Motivate Your Employees with Purpose, Not Profits

It’s natural for leaders to emphasize the importance of hitting financial targets, but making numbers the centerpiece of your leadership is a costly mistake. Financial results are an outcome, not a root driver for employee performance, and a growing body of evidence tells us that overemphasizing financial targets erodes morale and undermines long-term strategy. So, what should you do instead? Use your time with your team to build and reinforce your organizational purpose. This requires three actions:

 1. Reevaluate how you use your leadership “airtime.” Spend at least half your time with your team discussing your purpose and impact of the work, and no more than half your time on numbers or deliverables.

 2. Talk about customers, clients, and colleagues with specificity and emotion. The more clearly an employee understands their direct impact on another human being, the more likely they are to go the extra mile — and they’ll also experience greater fulfillment in doing so.

 3. Resist the urge to widely share every financial outcome, even if it’s positive. Ask yourself: What does my team really need to know on a daily basis to accomplish their goals?

 

Source: Harvard Business Review - Management Tip of the Day

 

Attitude is the key to personal satisfaction but its also a foundational quality that makes organizations work. The quote in this headline really resonated with me as it speaks to my belief that for a leader to be successful you must surround yourself with talent. This talent must have the recreate skills for the work to be done, it should complement your own skills and most importantly fills in the gaps or deficiencies in the leader’s personal skills toolbox. 

A servant leader understands and embraces this thinking and approach but no matter how well intentioned and obvious this is it will always be an uphill battle if the Attitude is not right! As the headline says people that Give A Shit is the defining and most foundational attribute for success. GAS means a number of things…

1.       Pride in doing good work – a personal belief and core values that are self-motivating

2.       Loyalty to organization – a personal commitment to the choice you make, and others make to you

3.       Integrity – As Jack Welch used to say…knowing the difference between doing the right thing vs. doing what’s right. That is on my Jack top ten list.

4.       Team players – believing that diversity of thought is good and finding enjoyment and satisfaction is group knowledge and success.

5.       Being part of something bigger than self - The value of belonging to something you care about.

6.       Being part of the solution and not part of the problem – Is the glass half empty or half full?

This list could go on and on but the essence of GAS in my opinion is the Golden Rule. Or maybe reminding our selves about what R. Fulghum wrote in 1990…in his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten:

1.     Share everything.
2.     Play fair.
3.     Don't hit people.
4.     Put things back where you found them.
5.     Clean up your own mess.
6.     Don't take things that aren't yours.
7.     Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
8.     Wash your hands before you eat.
9.     Flush.
10.    Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11.    Live a balanced life — learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
12.    Take a nap every afternoon.
13.    When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14.    Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
15.    Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup — they all die. So do we.
16.    And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned — the biggest word  of all — LOOK.

What has COVID done to how we work and the Office Furniture Industry?

Rethinking the Future Office - Workrite Ergonomics (proficiencypost.com)

The office has or will be changing forever. The office furniture industry has a history of chasing one size fits all solutions. Cubicles lasted for several decades, benching and hot desking came and Resimercial, making the office look like home or a student union building. The newer trends were largely designed to reduce real estate costs while selling it as the new collaboration environment.  COVID has forced the industry to change and it wants a new one size fits all solution that every manufacturer that serves this industry can chase and do their version of! In my opinion that’s fool’s gold as every company does different types of work, has a different culture, different facilities, different community environment and they all have different financial means to make change.

I recently sat on a CES, Consumer Electronics Panel discussing this topic. The panels take-aways about where we are headed were:

1.   More flexibility and accommodation on where we work

·        More flexible schedules, more willingness to allow folks to work remotely, work from home multiple days a week but come in for meetings

·        Some jobs may be able to be permanent WFH

2.   The anticipated explosion of technology advancement that will improve remote work

·        Challenges create innovation and COVID was the ultimate test from necessity for nearly every company to find new and potentially better ways of working remotely. New technology will soon advance this even further

3.   More compassion and humanity to personal life challenges

·        COVID has made company’s more employee centric, compassionate, and accepting of work life challenges. WFH will help employees, especially women better balance career and family as an example.

4.   The shift of the company office becoming a cultural and community foundation but not mission critical for task work

·        With more remote work, concerns for group safety, the high cost of living and real estate in many areas, etc. companies will have to get creative to not lose their culture or create a new one. Part of many companies is being a community. Silicon Valley is the best example of this with all the enticements…day care, free food, free social events, on campus housing, etc. Where do we go from here

 

My conclusion for the office and how work gets done.

     

     1.   Some corporate offices and campuses will shrink and have less task space. Task safe = private offices, cubicle, etc.…a desk to do work. Much of this work can be done where its less expensive and more convenient. Why should a company spend money on an expensive office building when COVID proved that many jobs could be done outside of the office?

      2.   The office and new technology will shift the office away from the place where all work gets done to a place to create the new culture and community of the company in a post-COVID era.

     What does this mean for the Office Furniture Industry?

1.   If I was a CEO of one of the Big furniture mega brands, I would be very concerned!

·        There will be fewer mega projects of new office or remodeled offices that include many floors of ceilings, flooring, lighting, walls, desks and all the project management and installation work. These mega projects were what sustained these companies and industry for decades!

2.   This shift will create opportunities for industry specialists!

·        WFH, Remote work, task work specialists (desks, chairs, etc. for individual spaces). 

·        New distribution models and less dependence or need for dealers, designers, project managers and installers. Speed ease of doing business and cost will be the keys to success.

·        Community, training and meeting space specialist (conference rooms, meeting rooms, large group spaces, technology infused spaces)

The office, commercial real estate and the office furniture industry have been permanently changed by COVID. The days of a one size fits all solution in what we used to call the office and how it gets done has changed. Flexibility and a willingness to embrace these changes will be critical for the suppliers to the industry. As customers and users of office furniture manufacturers are different than tech companies and they are different than service companies and they are different than medical products companies and the list goes. Even inside one of these companies engineers, accountants, sales, marketing, supply chain and customer service people all work differently shouldn’t the place and tools they have match the work rather than us modifying how we work to the office space we used to work in?

COVID was no fun but maybe as is often the case it has changed us all and forced us to really think differently. I believe that’s a very good thing for an industry that generally is slow to change and likes the comfort of constancy and sameness. 

Rethinking the Future Office - Workrite Ergonomics (proficiencypost.com)

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