today 2

To Seem More Competent, Be More Confident

/in /by
Summary.   It’s a common feeling: while you are busy doing a good job, others seem to be advancing much faster in their careers. What’s going on? The answer in many cases is your contributions are not being seen and recognized. One important reason this happens is that people are simply not great at assessing competence — a crucial trait for succeeding at work— and perceptions of competence are just as important for success as actual competence. It turns out, results don’t speak for themselves, even when it’s all about numbers. Consider a salesman: his sales may rise, but they could have risen without his effort due to the superior quality of the product or marketing efforts that finally bore fruit. If sales go down, it could have been the result of increasing competition. It’s often difficult to disentangle actual drivers of performance, including how much luck and difficulty level played a role. Because of this, people tend to evaluate competence based on other factors, meaning you have to do more than produce results to convince them of your expertise. One way to do this is by demonstrating confidence in your abilities’.

It’s a common feeling: while you are busy doing a good job, others seem to be advancing much faster in their careers. What’s going on?

The answer in many cases is your contributions are not being seen and recognized. One important reason this happens is that people are simply not great at assessing competence — a crucial trait for succeeding at work — and perceptions of competence are just as important for success as actual competence.

But don’t results mostly speak for themselves? They don’t, even when it’s all about numbers. Consider a salesman: his sales may rise, but they could have risen without his effort due to the superior quality of the product or marketing efforts that finally bore fruit. If sales go down, it could have been the result of increasing competition.

It’s often difficult to disentangle actual drivers of performance, including how much luck and difficulty level played a role. Because of this, people tend to evaluate competence based on other factors, meaning you have to do more than produce results to convince them of your expertise. One way to do this is by demonstrating confidence in your abilities.

A pioneering study from 1982 explored this connection between confidence and perceptions of competence. Psychologists Barry Schlenker and Mark Leary asked 48 subjects to rate the competence (among other characteristics) of 60 imaginary people who were facing a tennis tournament or a class final examination. Subjects received two crucial pieces of information: they learned what the imaginary people predicted their performance to be — from very poor to very good; then they learned the people’s “actual” performance. After that, they had to rate each imaginary person’s competence.

Lo and behold, the person’s prediction had a strong influence on how subjects perceived their competence: Observers evaluated those who made optimistic predictions as much more competent than their modest contemporaries — no matter how accurate those predictions were and how well they actually performed. Even with an optimistic forecast and a horrible result, they were still rated as almost twice as competent as those who accurately forecasted their poor performance. This seems to suggest that if someone asks how you expect to perform, you should give a positive, confident response. A negative forecast may lead you to be perceived as distinctly less competent — no matter how well you actually perform.

Over the last few decades, researchers have scrutinized the effects of projecting confidence versus modesty, gathering rather contradictory conclusions. But a recent replication of Schlenker & Leary’s 1982 study supported those original findings. This found that projecting confidence does lead to positive effects, but only when it is non-comparative. In other words: praising your competence seems to be fine as long as you do not claim that others are incompetent.

But why do people view confident others as more competent, even when their performance suggests otherwise? One explanation is that we have a tendency to believe what we are told, and to confirm our beliefs by selecting information that supports them. The term for this is confirmation bias. So if you project confidence, others tend to believe you know what you’re talking about, and they will then filter ambiguous information (like how much luck may have helped or hurt you) to fit their initial impression.

While it’s unwise to project fake confidence when you know you won’t perform well, being too modest likely won’t serve you well either. As we saw in Schlenker & Leary’s study, people tend to penalize humble actors by deciding against them and choosing the confident ones. Modesty is regarded as hedging against possible failure, an attempt to take the wind out of critics’ sails. If the expert doesn’t trust in his or her abilities, how could anyone else?

In order to convince others of your abilities, you should make it a habit to communicate that you are good at what you do — without any self-deprecation regarding your core competencies.

This doesn’t always come easy. To feel more authentic demonstrating confidence, you may first have to convince yourself. Ask yourself: What am I good at? What was my greatest success so far? Why should others be led by me? What do I know that they don’t? If you have a hard time answering these questions, you have a problem — how should you convince others of your expertise if you aren’t convinced yourself?

“Praise yourself daringly,” the philosopher Francis Bacon said, because, as he continued, “something always sticks.” If you want to ensure that your achievements are recognized, think about how your manager and colleagues see you and your abilities. Do you think they have a good sense of your competence and expertise? If not, could you be demonstrating more confidence in your tasks? This doesn’t necessarily mean praising yourself at every opportunity; rather it means projecting an optimistic attitude. By displaying more confidence in your abilities, you set yourself up to be recognized for your competence and your contributions.

Jack Nasher is a professor at Munich Business School and on the faculty of Stanford University, an international negotiation advisor, and the widest read business psychologist in continental Europe. His work has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Forbes. A member of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and a principal practitioner with the Association of Business Psychologists, he has spoken at TEDx and he also performs as a mentalist at the world-renowned Magic Castle in Hollywood.

today

Don’t Let Platforms Commoditize Your Business

/in /by

Summary

Large digital multisided platforms (MSPs) such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Apple’s App Store have made it much easier for sellers to reach new customers, but as thousands of companies large and small have discovered, conducting business on them carries significant risks and costs. MSPs sometimes exploit sellers’ dependency on them in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways. They raise fees. They change their recommendation algorithms to put more emphasis on price. They require sellers to advertise to maintain visibility in search results. They compete against sellers by imitating their products. They impose restrictions on the prices sellers can set outside of the MSP. And they change their rules and design in ways that weaken sellers’ relationships with their customers.

But all is not lost, say the authors. Sellers can employ four strategies to build viable businesses on platforms. They can develop and invest in direct channels, use platforms mainly as showrooms, go deep with highly specialized offerings or go broad with many different offerings, and wage public relations and lobbying campaigns to curb platforms’ power.

Large digital multisided platforms (MSPs) such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Apple’s App Store have made it much easier for sellers to reach new customers, but as thousands of companies large and small have discovered, conducting business on them carries significant risks and costs. Sellers are drawn into increasingly intense price competition as MSPs attract more and more of them. The platforms sometimes exploit sellers’ dependency in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. They raise fees. They change their recommendation algorithms to put more emphasis on price. They require sellers to advertise if they want to maintain visibility in search results. They compete with sellers by imitating their products. They restrict the prices sellers can set elsewhere. And they change their rules and designs in ways that weaken sellers’ relationships with customers.

A broad spectrum of enterprises are grappling with these problems, including sellers on Alibaba and Amazon; app developers on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android; restaurants on DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats; hotels on Expedia and Booking.com; small businesses on Tencent’s WeChat; and media outlets on Facebook, Google, and Twitter. And antitrust authorities and regulators around the world are investigating some of the largest MSP operators, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, for possible abuses of their market power.

But all is not lost. Sellers can employ a number of strategies and tactics to avoid being exploited and commoditized. We have grouped those measures into four categories.

Develop and Invest in Your Direct Channel

Even if it is impossible to avoid operating on key MSPs, sellers should limit their dependence by investing in their own channels, such as branded websites and apps, to reach and serve customers directly. Given the widespread availability of business-in-a-box solutions such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Mailchimp, Square, Appy Pie, and Wix, creating a fully functional online storefront is increasingly easy and affordable. The key difference between relying on those providers of software tools and relying on an MSP is that the former exert no control over brands’ relationships with their customers. For example, Shopify provides all the digital tools and infrastructure a brand needs to sell online, typically without consumers’ realizing that the brand’s store is powered by it. Part of the reason Shopify is so appealing to online merchants (it has more than one million of them as customers) is that unlike Amazon, Shopify is not a marketplace connecting them with consumers and therefore does not commoditize them. As Shopify’s founder and CEO, Tobias Lütke, has said, “Amazon is trying to build an empire. Shopify is trying to arm the rebels.”

