This is about the animus that the organization has instilled in its staff, not the routine performance review process. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and my “paint by numbers” horse in a field are both paintings: assessing people working and a performance review have the same relationship.
It is time I shared some of my “people watching” skills with you. Nothing to do with hiding behind potted plants though!
People and their relationship to their work is my expertise. As you know, because you are an expert in something yourself, an expert has a sixth sense and sees things that non-experts do not.
There really isn’t anything magical about my expertise. It is the simple result of my background: academic study, practical management experience and combining the two in experiments on my people. I honestly believe that anyone can develop these skills; it just took me 40 years.
Let’s see what I can share with you in two minutes to save you some of those 40 years!
Observing, analysing, and rationalising people’s behaviour is something we all do every day. So, first, we must unlearn the sloppy thinking that we fall into day by day.
What is motivation? Motivation is an attitude internal to a person. Motivation is a predilection to behave in a certain way—in other words an attitude.
The problem is we cannot observe attitudes directly! All we can observe is behaviour.
Fortunately, it is behaviour that gets the work done. You rent your employee’s behaviour, not their attitude to life and to you – you must earn that.
Do you jump to conclusions about a person’s attitudes: he doesn’t want to work; she can’t compete? These are examples of conclusions about internal attitude which can only be judged based on observable behaviour.
You have probably read a lot of “employee engagement” articles. If you have read mine, you’ll know I don’t like the phrase. It has been debased.
There is confusion about the equivalence between engaged and happy employees. Gurus will tell you people have to be happy in their work to be engaged and more productive. This has led to some appalling nonsense in this management field.
Happiness is an internal state, an attitude. You can only observe its influence through behaviour. There is absolutely no need to bring in an unobservable factor like happiness.
More motivational management behaviour produces more effective, more productive employee behaviour. In the first instance why do you care if people are happy or not? Observe the behaviour.
Of course, unhappy people will look for other work and so on, which is bad. Proper management behaviour makes people more effective and happier in their lives.
Work is not always pleasant. There are tough times sometimes. Tough and uncomfortable is perfectly acceptable for a time. People will still be more effective even if times are hard, when you get the managerial behaviour right, if you make the working culture and environment appropriate.
Manage the attitude forming work environment and observe the behaviour to see the result.
Since 1911, when Frederick Taylor did his work at Bethlehem Steel in the US on work behaviour, the sight of a Time Study man with a stopwatch affects behaviour. Some people speed up, some slow down and some get nervous and make mistakes.
Your observations of your people are difficult. You have to observe in passing, not as part of a deliberate action. You can observe your people when in conversation with someone else looking over their shoulder, on the way to the car park or the canteen and in every fleeting second you come across people unexpectedly. Please don’t make a habit of coming across people unexpectedly if you are a boss. Think what message you are sending about trust and belief.
What we need to do is give you some people watching experience in a workplace where you are not the boss. We will do your training away from your place of work, so people are behaving naturally with you.
A good place to people watch is a restaurant or a shop, particularly a department store.
Have you ever been to a department store and felt you were an inconvenience? Did you ever apologise for interrupting the conversation between two shop assistants?
You can practise wherever people work in the public’s gaze: restaurants, shops and railway stations are ideal.
Have you ever seen children at play? A child at play makes deliberate and speedy movements. Children play with enthusiasm, with alacrity and are dedicated to the job of play.
Observe people’s movement in their work. You wouldn’t want a restaurant waiter to be impatient with the customers choosing their meal from the menu. You need to observe behaviour that is unbiased by any interaction with another person or a machine.
Have you ever seen a child walk while playing? They run, not walk. They are capable of walking and slowly, too: just try telling them it is time to sleep! It is all a matter of motivation.
It isn’t usually acceptable for people to run in their workplace. But how fast do they walk? Do they walk purposefully or saunter along at a pace they have learnt is just fast enough to satisfy their supervisor?
Observe their hand movements. Are they moving as quickly as the process allows and in a purposeful way? Be careful with jumping to conclusions about your observations. You cannot observe what is happening in people’s heads, only the effect.
I type at variable speeds depending on what is in my head. Some of the time I am still while I think about what to say. Sometimes I am typing slowly as I don’t like what I am writing and am trying to rephrase it to make more sense.
