How Oxytocin Can Make Your Job
More Meaningful PART II
Yield.
Whole Foods Market has
embraced Yield from the executive suite to the store aisles. Each department in
their stores is run as a nearly autonomous unit, deciding what it will sell,
who to hire, and how to display their products. Departments have their own
profit and loss statements and are responsible for staying in the black. Teams
are arranged in a lattice so they can learn from others’ successes and
mistakes. Bonuses are team-based and compensation is shared broadly. Walter
Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods, has said, “When leaders give their power away to
others, they create space for those people to flourish.”
Transfer.
One of the fastest-growing and most
profitable agricultural companies in the U.S., Morning Star Tomato,
has no job titles. At all. Everyone is a colleague; even owner and founder Chris
Rufer’s business card just has his name on it. Each colleague chooses which
work group she or he will join based on a commitment to create value for the
group. Morning Star Tomato produces more than half of the U.S. output of
processed tomato products (sauce, paste, and stewed tomatoes) and has nearly
single-handedly driven down the price of these products by 80 percent over the
last 30 years. Rufer attributes their success to their culture of inclusion and
excellence. Processing tomatoes is a highly regulated industry. Each plant has
an on-site FDA lab randomly testing for quality and cleanliness so everyone
must perform well. Excellence at every stage of the production process is
achieved with Transfer.
Openness.
Openness is part of the core business model
at Buffer, a software
company that optimizes social media impact. Salaries are posted online, as are
revenue and the number of customers. All company emails are accessible by
everyone. “Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great
teamwork,” according to Buffer founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne. Within three
years of its 2010 founding, Buffer was serving one million customers a day.
Clarity about Buffer’s goals and practices using Openness reduces the stress
that inhibits trust, so Buffer’s colleagues can focus on wowing their
customers.
Caring.
SAS Institute is
the world’s largest privately held software company with over $2 billion in
revenue. Employee turnover at SAS is two percent, the lowest in the industry.
They have sustained high profitability and colleague retention by building a
Caring culture. SAS emphasizes work-life integration by having colleagues work
35 hours per week. They also offer on-site daycare for 850 children of their
employees at one-third the market cost, offer basic medical services at no
cost, and provide healthy snacks and meals at campus cafes. “We’ll take care of
you if you’ll take care of us” is the approach taken by SAS Institute
co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight. SAS Institute is consistently ranked among
the best companies to work for in the U.S.
Invest.
In the early 2000s, British-Dutch consumer
goods company Unilever created
a health and well-being program called “Lamplighter” to help executives manage
their energy and performance by reducing chronic stress. Its success led to a
rapid rollout of Lamplighter to Unilever’s 172,000 employees around the world.
The program assesses physical and mental health and creates individual
scorecards that team members use to develop work-life integration plans. These
plans include exercise and nutrition goals and even psychological counseling,
if needed. Unilever’s analysis showed that for every £1 spent on the program,
£3.73 was returned in higher productivity. Lamplighter is good for its
colleagues and profitable for the company.
Natural.
In 1999, personal computer maker Lenovo Group was going
global. But this Chinese company had a very Chinese culture. People would only
speak in hierarchical order. Tea was served at every meeting. And titles were
paramount. CEO Yang Yuanqing was called “Chief Executive Officer Yang” by
everyone. Mr. Yang sought to change Lenovo’s culture to one focused on being
Natural. One of the first things he did was to post himself in the lobby of
Lenovo’s Beijing headquarters for more than a week wearing a “Hello, my name is
Yuanqing” sticker and shaking hands with everyone who walked through the door.
He asked employees to address him by his first name. He also changed the
official language at Lenovo to English. The changes worked. Lenovo grew from an
Asian-only brand to a global behemoth shipping more PCs than any other company
in the world. Lenovo generates over $46 billion in annual revenue and Barron’s magazine
consistently names Yang one of the “World’s Best CEOs.”
What about Purpose? In addition to OXYTOCIN,
there is one more ingredient my research shows companies need to improve that
triple bottom line: a sense of transcendent purpose. “Through commerce, we
create value that helps each of us pursue a better life and forge human
connections that enrich our shared experience.” This is eBay’s Purpose
statement. The use of “we” and “us” clearly signals that their goal is not to
maximize profits or stock price, but to serve all of humanity. Service is
essential in Purpose narratives. Colleagues at organizations that have a clear
and well-communicated Purpose use “we” much more than “me.” Aaron Hurst,
founder of nonprofit Taproot, advocates thinking of Purpose as a verb: the
organization has to live its Purpose or it will have little impact.
The
impact of trust and purpose
The science relating trust to team
performance is convincing, but how much does trust really improve outcomes in
actual businesses? If it is only a little, then there is not much to get
excited about.
The data I have collected from the
organizations that have asked me to help them reboot their cultures showed that
trust substantially improved multiple outcome measures. But these are a
self-selected set of businesses and nonprofits that already thought culture was
important.
To confirm that these findings apply broadly,
in late 2016 I collected a nationally representative sample of 1,105 working
adults in the U.S. and queried them about their organizations.
·
My team found that those working in companies
in the highest quartile of trust, compared to those in the lowest quartile, had
106 percent more energy at work, were 76 percent more engaged on the job, and
said they were 50 percent more productive.
·
High-trust companies had one-half the
employee turnover of low-trust companies, with employees at these companies
telling us that they were 56 percent more satisfied with their jobs.
·
Trust improved alignment with their
organization’s Purpose by 70 percent and reduced sick days by 13 percent; those
fortunate enough to work in high-trust organizations were 29 percent more
satisfied with their lives outside of work. Trust not only improves work, it
improves life.
Trust matters. A lot. Our analysis of showed
that if a company moved up one quartile in organizational trust, the average
employee would produce an additional $10,185 in revenue. Every year. Many of
the ways to increase trust that I discuss in Trust Factor do
not cost very much, so the return on an investment in trust is often hundreds
of dollars for each dollar spent. Don’t tell economists this, but working at
high-trust companies with Purpose is fun: Colleagues are doing important work
for the world with people who support them.
It all starts by identifying your
organization’s Purpose—how you connect to, and serve, others. Then, empower
colleagues with trust and challenge them to reach audacious goals that improve
the world, one customer at a time.
There are no human resources at work, just
human beings. It’s time to start treating those at work as the fallible,
emotional, surprising, and intrinsically wonderful human beings that they are.
BY PAUL J. ZAK
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_oxytocin_can_make_your_job_more_meaningful?utm_source=Greater+Good+Science+Center&utm_campaign=4143945fb7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_GG_Newsletter_June_6+2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ae73e326e-4143945fb7-51482775
No comments:
Post a Comment