Similar business-in-a-box solutions are popping up in other market segments where MSPs are trying to build empires. Consider restaurants. DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats enable consumers to place takeout orders and arrange for delivery. Because restaurants have become increasingly reliant on them in the past five years, they now charge a 20% to 35% commission. According to some reports, they also engage in questionable practices (for example, Grubhub has allegedly created shadow websites that lead consumers to believe they are ordering from restaurants directly). They stand in contrast to ChowNow and Olo, two fast-growing start-ups providing back-end technology that lets restaurants sell directly online. Restaurants pay those companies subscription fees to power their websites and mobile apps and to provide other services associated with orders, payment, restaurant-specific loyalty programs, and marketing. But each restaurant keeps full control of its customer relationships and its chosen delivery and sales channels.

Even if it is impossible to avoid operating on key platforms, sellers should limit their dependence by investing in their own channels to reach and serve customers directly.

The downside to business-in-a-box solutions, of course, is that sellers must figure out how to get customers to their sites. The solutions providers can help to some extent through partnerships. For instance, Shopify partnered with Facebook in May 2020 to allow its merchants to create storefronts on Facebook and Instagram. It partnered with Walmart that June to allow its merchants to easily become third-party sellers on Walmart’s e-commerce marketplace. By “multihoming,” or listing on multiple MSPs, sellers become less reliant on any one platform. That means they can more easily delist from a platform that pushes unfavorable terms. And the threat to jump ship sometimes keeps an MSP in check, especially if it comes from a strategically important seller. (Disclosures: One of us, Julian, has consulted for Facebook, and HBR publishes content there.)

In recent years the “Shopify for X” approach has been applied in more and more sectors, and a variety of firms now help arm the rebels. Dumpling lets people start their own personal-shopping businesses so that they can reduce or eliminate their dependence on MSPs such as Instacart. Lyte provides the technology and tools for venues and event owners to control their ticketing, allowing them to bypass StubHub and Ticketmaster. NearSt lets brick-and-mortar retailers in the United Kingdom make their inventories searchable on Google without listing them on Amazon. (Disclosure: Both of us are investors in NearSt.)

Use MSPs as Showrooms

Few sellers can become completely independent of MSPs, given the huge numbers of buyers the platforms attract. But by taking advantage of business-in-a-box solutions, sellers can use MSPs mainly as funnels for obtaining new customers. This approach gives them more control over their customer relationships, including customer data, enabling them to better tailor their offerings and differentiate themselves. Essentially, it lets them use MSPs as showrooms.

One tactic for doing so is to offer deals and directions to the seller’s own channel when filling orders through an MSP. For example, restaurants can drop coupons into the bags picked up by food-delivery platforms, steering customers to their websites and offering discounts on the next direct order.

Sellers should also consider limiting their offerings on MSPs by presenting a broader variety of products, services, and loyalty rewards in their direct channels. Some do so with Amazon: They use the platform to obtain a first order (possibly for a loss-leader product), and when filling it they include a coupon aimed at attracting the consumer to their own channel for repeat orders, sales of other products, and subscriptions.

Of course, a powerful way to induce consumers to switch to a direct channel is to charge lower prices there. Some MSP contracts forbid that. For example, Booking.com and Expedia prohibit hotel websites from posting room rates that are lower than the ones they offer. Many hotel chains have responded by giving customers loyalty rewards and additional perks, such as the ability to choose specific rooms and to access upgrades, when they book through the hotel’s own channel.

Go Deep or Go Broad

Doing business on MSPs forces sellers to choose one of two means of building competitive advantage and withstanding the threat of commoditization: They can go deep, by offering a highly specific product or service and leveraging MSPs’ economies of scale, or they can go broad, by offering many different products or services and leveraging economies of scope.

Going deep.

Specializing in a product or service is generally a good strategy for achieving competitive advantage—and it’s even more important for sellers operating on MSPs. Digital platforms usually make it easy for consumers to compare many offerings and find their ideal product. And by breaking down geographic barriers and accumulating very large user bases, they greatly increase a seller’s reach. Taken together, those qualities mean that becoming the highest-quality or lowest-cost provider in a narrowly defined product or service category is significantly more valuable for sellers who conduct business on MSPs.

Deep specialization on an MSP can create a self-reinforcing cycle. The more a product aligns with what consumers are searching for, the higher its ratings will be, increasing the chances that the platform’s algorithms will drive target customers to it. That means more people will buy and rate the product, further heightening its advantage. Thus, highly specialized sellers can build a sustainable competitive advantage over time.

Take Anker, a Chinese company specializing in computer and mobile-phone peripherals such as chargers and power banks. With a market value of nearly $73 billion, it is one of the most successful third-party sellers on Amazon.com. “Amazon reviews are the single most important input to our new-product development process,” founder Steven Yang has said. Initially only on Amazon, Anker now sells through many channels, including offline ones such as Best Buy, Target, and Walmart.

Examples in other contexts include unique and hyperspecialized content providers on YouTube (such as 5-Minute Crafts, Dude Perfect, and MrBeast), Facebook (Bored Panda), and Instagram (9GAG). The more views and likes they obtain, the higher their revenues, which they can invest in producing more and better content, leading to ever-larger audiences.

Going broad.

 

Alternatively, sellers can build expertise around specific MSP features, which they can then leverage across multiple products and services to take advantage of economies of scope. Some third-party sellers on Amazon’s marketplace have developed highly efficient processes for listing, marketing, and selling products, allowing them to resell products from smaller merchants who lack comparable expertise.

One of the most successful adopters of this strategy is Thrasio, a third-party seller on Amazon. Founded in July 2018, it achieved unicorn status (a market value of more than $1 billion) in just two years—a record. It did so by aggressively acquiring other Amazon third-party sellers (more than 40 in that time, and another 50 by the end 0f 2020) and leveraging its operations, marketing, and search expertise to grow their sales. The economies of scope it exploits come from sharing best practices about how and what to sell in terms of pricing, advertising, product, and listing design across the more than 10,000 products it offers (from pet-odor eliminators to socks and kitchenware) and from cross-selling those products. It also benefits from economies of scale in shipping and ad spending for placement on Amazon. Other firms adopting a so-called rollup strategy on Amazon include Boosted Commerce, Heyday, and Perch, all of which have raised significant venture funding.

A version of this strategy is employed by Wave.tv, a rapidly growing start-up that publishes offbeat sports content on social media MSPs, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Wave.tv acquires or licenses content from many sources and leverages its technology and data analytics to repackage it under more than 15 brands, including BenchMob, Haymakers, and Buckets, increasing the content’s reach on the many MSPs on which it operates.

Although the go-broad strategy ideally involves aggregating a large number of products or services, even small to medium-size sellers can consider it. For them, the idea is to develop processes that take advantage of certain MSP features to create economies of scope across just a handful of products. That’s an especially good option if the current sellers of those products are underperforming.

Choosing the optimal strategy.

 

Deep specialization is the best strategy for small “native” sellers—ones that started out on an MSP. In fact, one of the most important ways in which the platforms create value is by generating unprecedented opportunities for niche products or services to succeed.

