Posted on September 19, 2016

How can an organization create a culture – a way of doing business – that produces outstanding results? For nearly a century, industrial psychologists have been searching for the dynamics that connect employee behavior to organizational performance. This quest to unlock the mysteries of the employee psyche has been a long and winding road:

• In the early 1920s and ‘30s:  The seminal experiments at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, from which came the ‘Hawthorne Effect,’ the tendency of workers to produce more as a result of being observed

• In the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s:  I.B.M.’s breakthrough and daring-at-the-time concept of asking employees for their opinions about the workplace in the first ‘morale’ surveys, followed closely by Bank of America’s morale-based global employee research designed to improve business performance

• In the ‘80s and ‘90s:  The transition to the then-popular ‘job satisfaction’ concept (popular, perhaps, because ‘satisfaction,’ as banal as it is, is such a low, easily-attainable threshold?), and

• Now:  The widespread belief that ‘engagement’ of all things is the real deal.

From our research and experience, this quest has been largely shortsighted. Because it’s not about morale, given that it’s amorphous, is nearly immune to intervention at work and is almost worthless in predicting company performance. Nor is it about simply being satisfied with one’s job. Like satisfaction drives outstanding performance! And while engagement is the best of the lot, not hard given the competition, it’s really just a nice name for commitment, which, as we know, wanes over time. The concept is also one-sided, given its imbalanced focus on the employee and not on the role of the organization.

There must be something better.

From our point of view, supported by our data, the most compelling, sustainable influence on employee behavior and, in turn, organizational performance is the extent to which people feel valued by their employer. Show us an organization where employees feel truly valued for their talent, experience, initiative, and passion and we’ll show you an organization with open and timely dialogue about the business, a fluidity of ideas, an ongoing ability to increase efficiency and productivity, effective cross-functional teamwork, and, critically, an organization that consistently performs at a high level. And, not unimportantly, a place employees love to work and others seek to join. As we’ll try to demonstrate in the Mondays ahead, feeling valued has little to do with money. It’s more wholesome, more intrinsic than that, for it’s about being given a real opportunity to contribute to the organization. Which we know is what most people want to do when they go to work. Including us.

More on the virtues – and payback – of being valued at work next week, as our minute’s up.