Recognition
In a study of 1,500 employees by Wichita State
University, it was noted that the most powerful
motivational technique was instant recognition. (Nelson,
1994)
A Kepner-Tregoe study indicates that only 40% of
American workers say they receive recognition and that,
“unless this issue is addressed, the goal of achieving a
high-performance work place will be unattainable” (Kouzes
& Posner, 1999, p. 5).
In my informal survey of working Masters students only
25% get enough recognition (Sherman, 2003).
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions:
Observations
Flexible Scheduling and Telecommuting are
more politically correct inclusions into
policies than organizational realities.
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Workers resent this lack of “walking the talk”, lack of
trust, and lack of freedom to determine how they get
the job done.
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We ask for more with less, but won’t allow workplace
changes that can drive it.
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions:
Observations
We are becoming more “top down” and
“hierarchical” in management style, not less.
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Under Stress we revert to old habits and training.
Do NOT become your fathers…we all know it doesn’t
work.
Communication is infrequent and mostly one way.
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Manager’s do not know their employees and do not
make them feel needed. Feeling “needed” brings
commitment, feeling expendable does not.
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions:
Keeping Yourself and your Organization
Motivated
What we can do:
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Say “thank you”daily if not hourly, and mean it.
• Build on relationships. Have “conversations” with
employees to find out what makes them motivated…And then
Act on what they tell you.
• Don’t cut development and training. Employees expect
it, and it is a major motivator. People are doing jobs of
former colleagues, telling them they cannot learn skills to allow
them to be more efficient insults them.
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To Gen X and Y taking away training and development
is foundational to their sense of worth and their future.
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions:
Keeping Yourself and your Organization
Motivated
•Be Flexible. More, not less, flex scheduling,
telecommuting. Don’t resort to the 1960’s org.structure.
•Listen to your people. Ask them how they can be more
productive and then do what they say.
•Find new work models: part timers, job sharing,
retirees, partial retirement.
•Your Organization can resemble one of the following
two models:
– Which will it be?
The De-motivated Organization
“Soulless bureaucracies dominate the
workplace. They are just as common in the
public as the private sector. Disconnection's
abound within soulless bureaucracies.
Management fervently clings to the hopeless
belief that business is no place for humanness,
that buying a person’s hand and head is more
important than engaging a person’s heart and
soul. Such workplaces deaden the spirits of
workers everywhere”
(Harris & Brannick, 1999)
The Motivated and Passionate
Organization
“For those who believe passion falls into the
realm of the touchy-feely, I want to summarize
the tangible benefits it provides. Passion
provides direction and focus, passion creates
energy, passion fosters creativity, passion
heightens performance, passion inspires action,
passion attracts employees and customers,
passion builds loyalty, passion unites an
organization, passion provides a critical edge,
passion brings the organization to a higher
plane” (Chang, 2001).
Advice, Tools, and Prescriptions:
Keeping Yourself and your Organization
Motivated
Take Care of Yourself and Your Employees:
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Work smart. No “Tragedy of the Commons”
Question processes, not people.
Mentor, nurture, and grow.
Get out of the office and let your people out.
Neither Tyrants nor Dead men or women
live to enjoy their “80 points”.
Panel Discussion Themes:
Flexible Work
Recognition and Appreciation
Communication
Career Development
Work/Life Balance
Stone Soup: Sustaining and
Motivating During Change
Dr. Patrick Sherman
Leadership, Organizational Development, & Human
Resource Consulting
4443 N. 21st Place, Phoenix, AZ 85016
602-778-6577/928-587-8500
[email protected]