Going deep is also likely to be the best option for sellers (small or large) with established businesses outside the MSP in question. Because they already have a successful offering, they can more easily adapt it to the MSP than build expertise around specific MSP features that they could leverage horizontally—an area where “non-native” sellers have no comparative advantage. Still, they should recognize that succeeding on an MSP may require much more specialization than they needed on their own.

 

Going broad is a natural move for native MSP players that have succeeded with a specialized offering but run out of room to grow in that niche. They can leverage the deep expertise acquired while selling that offering through an MSP to expand horizontally to other products or services. Going broad is also increasingly the preferred approach for sellers, such as Thrasio, that were created and capitalized specifically to take advantage of the economies of scope available on large MSPs.

Sometimes exogenous capacity constraints limit what can be achieved by going deep. This is true of hosts on Airbnb (who face physical occupancy constraints) and restaurants on DoorDash and Grubhub (who have staffing and time constraints). That’s not to say that all Airbnb hosts should rush to acquire more apartments or that all restaurants should start operating so-called cloud kitchens (shared facilities optimized for food delivery). Given that they have limited resources and have already carved out a niche, many will be better off doubling down on what makes them unique.

Wage Public Relations and Lobbying Campaigns

The intense scrutiny and criticism of large MSPs by regulators, researchers, and the media creates opportunities for sellers large and small to drum up public support for their causes and to push back against practices that commoditize their businesses.

Sellers can employ numerous tactics to that end, including negotiating more aggressively, taking to social media, bringing complaints to antitrust authorities or the courts, and joining with other participants to fight specific MSP practices. Epic Games—publisher of the wildly popular Fortnite—has made good use of all those tactics in its ongoing dispute with Apple. The disagreement is mainly over Apple’s requirement that payments for purchases of digital items within iOS games go through its App Store so that it can collect a 30% commission. In addition to demanding lower fees, Epic released a parody of Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial, which riffed on George Orwell’s dystopian novel as it introduced the Macintosh personal computer, to enlist support for its cause. It also filed an antitrust suit and, with Spotify, Match Group, and other Android and iOS developers, created the Coalition for App Fairness to lobby regulators. Those efforts caused Apple to relent on some policies—for example, by streamlining the process for approving app updates. In November 2020 it also announced that it would halve its commission for app developers with annual revenues below $1 million.

The intriguing possibility exists that some sellers could turn the tables on their platforms and at least partly commoditize them.

And consider restaurants in New Delhi, which in August 2019 mounted a coordinated public campaign against the large food-delivery MSPs they depend on: Zomato, Swiggy, and Uber Eats. The protest, headlined on Twitter with the hashtag #Logout, was aimed at forcing the platforms to reduce the deep discounts offered to consumers, the cost of which was borne by restaurants. The pressure forced Zomato’s CEO to publicly apologize and to accede to some of the demands.

Going forward, it may be useful for sellers to know which MSP practices are likely to raise regulatory and antitrust concerns; that knowledge can point them toward the types of complaints that are most likely to succeed. Today, the easiest targets are restrictions on what sellers can do outside the MSPs they’re on. Those include requirements we mentioned earlier, such as the ones Apple has used to prevent developers from bypassing its App Store, along with exclusivity clauses that prohibit sellers from operating on other platforms. Alibaba is under investigation in China for its exclusivity clauses, and Grab has been banned from imposing them on drivers in Singapore. Other promising targets include the contract restrictions we’ve described—so-called price-parity and most-favored-nation clauses—that are widely used by hotel-booking and other price-comparison MSPs to prevent sellers from setting lower prices in competing channels. Some of those restrictions have been lifted in Europe in response to regulatory pressure, and Amazon quietly removed its most-favored-nation clause from contracts with third-party sellers in the United States in 2019 (as it had done in Europe six years earlier).

Sellers can also push back against unfair competition from MSPs. Some platforms have used proprietary data generated by third-party sellers to launch competing products (both Amazon and Apple have been accused of doing so), and some engage in “self-preferencing,” treating their own offerings more favorably in search and ranking algorithms than those of third-party sellers (as Amazon and Google have been accused of).

The recent Digital Markets Act in Europe provides further guidance on which MSP practices are likely to raise regulatory concerns. Most relevant to sellers, in addition to the practices just described, are attempts to prevent them from promoting their offerings directly to users obtained through the MSP, attempts to make them purchase services linked to the MSP’s core offering, and restrictions on their ability to access and port the data they generate through the MSP.

As new tools and technologies enable sellers of all sizes to take more control of their destinies, and as new regulations reduce the risk of being held up by large MSPs, sellers can build powerful businesses on top of those platforms with greater confidence. We will see more of them leverage MSPs to reach large scale and financial success, as Anker and Thrasio did with Amazon. And the intriguing possibility exists that some sellers could turn the tables on their MSPs and at least partly commoditize them. For instance, the legal battle between Epic and Apple might well result in Apple’s losing its ability to exclude rival app stores and payment systems from the iPhone. If that happens, some developers will almost certainly offer their own specialized app stores; it’s not hard to imagine an Epic store for games or a Spotify store for music. More generally, we expect the emergence of new sellers that will create new types of platforms on top of iOS and Android platforms. The large MSPs of tomorrow could well be built by the MSP sellers of today.

A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Andrei Hagiu is an associate professor of information systems at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

Julian Wright is a professor of economics at National University of Singapore.
today

Quote Of The Day!

/in /by
today 3

Why We Procrastinate When We Have Long Deadlines

/in /by

Summary  

When people are faced with a deadline far in the future, they are more likely to think the assignment is difficult. This leads them to procrastinate, spend more money on completing the assignment, and even risk abandoning it completely. These patterns are important for managers and others setting deadlines to recognize, in large part because the author’s research reveals that people’s tendency to procrastinate on long-term assignments and finish less-important but urgent assignments reflects a basic psychological preference. We behave as if pursuing urgent tasks has its own appeal, independent of objective consequences.

 

“Can you get that to me by the end of the day?” isn’t a request many employees like to hear. But for many people, having shorter deadlines instead of longer ones — “Do you think you can do that by the end of the week?” — might actually help them complete a task and see their work as being less difficult.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, my colleagues Rajesh Bagchi and Stefan Hock and I demonstrate that longer deadlines can lead workers to think an assignment is harder than it actually is, which causes them to commit more resources to the work. This, in turn, increases how much they procrastinate and their likelihood of quitting. This is true even when the deadline length is incidental, such as when a venue or guest isn’t available for an extended period of time.

In our research we asked volunteers at a local community center to answer a short survey about retirement planning. We set two incidental deadlines. In one group, the online survey could be accessed throughout the next seven days, but the other group had 14 days. Results showed that participants who faced the longer deadline wrote longer responses to the survey and spent more time on it. But there was a catch: Those same participants were more likely to procrastinate and were less likely to complete the assignment than their time-constrained counterparts.

In another study, a longer deadline led respondents to commit more money to filing their tax returns, even though the length of the deadline arose from an incidental factor — the arrival of a lost W-2 tax form. In this study, those whose tax form arrived later, and thus had less time to complete their taxes, committed to spending less money than their peers to get the same job done, hiring tax professionals or buying tax preparation software.

These two studies offer lessons for managers and employees who set deadlines, whether for themselves or for others. They also build on our understanding of Parkinson’s law, which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Our findings though suggest that managers need to view deadlines more comprehensively. First, whereas Parkinson’s law suggests that longer deadlines lead people to set easier goals and therefore decrease effort, we found that longer deadlines increase an assignment’s perceived difficulty. Second, while Parkinson’s law makes a prediction only about time commitment, we found that longer incidental deadlines increase monetary commitment. As a result, when an assignment includes a budget, it might be better to set a shorter deadline than a longer one.

