Do you motivate your employees with money?

      Of course yes! You pay your employees to do the work and to do it well. You also give rewards when the work has been done perfectly. It means that money is a way to motivate people. But does that mean that you can continuously motivate people with money? Or worst, does that mean that you maybe pay too much your employees? A recent article in the HBR made me think again about this question.

      In this article, Ray Fisman _ The Org : The Underlying Logic of the Office_ deals with an experiment that did some searchers in Germany and Switzerland. He says that the study is “suggesting that economists' focus on cash might often be misplaced”.

The study was very simple: a work for which it’s easy to measure productivity and for which no specific skills are required. They chose "cataloguers in the library". Students were paid 12 euros an hour. They created three groups of students:

-          Group 1 : 12 euros/hour + 7 euros of bonus if they do 3 hours

-          Group 2 : 12 euros/hour and instead of cash, they offer a bottle of water

-          Group 3 : baseline, just paid 12euros/hour

Check the results on this graph:

      Productivity can be increased not only with money but also with gifts. And we can understand that if we think about the margin utility. The labor supply curve slope upwards to the right as it does between the point A and B for example. The margin utility is increasing because for each more hours worked, the employee increases his wage _ money used to enjoy the time he doesn’t work. This will continue until one point (M like Maximum). Beyond this point, he will start to reduce the amount of labor hours he supplies even if the wage is still increasing (point C).

     At one point, the company is losing money and productivity at the same time! How can you still motivate your employees to increase their productivity?

There are many books about it and many specialists who work  for companies  as consultants to motivate people. I will just give some categories of reward/gifts that you can give to your employees to increase their motivation:

-         -  Recognition: A person needs to be part of something. Just some time with croissants in the morning for example or some flowers or whatever on the desk for special occasions

-         -  Responsibilities and Power: Some searchers argue that you can give more power and responsibilities to someone. Even if on the long-term he will ask for more money…

-          - Training : it means that you are taking care about the future of your employee and you want to see him evolving in the company

-          - Gadjets : it can be a cell-phone, a car, an house cleaner, etc…

      But you can do with less money. I know a manager who worked very hard with his team to finish a project. Everyone worked during the weekends and until really late in the evening. The problem: the company did not have any more money to give as reward, or maybe 20 Euros per person. Ridiculous. So, he decided to organize a visit in a beautiful castle around Paris. He managed to do it for free and took all his team to the castle with an Art History’s professor who did the visit. Results: the loved it and were reallu gratefull.

      To conclude, every company should ask themselves if they pay correctly their employees. By “correctly” I mean: Are our employee motivate to work for us?  If not, ask if a wage-increase is the solution. If it’s already higher than the market, try to motivate them using other levers.

PS : Check this very famous video about motivation. More that intersting, it's also very funny and very well done : 

What could managers learn from soccer?

Karl Stark _ co-founders and director of strategic advisory firm focused on growing companies_ have made a very true statement. You don’t learn only about soccer when you watch more and more games but you learn about business as well! Why?

What is the difference between the England’s team and the Brazil’s one? Or we can ask: Which one do you prefer watching? Many of you _except English people of course_ will probably answer “Brazil”. England can be very successful in its achievement by doing the minimum: marking a goal and then defend. But it’s quite boring to watch!

On the other side, you have the Brazil’s team. They want to do the show and not only winning the game. Their style is much more acrobatic than any other team and people love watching them. This difference is called by Stark: “Win _ Win beautifully”. He says that “Winning is not good enough; aim to win beautifully!”

These two team illustrate two different management models. The first one is a team with many good individual players but not playing in team while the second one has maybe not better players on the field but they know how to play together. The team is better that the sum of all the individuals.

How achieving this pragmatically speaking? Stark told us some tips to achieve it:

          - Trust and mutual respect are key to achieving it

          - Find pairs to work together. It also means that it’s maybe better to hire someone with less qualification but who will enjoy working with his team

          - Recognize and reward the team first and not individuals

These ideas are not new and many companies theoretically share these thoughts. Who would disagree? But don’t you remember this game between North Korea and Brazil during the 2010’s World Cup. It was so insane! North Korea marked the first goal and then had perfectly defended against Brazil. It was very difficult for the Brazilians even if at the end of the game they won  2-1 during the last few minutes. It’s another example of how a team can be stronger than individuals even if at the end they lose. Nowadays, we remember how North Korea defended and how it was hard for the Brazilians to win. It means that your management model is not good in itself. To be better at one moment than the others doesn't mean you are better forever. Companies should keep an eye on what do other companies and re-think their model before it's too late.

Watching soccer can be interesting to re-think a management model. Of course there is no perfect model but you can find the model that can match for your organization. Of course, if you prefer rugby or basketball, it also works.

