Congrats: You Hit Your Goals -- and Are Killing Your Company

"The ends justify the means."

"It doesn't matter who you step on while you're on the way up, as long as you don't come back down."

"Results matter -- everything else is excuses."

If employees hit their goals, does it really matter how they get there? Here's why "results-based leadership" can be risky business -- and what you should be doing to get the outcomes you want.

Managing Employee Behaviors: What's Productivity Got to Do with It?

Which of your employees' behaviors contribute to your company's goals?

You might be able to answer this question -- but chances are good that your employees can't. In a Harris Interactive/Franklin Covey survey of 23,000 employees, only about 4,600 -- that's two out of ten -- could explain how their day-to-day work on the job contributed to the company's overall mission, vision, or goals. The other eighty percent simply don't know how to best contribute to the company's results -- which means they're probably falling short.

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To boost productivity, take a more productive approach to managing or changing employee behavior. Here's how:

  • Start with the result. What do you want your employees to achieve?
  • Work backwards. What behaviors, tasks, and activities must each employee perform in order to turn that result into a reality? Make these actions the basis of your expectations of employees at all levels.
  • Talk about it. Share success stories with employees. Talk about situations in which employees carried out actions that led to the desired results, and always praise employees who take the initiative.

Sharing success stories and giving direct feedback helps to change employee behaviors by offering an incentive and a concrete explanation of how to implement a change.

To Improve Results, Change the Consequences

To understand how focusing on employees' behaviors can improve business results, let's look at behavior the way applied behavioral science does.

Applied behavioral scientists analyze human behavior by examining three categories. The first is the Antecedent: What triggers a person to behave in a certain way? In the workplace, antecedents might include training, instructions, process design elements, policies, or instructions from managers.

The second is the Behavior. This is the action the employee takes -- the thing the employee says or does that affects results.

After the behavior comes the Consequence. A consequence is anything that increases or decreases the likelihood that the employee will repeat the behavior in the future. For instance, praise or recognition for a behavior is likely to increase the behavior in the future, while a reprimand or even radio silence for a behavior is likely to decrease it in the future.

Applied behavioral scientists estimate that consequences have four times the impact on behavior that antecedents do. In other words, telling your people what to do matters -- but what matters more is how you respond when they do it. When you support behaviors that contribute to the company's results and ignore or reprimand behaviors that detract from those results, your employees will gravitate toward behaving in ways that get results.

Why Positive Matters

Consequences have more power than antecedents. But the type of consequence also matters. Studies have found that positive consequences have about four times the impact on employee behavior that negative consequences do. Focusing on positive reinforcement also boosts morale and improves retention, which have direct impacts on productivity.

Positive consequences can come from a wide range of sources inside a company. They may include:

  • Access to information, choice assignments, or influential people;
  • Resources like time, budget allocations, meeting space, or people with needed skill sets;
  • Status markers like a new title, tenure, or a choice office location;
  • Interpersonal communications like praise or approval (both verbal and nonverbal); or
  • Financial "perks" like a raise, a bonus, gifts, or improved benefits.

Where to Find Support

Changing your company's culture to include positive behavioral support that moves toward your business goals isn't easy, and it rarely happens overnight. In addition to seeking feedback from employees and managers, consult a staffing partner who specializes in placing people in your industry.

Staffing partners strive to become recognized experts in the industries they serve and the people they place. They've seen positive approaches to behavior work in other organizations -- and they can help you make these strategies work for yours.

Trust Here's Help Staffing and Recruiting to deliver exceptional people who will support the culture you want to build. Contact us today to get started!

Sources:

Harris Interactive/Franklin Covey survey data: http://www.hci.org/blog/two-things-you-must-do-align-employees-your-strategic-goals Applied Behavioral Science: http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/changing-behaviors-to-deliver-business-results.aspx