These findings related to only single deadlines, and many of us balance multiple deadlines of varying lengths at a time. And so my colleagues Yang Yang and Chris Hsee and I designed a separate study to consider how individuals respond to a group of deadlines. We concluded that when faced with multiple deadlines for tasks that vary in importance, people regularly pursue less-important assignments with shorter deadlines than more-important assignments with longer deadlines. In our article in the Journal of Consumer Research, we called this the mere urgency effect to reflect how limited time windows affect how individuals select what tasks to complete.

We studied this by offering college students three Hershey’s Kisses to complete an assignment with a quick deadline, or five Hershey’s Kisses to complete a similar assignment with a longer deadline. Importantly, the low-payoff option was linked to spurious urgency, because students could always finish the assignments (which automatically ended in exactly five minutes) within the deadline provided. More students were willing to give up a high-value prize merely when the low-payoff assignment was characterized by this illusion of expiration. In another of our studies, professional contractual workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, whose daily job involves signing up to work on different human intelligent tasks in order to make money, were willing to give up an amount equivalent to 8% of their full wage specified in their contract merely because the low-payoff assignment was characterized by an illusion of urgency.

These studies showed us that people’s tendency to procrastinate on what is important to finish less-important urgent assignments reflects a basic psychological preference. Many of us know this intuitively; we constantly check and respond to emails rather than work on the revenue report or our team project. We choose to postpone a routine medical check-up that could be life-saving — say, by diagnosing a cancer at an early, curable stage — in order to visit a store for its soon-to-end sale. This may happen because important tasks are more difficult and further away from goal completion, urgent tasks involve more-immediate and certain payoffs, or people want to finish the urgent tasks first and then work on important tasks later. However, our studies go one step further by showing that we may prioritize urgent yet trivial tasks even when these reasons are controlled for and when we would end up being worse off financially. We behave as if pursuing urgent tasks has its own appeal, independent of objective consequences.

These patterns are important for managers and others setting deadlines to recognize, in large part because our findings reveal ways to game the system: Short deadlines on urgent tasks elicit attention. Those tasked with the assignment are more likely to complete it, less likely to procrastinate on it, and less likely to spend superfluous money on it than if they were given the same task with a less-urgent deadline.

But sometimes a longer deadline is necessary if a task is inherently more complex or there are outside factors that are going to add time to the schedule. Can productivity still be wrangled? Our results suggest yes.

When deadlines are distant, managers can shift people’s attention away from the deadline and toward the final outcomes of everyday tasks. Reminding employees of the final payoffs of different tasks is an effective way to do this. And there are times when longer deadlines are more effective than short deadlines, such as when individuals have a natural tendency to under-plan, in saving for college or planning for retirement, for example. Though some people will procrastinate or abandon the task, those that do take it on will achieve the goals because they assume that they need to put more effort into the task than what is typically required. In this case, the deadline pressure serves to balance against under-planning.

Editor’s note: We clarified the findings related to the W-2 study to reflect how people spent money when on deadlines.

 

Written by – Meng Zhu is an Associate Professor of marketing at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

Mar21_25_remoteworkers

Remote Workers Need Small Talk, Too

/in /by

Summary.   

Small talk is something many of us miss about going into the office, and for good reason: It helps people feel emotionally connected and boosts collaboration and creativity. Yet not everyone is a fan; some think small talk is inauthentic and a waste of time. To resolve these views, the authors did a 15-day study of the impact that small talk had on 151 workers. They found that though small talk was both uplifting and distracting to employees, the positives outweighed the negatives, and the negatives could be managed. The issue today is that the move to remote work environment is cutting many people off from workplace small talk. However, managers can find ways to integrate it into virtual settings and use new tools to make it more inclusive and productive.

 

Before Covid-19 and social distancing, small talk was a daily workplace ritual for most of us. We exchanged hellos with colleagues on our way in from the parking lot, chatted about our weekends while waiting for meetings to begin, and swapped stories about our families with our cube mates. Though these encounters probably lasted only minutes, they played a crucial role in making us feel emotionally connected at work.

Small talk is important to us in other ways, putting us at ease and helping us transition to more serious topics like negotiations, job interviews, sales pitches, and performance evaluations. The tidbits we learn about our colleagues — for instance, that they play guitar or love dogs — build rapport and deepen trust. Research even suggests that chance encounters and spontaneous conversations with our coworkers can spark collaboration, improving our creativity, innovation, and performance. Many people say that small talk energizes them and makes them feel “seen.” As one employee of a midsize accounting firm told us, “Your coworkers don’t necessarily need to know every detail of your life, but it certainly helps everyone feel like a real person.” No wonder so many of us are mourning the loss of small talk during the pandemic-driven work-from-home boom.

Yet others are deeply skeptical of small talk. They say it makes them anxious, spreads gossip, wastes time, and is inauthentic and awkward. Some even arrive at meetings exactly at the start time to avoid having to chitchat. This makes small talk a bit of a social paradox and raises the question: Is it ultimately more helpful or more hurtful to employees’ daily lives?

To resolve these views, we surveyed 151 full-time working adults three times a day for 15 consecutive workdays before the pandemic. We asked how much small talk they made at work each day and about their positive emotions (friendliness, pride, and gratitude) and ability to focus. And each night they reported their levels of well-being and prosocial behaviors.

The results revealed that small talk was both uplifting and distracting. On days workers made more small talk than usual, they experienced more positive emotions and were less burned out. They were also more willing to go out of their way to help their colleagues. At the same time, they felt less focused on and less engaged in their work tasks, which limited their ability to assist others. However, we found that one group — people who were adept at reading others and adjusting their conversations in response — were less likely to report feeling disrupted by small talk. We also saw that conversations didn’t have to be intimate or lengthy to deliver benefits. On the whole, it was clear to us that the positives of small talk outweighed the negatives and that those negatives could be managed.

As organizations consider their optimal post-pandemic remote-work strategy, they’ll need practices to integrate small talk into their work ecosystems. The good news is that the virtual landscape presents a surprising opportunity to enhance the value of small talk. Drawing on our research, we offer managers and employees the following advice:

Encourage new social rituals. Working from home has blurred the lines between people’s jobs and their personal lives, and without routines like daily commutes to divide them, many employees are struggling to shift gears between the two. Small talk can help people disengage from the “home” role and ease into a business mindset. That’s why it’s a good idea to build in time at the start of every meeting for members to greet one another, exchange pleasantries, and ask playful questions. This can also set a positive tone for a meeting.

Other tactics include creating “virtual lounges” in Slack or Teamwork where teams can socialize and holding regular virtual coffees, trivia nights, and happy hours. A recent INSEAD study of more than 500 professionals working remotely across the world showed that the teams that were thriving in the new virtual environment were formally scheduling social gatherings involving quizzes, shared playlists, book recommendations, and movie clubs. Although this mandatory “fun” might have felt a little awkward at first, the teams that didn’t engage in such rituals struggled to adapt to the new normal and reported feeling less connected.

Re-create “casual collisions.” Some organizations have found creative ways to orchestrate informal virtual interactions among employees. There are companies like Spark Collaboration that help employers organize “office video-chat roulettes” that pair up employees who don’t already know one another for real-time social interactions. One Spark client at a global law firm explained, “During the pandemic it was important to us to make sure employees were still making the random connections you might find in a shared office space to help with innovation, building networks, and collaboration. It has been invaluable for relationship building.” Platforms like Airmeet set up virtual speed networking for employees. One probable upside is that these exchanges, though less spontaneous, are more inclusive — giving everyone the opportunity to connect rather than leaving it to chance.

