POSITIVE INFLUENCE

Most companies try to keep you safe. Safety training, protective equipment, guards, rules and regulations – all devoted to protecting you from injury. Then there are safety initiatives like Behavior Based Safety; a great process for helping you manage what you and your coworkers do on the job to stay safe.

What none of these worthy, preventive activities do is manage what’s going on in your head; only you can do that. What you are thinking and feeling are private events that only you have access to. Unfortunately, most people do not purposefully manage what they are thinking and feeling. It just happens and they roll with it.

Most working people are exposed to hazards and things that can go wrong in spite of everything management, engineering, equipment guards, rules, and PPE attempt to prevent. The workplace is dangerous; in many jobs, you can get killed or disabled in a few seconds.

For the last three decades, employee surveys have repeatedly pointed to recognition as being one of the critical ingredients in employee satisfaction, morale, motivation, and retention.

Rewards and recognition practices--positive management, has reached an iconic status as the preferred means of motivating human performance. In light of the time and resources dedicated to these methods, it seems appropriate to examine the effects of positive systems and processes with the same lens we apply to other organizational systems. If they have a positive effect on employee engagement and discretionary effort, then the ROI will be validated and the investment of organizational resources they receive will be substantiated.

If you read the available management literature, you soon run into a mandate that is seldom questioned: Praise your employees often; give them a “thank you” when they do a good job; recognize their efforts; use verbal positive reinforcement for value added behavior. Supervisors and managers are told unequivocally, that this is the best way to increase performance, enhance supervisory-employee relations, create employee engagement, and increase retention—to name a few.

Why then do climate surveys and 360° surveys consistently uncover contradictory evidence? Why do surveyed employees working in companies with formal and informal recognition systems feel they are not being “recognized” for their efforts? Survey data is inconsistent, but results (by reputable sources) report “78% of the employees surveyed said they had not been recognized by their supervisor for their work,” and “52% or the turnover in business and industry is related to supervisory-employee discord,” (irrespective of what exit interviews say.)

For 30 years I’ve been a Behavior Analyst Practitioner—a consultant who helps public and private organizations understand how an employee’s behavior is influenced by the environment he or she works in. The explanation that most people accept for human behavior—the “cause” for why someone does or says this or that—is that their behavior is personality-driven.

Personality is a complex subject, but I think the average person would characterize it as being the “hard-wired,” beliefs, attitudes, and predispositions that were acquired early in life, that pre-determine our personal style. Although there are major disagreements among academics about the changeability of people, it seems obvious to me that leaders, managers and supervisors can not do it in a work setting. It is expensive and futile to attempt to affect human performance by changing their internal structure.