By Liza | Categories: Career advice, Consulting, Recruitment, Recruitment advice | No Comments
Here at Enigma HR we love TED talks.
They’re inspirational, thought provoking and delivered by some of the most fascinating thought leaders in the world. Like this talk, from Dan Pink – a career analyst and former speechwriter to Al Gore.
For a long time we’ve all asserted that there’s pretty much a direct relationship between reward and performance.
That’s wrong says Dan.
He says science proves that people can actually perform worse (not better) when they’re offered financial rewards. While incentives are not disincentives, they can act as a distraction in roles that require right brain and creative thinking.
Rewards, he says, work really well for simple linear type tasks where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination. However, rewards by their very nature, narrow our focus and concentrate the mind. For real life problems in the working world of the 21st century, you don’t want to be looking straight at the task when the solution may actually lie in the periphery.
Dan says we’re rewarded and engaged when we do things that matter to us, when we like what we’re doing, when we find the task interesting and when we feel we are doing part of something that is important. Put simply there are three things are critical to true motivation – “autonomy”, “mastery” and “purpose.”
These are the foundation for a new way of looking at our businesses and working lives:
- Autonomy is the urge for us to direct our own lives
- Mastery is the desire to get better and better at something that matters
- Purpose is the urge to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
What’s our take out of all of this?
Well, we hope to surprise you too, given what we do.
We say – before you throw more money at a performance problem with your staff; before you decide to offer the big dollars to attract new staff and before you personally decide to go after the big dollars, watch Dan talk and think about what really matters to you.
Then when you’ve done that come and talk to us.
In 1997, I founded Enigma HR with the philosophy: “be ethical; be professional; be friendly and serve my clients well.” We specialise in insurance and accounting placements and have been assisting professionals in this industry for over 20 years.
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By Karalyn | Categories: Recruitment advice | No Comments
Ok, here at EnigmaHR we want to tell it like it is.
Can throwing a bucket full of money at a departing employee really keep them? Intuitively we don’t think so. Our experience tells us the same thing. It takes a lot to leave a company, even if it’s one you dislike.
If an employee is genuine about moving on, and not just on a fishing expedition for more cash, a counter offer may well come too late. If you’re a manager and they are in your office with a letter, they are probably both logically and emotionally detached from your company. Your employee has gone through a long and hard thought process both around resigning and around the pluses and minuses of a new job.
We’ve found one of the main reasons people leave jobs voluntarily is that in some sense their trust has been broken. That trust may be about many things. For example – the promise the company delivered in the way they said they would treat them; a promise a company made about career opportunities; or a promise a company made about the possibilities of a job.
Counter offers that are just financial may only work as a short term lure, if an employer does not work hard to tackle any underlying issues, or the most important motivation around why people resign.
The other reason we’ve found that counter offers fail is that (shock horrors) employees are not always honest when they say why they are leaving. Resigning, even from a bad job, can be hard work, particularly if people are emotional, or do not want to open up a discussion around their dissatisfaction. To say it’s the money, is an easy out in this scenario.
If you’re an employer and tempted to make a counter offer there are things to think about. Firstly there’s the impact on your other employees. If they haven’t boasted about their conquest down at the pub, there will be a few people that your exiting employee has confided in discreetly, no matter how carefully worded your confidentiality clause around salary is written. Word will get out that this person has just talked themselves into a big pay rise.
So what’s the latest on what it takes for people to be truly satisfied in their roles?
People describe cash as the hygiene factor – something that you notice when it’s not there. So if you’re not earning enough money, struggling to pay the bills or satisfy your basic needs, it can be a cause of huge dissatisfaction. However, if you do have enough money, beyond the initial rush of a nice big fat pay increase, then other things start to play a part.
Things we’ve found to be big motivations to stay at a job are really just the fundamentals of good people management. Employees feel safe. The feel respected. They believe the company cares about them. They feel listened to. They have the amount of autonomy in their roles that is right for them.