Stick to the script. Managers and employees alike should be careful not to let social conversations take a negative turn. Small talk should be polite, surface level, and focused on neutral topics, like the weather, sports, and TV shows. It should never devolve into gossip — especially about the company or other employees — which breeds incivility, cynicism, and distrust. Managers should also steer teams away from potentially controversial topics like religion, politics, and romantic relationships. Another thing to avoid is excessive self-disclosure: Sharing your deepest anxieties may be okay when you’re meeting a friend for coffee, but it’s not when you’re greeting an acquaintance. If someone asks, “How are you?” it’s ill-mannered to rant about your bad day. Nevertheless, the pandemic has made it commonplace to say things like “Hope you and your family are safe and well” and to acknowledge our feelings of worry and concern.

Emphasize the upside. Highlighting the ways small talk can boost employee happiness as well as the company’s bottom line can win over people who tend to self-isolate. Encourage employees to take charge of their own social health by building in daily social breaks. Although these might seem counterintuitive when you’re under deadline pressure, our research suggests that they are restorative and reduce burnout. New online apps, such as Water Cooler, allow employees to pick a time to chat with coworkers about shared interests, hobbies, or fitness goals. Because the program sets a fixed window for conversations, it can prevent productive work time from being eaten up — something that’s more difficult to manage in face-to-face settings.

Employees can also ask themselves, “Have I been feeling more or less connected today?” “Whom can I reach out to if I need support?” and “What relationships are the most important to me?” Meanwhile, simple strategies like regular brief check-ins can do a lot to alleviate employees’ feelings of loneliness. Though easy, this approach is extremely effective: Research shows that employees feel the greatest sense of belonging at work when their coworkers simply text or email to ask how they’re doing.

As we navigate endless Zoom meetings and new work/life challenges, let’s not underestimate the value of small talk. Just because we might be working remotely doesn’t mean that casual conversations are no longer important. In fact, they may be more important than ever to help us seize daily opportunities to connect across the virtual divide.

Written By;

Jessica R. Methot is an associate professor of human resource management in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, and a distinguished research professor of management at the University of Exeter Business School. Her research expertise centers on organizational social networks and employee communication.

Allison S. Gabriel is an associate professor and a Robbins Fellow in the department of management and organizations at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. Her research focuses on emotions at work, employee recovery, interpersonal work stressors, relationships at work, motivation, and employee well-being.
Patrick Downes is an assistant professor of management and leadership at the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University. His research interests include employee social contexts, motivation, and analytics.
Emily Rosado-Solomon is an assistant professor in the department of management/HRM at California State University, Long Beach. Her research explores the effects of interpersonal relationships on work and the experiences of employees with mental illness.
Dec18_4_85202162

To Retain Employees, Focus on Inclusion — Not Just Diversity

/in /by

Summary   

Employees who differ from most of their colleagues in religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic background, and generation often hide important parts of themselves at work for fear of negative consequences. This makes it difficult to know how these employees feel and what they want, which makes them vulnerable to leaving their organizations. The key to inclusion is understanding who your employees really are. Many organizations conduct employee engagement surveys, but most neglect to segment the data they collect by criteria such as gender, ethnicity, generation, geography, tenure, and role in the organization, missing opportunities to identify issues among smaller groups. Focus groups are another way to gain deeper insight into what employees care about. They are best facilitated by a third party with no vested interest in the outcome so that employees can speak freely. A one-on-one discussion with a manager can be the most powerful tool for finding out what an employee cares about. But for these conversations to be effective, the manager needs to have an open-door policy and exude a “tell me anything” persona.

To retain talent, most organizations offer the typical things: free coffee and tea in the break room, competitive benefits, generous raises and bonuses, and employee recognition programs. But none of that works for an employee who doesn’t feel comfortable in his or her work environment. Picture, for example, a Muslim who prays in his car because he doesn’t want to advertise his religion, a mother who doesn’t put up pictures of her children so that coworkers won’t question her commitment to the job, or a gay executive who is unsure whether he can bring his partner to company functions.

Employees who differ from most of their colleagues in religion, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic background, and generation often hide important parts of themselves at work for fear of negative consequences. We in the diversity and inclusion community call this “identity cover,” and it makes it difficult to know how they feel and what they want, which makes them vulnerable to leaving their organizations.

Most business leaders understand the diversity part of diversity and inclusion. They get that having a diverse workforce is important to customers and critical to succeeding in a global market. It’s the inclusion part that eludes them — creating an environment where people can be who they are, that values their unique talents and perspectives, and makes them want to stay.

The key to inclusion is understanding who your employees really are. Three of the most effective ways to find out are survey assessments, focus groups, and one-on-one conversations. To be effective, however, they must be approached in a way that accounts for the fact that people — particularly those in underrepresented groups — can be more difficult to get to know than we think. Here are some best practices for getting to the heart of who your employees really are:

Segment employee engagement survey results by minority groups.

Many organizations conduct employee engagement surveys, but most neglect to segment the data they collect by criteria such as gender, ethnicity, generation, geography, tenure, and role in the organization. By only looking at the total numbers, employers miss out on opportunities to identify issues among smaller groups that could be leading to attrition, as the views of the majority overpower those of minorities.

In 2015, for example, women constituted 52% of the new associate class at global law firm Baker McKenzie, but only 23% of the firm’s 1,510 partners. To find out what was keeping women from advancing to senior roles, I asked our researchers to segment the results of a firm-wide engagement survey to examine responses from women lawyers. Based on that data, we learned that many of the firm’s women associates didn’t want to be partner nearly as much as their male counterparts.

That prompted us to launch a follow-up survey to find out why, which revealed four things that would make partnership more attractive to women: more flexibility about face time and working hours, better access to high-profile engagements, greater commitment to the firm’s diversity targets, and more women role models. Those four things became the basis for an action plan that included, for example, a firm-wide flexible work program that promoted remote working. By 2018, the percentage of women promoted to partner had risen to 40%, up from 26% in 2015.

Use independent facilitators to conduct focus groups.

Focus groups are another way to gain deeper insight into what employees care about and the issues that may be causing frustration and burnout.

One company-wide employee engagement survey conducted by a $15 billion food company showed that the employees in the Canada office had much lower work-life integration satisfaction scores than those in other countries. After conducting a series of focus groups to find out why, we discovered that many employees were receiving emails from their managers on weekends and feeling obligated to respond even when their managers told them not to until Monday.

We also learned that the leaders in that office were often tied up in meetings all week and used the weekends to catch up on email. When we asked the employees for solutions, they suggested banning emails on weekends and not having any meetings on Fridays so that managers could use that time to catch up on correspondence. After the office implemented these new policies, employees reported being happier and less stressed when they survey was conducted a year later.

These groups are best facilitated by an outside company or trusted diversity and inclusion professionals who don’t have a vested interest in the outcome so that employees can speak freely.

Get personal in one-on-one discussions.

A one-on-one discussion with a manager can be the most powerful tool for finding out what an employee cares about. But for these conversations to be effective, the manager needs to have an open-door policy and exude a “tell me anything” persona. One way for managers to prove they are trustworthy is by sharing their own thoughts and feelings when they are tired, sad, or struggling with an issue. It helps show they’re human.