You can follow Karl Stark on twitter : @karlstark

Should Women Emailing Like Guys?

The title sounds weird? Isn’t it? You probably asking you : what does it mean emailing like guys? Maria Bartiromo_ a television journalist at CNBC for the Closing Bell program_ thinks having the answer. Indeed, she said that one of her New Year's resolutions was to "start emailing like a guy”.

She explained herself, saying that women tend to write emails with phrases such as “how are you” and “hope all is well, blah, blah, blah before they make their point”. In contrary, men will just give one-word response as “yup”. Emailing like a guy means going straight to the point.

Here is the video. The conversation starts at 6.30.

        But she is not the only one to think this. Deborah Tannen _ American linguist and professor at the Georgetown University_ wrote a book which has been a bestseller in the early 90’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.

In this book, she says for example that “In general, women tend to write longer emails and are more likely to use expression or I am inclined to say emotion” or “Women tend to mix personal talk with work talk”. She says that the hierarchy can be interpreted this as a frivolous behavior. That means she also says that the hierarchy is hold by men. Concerning men, she says that they tend to use sarcasm more frequently than women to make jokes or teasing colleagues. On the other hand, women use it in a negative way.

Her explanation is quite simple and according to me, a little bit naive. If men and women have different communication, it’s because they don’t have the same sociological background. It’s true that most of the kids are raised according to their gender. It’s not a big discovery!

        The problem is that we often do a parallelism between “feminine and woman” and “masculine and men”. These two figures _ “feminine” and “masculine” _ always existed in our culture. The feminine one is taking care of the home and  kids while the masculine one goes hunting and protects the family. And it’s true that during the Neanderthals’ era, it was the case. But nowadays, we should be able to disconnect these conceptual figures with gender! Both men and women are able to take of their kids and earn money.

Otherwise, we will still hear comments such as these in the video below. It’s apparently a class project on the book of Deborah Tannen and they clearly make no differences between these concepts. Results: men have no emotion and women are stupid.

        These kinds of stereotypes are not progress. When Maria Bartiromo says she will write emails like a guy, it’s not the good attitude but it means that there is a real issue that everyone should take in account and not only women. Answering just by some word such as “yup” is not better that asking how the holidays of your colleagues were before asking a professional related question! I do believe that we need both but more importantly, we need to stop judging. I know it sounds very naïve but hearing “Whoa, she is a woman but she talks like a guy” sounds much more stupid to me. Don't you think?

Ignoring Emotions at Work is not Human

Because we are all humans, we have emotions. And making us working doesn’t change the fact that we have feelings. These feelings concern both our personal life and work life. The issue is that when you look on the internet some researches about feelings at work, you only find articles about how to manage your feelings at work. They explain you that you should go for a walk if you are stressed or try to find something positive about a situation if you are frustrated. Thanks for the advice!

Instead of helping you, they basically tell you that you need to do something about your emotions because it’s not normal and not appropriate at work! The article of one website titles “ controlling your feelings…before they control you” and the first sentence of the article is a quote from Viktor Frankl : “ Everything can be taken from a man but the last of human freedoms _ the ability to choose one’s attitude is a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way”. Basically, you are responsible of your emotions and handling with it is also your responsibility.

The main reason is that in a company, we ask employees to be productive and effective and we don’t need a master degree in psychology to guess that when someone is frustrated at work his productivity and efficiency is decreasing. That’s why some researches point out the necessity to handle with these emotions. I liked the vision of John Sporleder about handling with employees’ emotions that says:

“Compassion and motivation are not at opposite ends of the same spectrum. One does not need to be sacrified for the sake of the other (…) It is better to think of performance and employee emotions as complimentary to one another”.

The only problem with this way of thinking is that emotions are immediately related to business and performance. From my personal point of view, I much more prefer how Anne Kreamer tackles the question. First, she wanted to understand what an emotion was, physically speaking: an hardwired biological regulatory function. It’s a natural hormonal reaction to stress or danger like muscles.

Here is a video of Anne Kreamer who explain us how to handle with someone who start crying in front of you in the office. She says that tears are natural and always mean something. It can be basic tears (for dry eyes), reflect tears (something in your eyes) or emotional tears like joy, frustration and anger. Most important, crying doesn’t mean you are weak or inferior, especially for women who cry more because the amount of hormones is different. Judging tears leads nowhere.

If you haven’t seen the video, here are the 4 main suggestions to handle with tears at the office:

1)      Remember tears are a biological reaction

2)      Acknowledge the tears and don’t just ignore them

3)      Offer a tissue to introduce a discussion

4)      Recognize tears communicate a problem

Emotions should not be always treated as an issue for performance and productivity but definitely as a way to understand what is going wrong in the organization or at a job position. Take time to understand what is happening will bring you much more on the long term.