The whole point is that the invisible mental processes affect behaviour. Frederick Taylor’s work with processes included enforced work breaks to avoid fatigue. This allowed a higher work rate through the day—three times higher when all the other factors were included.
Previously I discussed “speed of movement” as a measure of people’s involvement in their work. I’d like you to think of “speed of movement” as being the product of some innate physical speediness and an internal attitude, a willingness to move, a motivation.
To assess a person’s willingness to work you compare their “speed of movement” to whatever is their natural speed. To assess their willingness, you have to judge a person by their own standards not compared with other people. This needs careful observation as people do vary one to another in their natural rate of movement, their degree of liveliness.
The end point of this is how much work gets done. But we are assessing willingness to work, not their actual work rate. We are doing this so we can improve their willingness and, therefore, their work rate. A fine distinction I know but the devil is in the detail.
Observe how the person interacts with their environment. Are they fully engaged in their work? Some people daydream at work. I’ve even seen people, arms folded under their head asleep on their desk! People are very good at “sleeping” with their eyes open. If their head is thinking about booking their next holiday, they are likely to be slow to react to their environment.
You may have heard expressions like “the place is buzzing” or “the hum of activity”. Quite what makes the sound I don’t know? Maybe it is blood rushing through energised brains! But that sound exists. Have you heard it?
The individual mental state that contributes to the buzz of activity is known as the Flow State. It was named as such by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You can watch him explaining the Flow State in this TED talk video.
Most people experience the Flow State in their lives. It is that state where you are so completely focused on the task in hand you lose track of time, don’t notice interruptions and are totally focused. How many of us have said “I didn’t realise the time” when we are over time on our hobby! Hours can slip by unnoticed. It is a very effective way of making substantial progress on a task.
If you are the, or a, Boss you can conduct an experiment. When you walk into a workplace does your staff work faster or slower? Which behaviour would you want to observe? Think about that and I’ll answer at the end.
More observations now: do your people actively do “minute shaving” (as in time)? Do they arrive and leave exactly on time? Putting aside that they are shaving a few minutes off each end of their working day, it suggests a mindset that their job is an interruption to their private life.
You can imagine how an employee would react if you shaved a few pounds off their salary this month!
I am not suggesting people regularly work over their contracted hours for free. But sometimes there will be something that needs a few minutes to be finished after normal stop time.
I expect that you have “Town Hall”, organization-wide meetings and take trouble to regularly communicate with everyone. They are generally regarded as a “good thing”, but do you think they are ineffective in practice?
Try talking with an employee to gauge their knowledge and interest in the organization. Are they genuinely interested or disinterested? That only comes from communication.
The next observation is how much autonomous decision making they can, and do, take.
Are they content to pass a decision off as “not my job” or do they want to make a difference?
People involved in their work will take decisions to make things better. Decision making authority will be restrained naturally, but are they aware of their own span of authority to decide? Are they involved in the day-to-day operational activities?
The penultimate observation relates to their target numbers. Are they aware of their targets and their progress to achieve them? Do you see people working more or less hard depending on the circumstance?
People slow down when there isn’t much to do. You can manage to avoid that by keeping the vision of what needs to be done in front of them. Don’t make the work to be done seem difficult though! People need to feel progress is being made. You also want people to speed up when there is a lot of work to do. People, who are involved in their work, naturally flex their work rate to fit the demand. What do you see?
The final observation is simply “are they happy in their work”? Note “..in their work” not laughing and not working. I made the point earlier about uninvolved people seeing work as an interruption to their daily lives. People need to have fun: why shouldn’t work be part of that? Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work. It is an important part of life.
It is difficult to cram 45 years’ experience in few words. I hope at least some of this makes sense. You will only know by making those observations. Please don’t start observing your own organization until you are calibrated by watching others.
I promised you an explanation as to which you should want: your people to work faster or slower when you enter into the workplace.
You want people to work more slowly. There are two reasons:
- People stop work because they want to chat, tell you things and hear what you have to say.
- You want them to work faster when you’re not present or you’ll have to be there all the time!
The next time I sit in a restaurant watching the waiting staff and notice someone else doing the same, I’ll know you subscribe to my LinkedIn feed. Shall we compare notes?