Michael Santa Maria, who chairs Baker & McKenzie’s North America International Commercial and Trade Practice, tells his employees repeatedly that he wants them to succeed both at home and at work, and he takes an active interest in their families. His philosophy is that it’s hard to succeed at work when things at home are failing, and he openly talks about his family to his staff and even clients. The fact that he is open about his personal life makes his staff more comfortable sharing their own personal details — even those that may differ from the majority of their colleagues.

The road to retention

In an ideal world, all leaders would be adept at understanding their employees and making sure they didn’t lose any through neglect or ignorance. In the real world, however, most aren’t tuned into the factors that can get in the way of knowing what’s important to employees both individually and collectively. Tools such as segmented engagement surveys, focus groups, and personal conversations can guide management in taking the actions that will help keep their talent engaged and committed to the organization. The first step in retaining more employees is to use these tools.

 

Author – Karen Brown is the founder and managing partner of Bridge Arrow, a diversity and inclusion management consulting firm. She was previously the Global Director of Diversity & Inclusion at Baker McKenzie, Baxter, Rockwell Collins, and Sodexo.

Today 3

How to Identify and Tell Your Most Powerful Stories

/in /by
Summary.   Leaders often shy away from sharing personal stories in their talks and presentations. Why? Because they’re afraid of exposing their flaws or struggles. But this is such a missed opportunity to connect with your audience. Instead of keeping your most impactful stories hidden, dig them up and use them. Start by thinking through the nouns that are important to you — the people, places, and things that have shaped your life. Chances are that you’ll find a number of stories buried in those memories. Then write one-line summaries of the stories and catalog them; you could sort them by situation, theme, mood, or moral. When you’re looking through your bank of stories to find one that is right for your next talk, consider who’s in your audience and what they care about. Carefully consider their values, goals, and interests, and then decide which of your stories fits them best.

When I ask executives what their favorite speech is, Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement address is always at the top of the list. Many think of Jobs’s talk as their favorite because it is incredibly moving — thanks to the stories it contains.

Execs love to hear talks like this, but few are comfortable delivering them. Why? Because great stories expose our flaws and our struggles. This is what makes them inspiring, and not sharing them is such a missed opportunity to connect with your audience.

When my firm helps executives craft talks that will persuade and forge bonds with listeners, we often have to help them recall or dig up latent stories that come from a deep place of personal conviction. Over the years, we’ve used effective techniques for unearthing these personal stories — which can then be cataloged, added into communications, and effectively delivered. Here are some of the techniques we rely on again and again:

Trigger Stories Through Memory Recall

Most people try to recall memories chronologically when they’re developing a story for a talk, but there’s another way to conjure up deeper, dormant stories.

Sit down with a notepad and think through the nouns that are important to you — the people, places, and things that have shaped your life. (Yes, I really mean sit down with a notepad and paper — studies show that you’re more likely to be creative when you’re writing than when you’re typing.)

  • People. Write your name in the center of the paper, and start drawing out types of relationships: family, friends, coworkers, and so on. Each time you draw a connective line between you and someone else, think through the relational dynamics and emotions. There’s a story in there!
  • Places. Get as specific as you can in recalling places that matter to you: the middle school hallways, the cabin at camp, the soccer field, that mountain, the ophthalmologist’s office, the red hatchback — whatever. Use spatial recollection to move through each location, neighborhood, and room. Retracing your movements will trigger scenes, sounds, and scents. It will dislodge memories that will reveal to you long forgotten events and interactions.
  • Things. Take note of objects or items that have symbolic meaning in your life: gifts, awards, books — any items you’ve loved. Sketch pictures of these symbols and recall what makes them emotionally charged. These items don’t hold meaning for others, but they do for you. Why?

When you’re done with the above exercises, look at the story kernels you’ve come up with and write one-line summaries of them. Some of the tales you’ve accessed may be too personal to share, but you may uncover some anecdotes that will become the basis of an important story you can return to again and again.

Create a Story Catalog

Once you’ve curated a host of stories that you can use in various types of situations, take your list and create a personal story catalog that you can turn to.

Create and manage this list in the way you work. It could be a journal or a spreadsheet with summaries. You can use categories to sort by situation, theme, mood, or moral. Use whatever categorization makes the most sense for you.

Many people pull from the most poignant part of their story catalog when they’re staring down mortality (like Jobs was). Instead of waiting until your hand is forced, take stock of the important stories in your life right now, and catalog them. Having these stories easily accessible to you without an accompanying crisis can help you to live life more fully and have a greater impact on others.

Choose Stories with Your Audience in Mind

To choose a story for your talk, remember who will be receiving it. Some of the stories are going to be hilarious and crack people up. Others are going to bring tears to their eyes or give them deep-seated hope. The same stories will evoke a different response from different people. One story that brings awe to one person could incite rage in another.

When you’re looking through your bank of stories to find one that is right for your talk, consider who’s in your audience and what they care about. Carefully consider their values, goals, and interests, and then decide which of your stories fits them best.

For example, when I speak to female audiences, I get more personal and raw by telling childhood stories where the odds were stacked against me, which encourages the ladies to have resilience in overcoming hardships. I don’t tell those same stories when I speak to a buttoned-up group of men. The men, instead, get stories about my quest for empathy.

When traveling to Asia, I tell stories of failure. The structure of Eastern stories is different from that of Western stories. In Western stories the protagonist almost always overcomes their hardships; Eastern stories are mostly cautionary tales where the protagonist fails and you learn from their mistakes.

Learn what market pressure may be on the minds of your audience. Research what’s going on in their industry, find their blogs, and recent news stories about their organization. Find out what they need to overcome.

The next time you need to communicate, ask yourself why you are uniquely qualified to be the audience’s guide. Identify stories from when you were on a similar journey, encountered comparable roadblocks, and emerged transformed — and muster the courage to share them.

Telling a personal story from a place of conviction is the most powerful communication device you have. That’s what the greatest and most beloved communicators do. They risk transparently revealing their vulnerabilities so that they can be mentors and guides who relate to people from places of universal needs and hardships. They connect to the audience and remind us that we are all human.

Nancy Duarte is a best-selling author with thirty years of CEO-ing under her belt. She’s driven her firm, Duarte, Inc., to be the global leader behind some of the most influential messages and visuals in business and culture. Duarte, Inc., is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley, as well as one of the top woman-owned businesses in the area. Nancy has written six best-selling books, four have won awards, and her new book, DataStory: Explain Data and Inspire Action Through Story, is available now. Follow Duarte on Twitter: @nancyduarte or LinkedIn.

 

download

TIME TO TALK DAY: 5 WAYS TO HELP BUILD A MENTALLY HEALTHY WORKFORCE

/in /by

Today is Time to Talk Day, an initiative to start conversations about mental health and help end the stigma.

Natalie Rogers, Chief People Officer at Unum

The pandemic has tested both our physical and mental wellbeing in a way we couldn’t have imagined previously. So, as our thoughts turn to building a stronger and better business environment post pandemic, it’s important businesses take steps to build a healthier, more productive workforce.

According to Unum’s Value of Help research, more than four-fifths (86%) of employers are changing their approach to employee health and wellbeing due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The research, which surveyed 350 UK employers and 1,000 employees, found 95% of employers said that the pandemic has impacted their need to make employees feel more protected.

Here are five tips to help employers improve their employees’ mental health and overall wellbeing:

1. Ask your employees

Don’t try to second-guess what people want. Instead, employers should be carrying out a company-wide survey of potential changes or benefits that people would like to see.

