Could
a simple five-minute interaction with another person dramatically
increase your weekly productivity?
In
some employment environments, the answer is yes, according to Wharton
management professor Adam
Grant. Grant has devoted significant chunks of his professional career to examining
what motivates workers in settings that range from call centers and mail-order
pharmacies to swimming pool lifeguard squads. In all these situations, Grant
says, employees who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on
others are not just happier than those who don’t; they are vastly more
productive, too.
That
conclusion may sound touchy-feely, but Grant has documented it in a series of
research papers. In one experiment, he studied paid employees at a public
university’s call center who were asked to phone potential donors to the
school. It can be grim work: Employees don’t get paid much and suffer frequent
rejections from people unhappy about getting calls during dinner. Turnover is
high and morale is often low. So how do you motivate workers to stay on the
phone and bring in the donations?
In
his 2007 study, Grant and a team of researchers — Elizabeth Campbell, Grace
Chen, David Lapedis and Keenan Cottone from the University of Michigan —
arranged for one group of call center workers to interact with scholarship
students who were the recipients of the school’s fundraising largess. It wasn’t
a long meeting — just a five-minute session where the workers were able to ask
the student about his or her studies. But over the next month, that little chat
made a big difference. The call center was able to monitor both the amount of
time its employees spent on the phone and the amount of donation dollars they brought
in. A month later, callers who had interacted with the scholarship student
spent more than two times as many minutes on the phone, and brought in vastly
more money: a weekly average of $503.22, up from $185.94.
“Even
minimal, brief contact with beneficiaries can enable employees to maintain
their motivation,” the researchers write in their paper, titled “Impact
and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with
Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior,” published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human
Decision Processes.
Motivated
Lifeguards
Motivating workers is a topic that interested Grant long before he
became a professional academic. Prior to graduate school, he worked as an
advertising director for the Let’s
Go line of travel guides. “We were producing travel guides and we
had a couple of hundred people working in an office that would help travelers
see foreign countries in a new way and travel safely,” he recalls. “None of the
editors had any contact with any of the actual readers.” Grant suspected that
the staffers would find more satisfaction in their work — and probably work
even harder — if they could regularly interact with the readers whose
globetrotting they enabled.
At
the travel guide business, he never got a chance to put that hunch into
practice. But as he moved towards his doctoral research at the University of
Michigan, he returned to the subject, using call centers, sports facilities and
classrooms as some of his early laboratories.
According
to Grant, just being aware of the impact your job has on others can help with
motivation. In a follow up study to the one he published in 2007, he focused on
lifeguards at a community recreation center. Some of them were given stories to
read about cases in which lifeguards had saved lives. A second group was given
a different kind of reading material: testimonies from lifeguards about how
they had personally benefitted from their work. The results: Those who had been
reading about their ability to avert fatalities saw their measure of hours
worked shoot up by more than 40%, whereas those who had merely learned that a
lifeguard gig could be personally enriching kept working at the same clip. The
results were published in a paper titled, “The
Significance of Task Significance: Job Performance Effects, Relational
Mechanisms, and Boundary Conditions,” in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Seeing
Is Believing
Beyond
awareness of job impact, face-to-face meetings with individuals who benefit
from a job well done can dramatically improve workers’ performance. In Grant’s
2007 study, a second experimentlooked at a group of students who were tasked
with editing cover letters of fellow students who had contacted the
university’s Career Center in order to help find a job. One group of the
student editors had the opportunity to see a would-be beneficiary who stopped
by to drop off his letters and made small talk, purportedly unaware that the
people in the room were the ones who would be tuning up his writing. Another
group of student editors dug into the identical cover letters without having
laid eyes on their author. The result? The people who had met the job-seeking
student — even for a brief, apparently superficial conversation as he dropped
off his paperwork — spent significantly more time on the editing task than
those who hadn’t.