Even by just asking your employees what their current health and wellbeing goals are, you’ll get some insight into what steps or improvements are likely to be effective and or well-received.

You’re unlikely to get everything right first time, so take any opportunity to make improvements by keeping your health and wellbeing initiatives under review.

2. Think flexibly

The CIPD’s 2020 health and wellbeing report found 60% of people said workload was the biggest cause of workplace stress.

Look out for people who may be struggling with heavy workloads or working long hours while juggling home schooling, childcare, eldercare or other demands outside of work.

Find out the reasons behind it and act appropriately. Whether that’s delegating some work to others, adopting a flexible approach to working hours, revising unreasonable deadlines, or removing the expectation of attending unnecessary meetings.

3. Check and use the tools you already have

You may be surprised how many businesses (and their people) aren’t fully aware of exactly what certain benefits offer. For example, is there access to an Employee Assistance Programme offering expert advice on a range of lifestyle issues, such as money, child or elder care or relationships?

Without this knowledge, employees can feel stressed which can affect their overall wellbeing and productivity.

4. Adopt healthy practices

Hopefully, 2021 will see many of us being able to return to the workplace. And whether you have a workplace canteen or restaurant, vending machines or just a communal kitchen area, providing healthy options at work, even if it’s just access to fruit or salads are likely to be appreciated.

While some businesses may offer a gym subsidy as an employee benefit, others won’t have the budget. The good news is that exercise needn’t cost a penny or impact on the working day.

Encourage people to take the breaks they’re allocated and get out and about, as taking time for some sort of daily exercise is important for physical and mental health.

5. Commit

While this may all sound like a lot of work, committing to employee wellbeing has clear benefits for both you and your employees.

“Fostering employee wellbeing is good for people and the organisation,” says the CIPD.

“Good health and wellbeing can be a core enabler of employee engagement and organisational performance, while promoting wellbeing can help prevent stress, and create positive working environments where individuals and organisations can thrive.”Natalie Rogers is the Chief People Officer at Unum, one of the UK’s leading employee benefits providers. Unum creates the benefits and wellbeing support that matters most to employers, employees, and their families.

image

Leaders Focus Too Much on Changing Policies, and Not Enough on Changing Minds

/in /by

Not long ago, I asked 100 CEOs attending a conference how many of them were currently involved in a significant business transformation. Nearly all of them raised their hands, which was no surprise. According to a study by BCG, 85% of companies have undertaken a transformation during the past decade.

The same research found that nearly 75% of those transformations fail to improve business performance, either short-term or long-term.

So why is transformation so difficult to achieve?

Among many potential explanations, one that gets very little attention may be the most fundamental: the invisible fears and insecurities that keep us locked into behaviors even when we know rationally that they don’t serve us well. Add to that the anxiety that nearly all human beings experience in the face of change. Nonetheless, most organizations pay far more attention to strategy and execution than they do to what their people are feeling and thinking when they’re asked to embrace a transformation. Resistance, especially when it is passive, invisible, and unconscious, can derail even the best strategy.

Business transformations are typically built around new structural elements, including policies, processes, facilities, and technology. Some companies also focus on behaviors — defining new practices, training new skills, or asking employees for new deliverables.

What most organizations typically overlook is the internal shift — what people think and feel — which has to occur in order to bring the strategy to life. This is where resistance tends to arise — cognitively in the form of fixed beliefs, deeply held assumptions and blind spots; and emotionally, in the form of the fear and insecurity that change engenders. All of this rolls up into our mindset, which reflects how we see the world, what we believe and how that makes us feel.

The result is that transforming a business also depends on transforming individuals — beginning with the most senior leaders and influencers. Few of them, in our experience, have spent much time observing and understanding their own motivations, challenging their assumptions, or pushing beyond their intellectual and emotional comfort zones. The result is something that the psychologists Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan have termed “immunity to change.”

We first ran up against the power of mindset two decades ago when we began to make a case inside organizations that rest and renewal are essential for sustaining high performance. The scientific evidence we presented to clients was compelling. Nearly all of them found the concept persuasive and appealing, both logically and intuitively. We taught them very simple strategies to build renewal into their lives, and they left our workshops eager to change the way they worked.

Nonetheless, most of them struggled with changing their behavior when they got back to their jobs. They continued to equate continuous work and long hours with success. Taking time to renew during work days made them feel as if they were slacking. Even when organizations built nap rooms, they often went unused. People worried that if they rested at all, they wouldn’t get their work done, and above all, they feared failing. Despite their best intentions, many of them eventually defaulted back to their habitual patterns.

More recently, we worked with the senior team of a large consumer product company which had been severely disrupted by smaller, more agile online competitors selling their services directly to consumers. On its face, the team was aligned, focused, and committed to a new multi-faceted strategy with a strong digital component. But when we looked at the team’s mindset more deeply, we discovered that they shared several underlying beliefs including, “Everything we do is equally important,” “More is always better,” and “It has to be perfect or we don’t do it.” They summarized these beliefs in a single sentence: “If we don’t keep running as hard as we can, and attend to every detail, everything will fall apart.”

Not surprisingly, the leaders found they were spreading themselves too thin, struggling to pull the trigger on new initiatives, and feeling exhausted. Simply surfacing these costs and their consequences proved highly valuable and motivating. We also launched several initiatives to address these issues individually and collectively.

One of the most successful began with a simple exercise aimed at helping the leaders to define their three highest priorities. Then we took them through a structured exercise including delving into their calendars to assess whether they were using their time to best advantage, including setting aside time for renewal. This process prompted them to examine more consciously why they were working in self-defeating ways.

We also developed an online site where leaders agreed to regularly share their progress on prioritizing, as well as any feelings of resistance that were arising, and how they managed them. Their work is ongoing, but among the most common feelings people reported were liberation and relief. Their worst fears failed to materialize.

Several factors typically hold mindset in place. The first is that much of it gets deeply rooted early in our lives. Over time we tend to develop confirmation bias, forever seeking evidence that reinforces what we already believe, and downplaying or dismissing what doesn’t. We’re also designed, both genetically and instinctively, to put our own safety first, and to avoid taking too much risk. Rather than using our capacity for critical thinking to assess new possibilities, we often co-opt our prefrontal cortex to rationalize choices that were actually driven by our emotions.

All this explains why the most effective transformation begins with what’s going on inside people — and especially the most senior leaders, given their disproportionate authority and influence.  Their challenge is to deliberately turn attention inward in order to begin noticing the fixed patterns in their thinking, how they’re feeing in any given moment, and how quickly the instinct for self-preservation can overwhelm rationality and a longer term perspective, especially when the stakes are high.

Leaders also have an outsize impact on the collective mindset — meaning the organizational culture. As they begin to change the way they think and feel, they’re more able to model new behaviors and communicate to others more authentically and persuasively. Even employees highly resistant to change tend to follow their leaders, simply because most people prefer to fit in, rather than stick out.

Ultimately, personal transformation requires the courage to challenge one’s current comfort zone, and to tolerate that discomfort without overreacting. One of the most effective tools, we’ve found is a series of provocative questions we ask leaders and their teams to build a practice around asking themselves:

“What am I not seeing?

“What else is true?”

“What is my responsibility in this situation?”

“How is my perspective being influenced by my fears?”

Great strategy remains foundational to transformation, but successful execution also requires surfacing and continuously addressing the invisible reasons that people and cultures so often resist changing, even when the way they’re working isn’t working.

 

Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook.

Jan21_07_AndreaManzati

Imagine a Hiring Process Without Resumes

/in /by
   

Despite near record unemployment during the Covid-19 recession, plenty of employers will face major challenges in hiring low-skill, entry-level workers when economic conditions improve. This is, in part, because the overall U.S. workforce will grow only 0.4% in the next several decades. A big part of the problem of finding low-skill workers is the barriers employers create when they focus on screening people out. Typical staffing processes are costly, time-consuming, and repeated endlessly. Businesses spend about $4,100 per employee processing resumes, then conducting interviews, background checks, and drug tests.

Meanwhile, business leaders are being pressed to increase inclusion and diversity in their companies, whose typical hiring practices often exclude millions of people who are denied opportunities to make a living. They include the formerly incarcerated, the homeless, and those in recovery. What if there was a solution that not only meets workforce needs but also creates economic opportunities for those facing major barriers to employment?

While it may not be feasible for every business, the concept of “open hiring” is an innovative, counterintuitive strategy worth considering if your organization finds it difficult to recruit and retain dependable entry-level workers. This approach, which eschews resumes, interviews, and background checks, focuses solely on human potential and provides employment to anyone willing and able to work. Some of these requirements, like background checks, may be necessary in sectors such as education, government, healthcare, and finance. But for industries that rely heavily on front-line talent — manufacturing, distribution, retail, and food services, where candidates can be trained on the job — open hiring offers the opportunity for more diverse talent that would otherwise be passed over or ignored.

Open hiring shifts resources to invest in workers, rather than finding ways to exclude them. Most important, this approach allows companies to build more resilient businesses and address one of today’s greatest social challenges: providing economic opportunities for people often viewed as unemployable.

Since 1982, Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, which produces millions of pounds of baked goods annually for customers like Ben & Jerry’s and Whole Foods Market, has used this approach while building a successful business with 70 Open Hire employees. New hires are offered a position when their name comes up next on the list of people who have expressed interest in working at the bakery. No resume, job interview, background check, or drug test is required. As a result, the business has virtually no hiring costs.

Greyston then invests about $1,900 in hard and soft skills training for new bakers, as well as providing access to extensive wraparound services. Understanding that a job is just the first step for many in achieving success, the bakery connects employees with health, housing, childcare, and transportation needs to resources that will help keep them employed. So, when a young baker starts consistently showing up late for work, a counselor intervenes and may discover the employee’s childcare arrangements have fallen apart. The counselor then works with the employee to find a solution that benefits his family and the business.

This model has enabled Greyston to build a profitable business over its 38-year history, while also putting money back into the community of southwest Yonkers. Greyston recently calculated that it generates nearly $7 million of local economic impact annually through public assistance savings, increased tax revenue, as well as reduced incarceration costs.

Greyston is now working to scale open hiring and guide other employers in adopting this innovative staffing approach through its Center for Open Hiring (one of us, Sara, is the director). About half a dozen businesses have successfully adapted this model to their operations.

One such company is The Body Shop, the international cosmetics company, which piloted open hiring in one of its distribution centers. The Body Shop typically hires 200 seasonal employees to handle the holiday rush in its warehouse located in Raleigh, North Carolina. Adopting the open hiring approach in late 2019, recruiters asked people just three questions:

  1. Are you legal to work in the U.S.?
  2. Can you stand on your feet for eight hours?
  3. Can you lift up to 50 pounds?

The results? Executives said they were able to quickly fill positions with fewer resources during the holiday rush. Turnover among the seasonal workers was down 60% over the previous year and warehouse productivity increased by 13%. Management reported the best hiring season in the distribution center in years. Due to this success, The Body Shop now is expanding this new hiring practice to other entry level positions in their retail stores.

While your company may not be able to adopt open hiring as broadly as Greyston Bakery, it is possible to apply parts of the practice — and philosophy — to ease your hiring challenges in specific departments or functions. Here are four keys that are essential for open hiring to succeed:

Tie Open Hiring to the Company’s Mission

“You have to be passionate and persistent,” said Trish Patton, vice president of HR at The Body Shop. “I wasn’t going to drop this idea. It’s what we should be doing for our business and our communities, and it leads back to our purpose — that we exist to fight for a fairer more beautiful world.” As with any strategy, you must tie the benefits of open hiring back to your business needs and, once committed, successfully navigate any barriers to implementation. For instance, Patton reports, “We thought we had to roll out unconscious bias training to our managers before we could do this. But, instead, we said there’s never a good time to do this. We have to start sometime. You don’t have to have it perfect. Just try to make change a little bit at a time.”

Pursue Internal Buy-in

Bringing this approach into any organization may feel uncomfortable to managers and current employees. They may express concern about whether they’ll be able to trust coworkers with troubled pasts. That’s why Greyston found that having a dialogue with management and current employees about these concerns is vital.

To accomplish this at The Body Shop, sponsors of the open hiring initiative met with corporate leadership, managers at the distribution center, supervisors, and current employees to clearly communicate their plan and its anticipated benefits. Working with the Center for Open Hiring, they explained Greyston’s experience, what the approach meant, and what it didn’t mean.

The Body Shop’s management also made sure existing employees understood that performance expectations and standards weren’t going to change. Including the warehouse staff in the implementation process also connected them to the business’s broader mission, which includes supporting local communities.

Reinforce Accountability

“Open hiring does not mean no accountability,” says Joe Kenner, Greyston’s CEO, “All we have gotten rid of are the interviews and background checks. Food, safety, and professional standards — all those must be met. This job is not a promise. It’s an opportunity. We have strict standards we need to adhere to for customers like Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever, and Whole Foods, and expect all employees to meet those standards. We’re very strict about that.”

To implement open hiring successfully, an organization must have a clear, consistent accountability system in place. But it must be used in a way that enables conversations about why an employee is having performance problems — for example, transportation, childcare, or mental health issues. Greyston’s general manager, who has been supervising bakery employees for decades, says that, in his experience, performance problems are usually driven by what is happening in an employee’s life today, not by their past.

Create an Ecosystem that Supports the Whole Employee

Greyston’s leaders know open hiring doesn’t work unless there is an ecosystem set up to support employees’ success at work. This means finding other partners who can help workers address barriers to successful employment. For example, the bakery partners with a local social service agency to fund a care coordinator who helps Greyston’s workers find resources such as housing, childcare, substance abuse counseling, or whatever is needed to keep them on the job. The coordinator will also help the bakers with career planning or job searches when they want to move on. Though funded by Greyston, the coordinator works for the agency, independent of the bakery, to ensure employee confidentiality.

Although not for all businesses, open hiring can be a practical, profitable, and inspiring solution to what seem like two intractable problems: finding productive talent and creating good job opportunities for often-excluded individuals. For businesses that struggle to find and retain entry-level employees who can be trained on the job, the challenge is often knowing where to begin. Our advice is to start slowly. Maybe it is the solution for filling one position, or perhaps your first step is removing one barrier to employment, such as requiring a high school degree or a background check. Just start somewhere. The payoff will be worth it.

David DeLong is president of the research-driven consulting firm Smart Workforce Strategies and has been a research fellow at MIT’s AgeLab. An author and keynote speaker on practical solutions in the Covid-19 recession for critical skill shortages and the aging, changing workforce, his forthcoming book is Building Tomorrow’s Workforce in Today’s Economy. He is also author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce and coauthor of The Executive Guide to High-Impact Talent Management. His latest research on practical solutions for today’s workforce challenges is available on his Smart Workforce Strategies Blog.