However,
there’s more to know about contact than the simple idea that it is worthwhile
to plunk workers down next to someone their daily tasks have aided. In a second
run of the Career Center experiment, for instance, the alleged student
job-seeker’s biographical information was also manipulated. Again, both groups
of editors worked on identical packets of cover letters. But they also saw a
personal information sheet the student had submitted to the Career Center. On
one sheet, the student wrote that he desperately needed a job, saying he was
having a hard time paying bills. For the other group, the personal statement
did not contain any such language. Again, one group of editors met the student
for the same few minutes of small-talk, and another group had no contact with
him.
As
in Grant’s lifeguard experiment, reading the high-need personal statement —
that is, learning that their work was very important — was crucial. But, the
one-two punch of knowing the beneficiary’s needs and meeting him in person generated the
largest impact on motivation. Editors who didn’t learn of the student’s dire
financial straits put in an average of 27 minutes of work. Editors who read of
the student’s money woes but never met him clocked 26 minutes apiece. Only
those who had met the student and
read of his worries worked significantly harder on the task of helping
him,spending more than a half-hour on the task, or an average of 20% more time
than the other editors.
Grant
says this suggests that “task significance” is the key driver, and that
face-to-face interactions, even seemingly superficial ones, can serve as a way
of driving that significance home. In other studies, he has found that
engineers, salespeople, managers, customer service representatives, doctors,
nurses, medical technicians, security guards, police officers and firefighters
who can directly see their impact on others all achieve higher job performance.
Over
the course of several years’ worth of experiments and surveys, Grant and his
colleagues have spotted a few other nuances in how meeting beneficiaries
affects workers. For instance, workers with a strong set of “prosocial values”
— determined by those who say they agree strongly with statements such as, “It
is important to me to respond to the needs of others” — are much more likely to
be affected by reminders of how significant their work is. By contrast,
generally conscientious workers, who presumably work hard whether or not their
labors are beneficial, don’t show nearly the same spike in performance upon
being exposed to their beneficiaries.
Still,
Grant says that in a wired economy where workers are increasingly likely to be
physically isolated from end users, it’s important for employers to build in
systems that reinforce employees’ awareness of whom they are helping.
“Technology is this really fascinating double edged sword,” Grant says. “On one
hand, we have more and more ability to connect employees to end users from a
different geographic region…. But on the other hand, technology has also
reduced the need for face-to-face interaction. A lot of organizations stop
short of making this sort of connection because the work can get done without
it.”
That’s
a mistake, he says — one that many companies are now working to avoid. In fact,
Grant is consulting with a number of organizations to establish these sorts of
procedures on an ongoing basis. One of them, a pharmaceutical firm that does
mail-order prescriptions, established a system where staff pharmacists
occasionally rotate into regular pharmacies where they interact with customers.
They also began attaching photos of customers to their mail-order files,
on the assumption that humanizing the names on all those medical forms would
improve performance and minimize mistakes on the crucial, if sometimes mundane,
work of pharmaceutical delivery.
Even
in firms that are not focused on helping people as a core mission, managers
might still look at increasing contact between workers and others in the
organization who benefit from their labor, Grant says. “Everybody has an end
user. In some cases, those end users are more inside the organization than
outside. In some cases, the end users who managers want employees to focus on
are coworkers, colleagues in other departments, or managers themselves.” The
question, he says, is: “How do we establish that connection as a regular
routine, whether it’s a weekly conference call with [co-workers] or a monthly
check-in?”
Corporate
charity might also have a productivity-boosting effect. “Some of my recent
research on a Fortune 500 company suggests that, if you’ve got employees where
the primary purpose of their job is not to help people, where there’s no
clearly defined group of end users, we can think about corporate philanthropy
as a substitute. One option is to give people the chance to take responsibility
for personally meaningful, important community service that can be sponsored by
the company [so that they think], ‘I make a difference by being here.’”
Source: www.dailygood.org/
Read, Learn and
Flourish!
Grow, Glow and Be Great!
