Creative Training Techniques Newsletter

How Do You Recognize People Without Using Pay, Promises, or Promotions?

A number of years ago, in a previous economic downturn, I was working with a department within the California state government. Salaries had been frozen and would be frozen for at least two years. Managers were concerned that they would lose good employees because they had lost what I call the traditional 3 “P”s: pay, promises and promotions.

Traditional thinking says, “Do you want your employees to be happy? Pay them more money right now. Promise them more money or a promotion in the future. Or promote them right now.” The interesting thing is, especially in tough times, managers have no control over these things. So in a sense they provide themselves with an excuse for losing good people. “Jack would have stayed if I could have given him that merit increase. Sara would have stayed if I could have given her that promotion. They both would have stayed if I could have promised when they’d receive the raise or promotion.”

Notice that poor performers don’t leave. It’s the top performers that do because they know that security is in themselves. In the worst of times, top performers create opportunities for themselves because they perform, and outperform the people around them. So we have a dilemma. Good performers leave and poor performers stay. It doesn’t take long for this to become a recipe for disaster.

With this particular group, I had 30 managers brainstorm for an hour on how they could help their people feel appreciated without using pay, promises, or promotions. In that hour, they came up with over 250 ways to make that happen. After further examination, they still had a list of 155 they all felt they could use with one or more of their top employees–and many could be used with their entire team.

Any work environment can be changed if you focus on just two things: content and context. The content of the job means the actual work itself. What could be done to make the actual job more fun, interesting, exciting, rewarding without changing the nature of the job?

I once had a summer job while on leave from the U.S. Naval Academy where I put the cutting edge on drill bits. The job consisted of taking a drill and placing it in a hole in a block just .001 inches larger than the drill itself, pushing the drill all the way through the hole until the edge to be sharpened appeared, moving the block on a fixed slide slightly to the right until an individual cutting edge was against the grinder, and then, keeping slight pressure on the drill, drawing it back through the block until that first edge was sharpened. The process was repeated for each of the edges.

The job by itself was not exciting. But I created little contests with myself. How may drills could I sharpen without error in the next ten minutes, twenty minutes, etc? I thought about where these drills might be going, how they might be used, how people would be helped, etc. These little things helped me stick with a job that otherwise would have been dull and boring but was the only thing available as a short term summer job.

Whether it is a training program or a job, ask yourself what can be done to help people connect with why this content is valuable. What difference does it or will it make? How does it add value to the organization and the organization’s customers?

The second thing to examine is the context that surrounds the job or training program. What can be done to help people feel recognized, celebrated, valuable, cared for, or part of the team.

In our new book, The Fun Minute Manager, we provide over 100 unique methods and over 50 additional resources for creating a context that improves productivity and results.

Ideas include:

• Provide pizza for a lunch and learn.
• Allow a group of employees to read a work related book with a monthly chance to discuss the book, what they’ve learned, and how it can be applied.
• Hold a book fair where employees bring in books they’ve recently read that they really enjoyed — or books or videos they’ve purchased for their children or grandchildren. Over a brown bag lunch, each person briefly shares what they brought and why.
• Other examples are fun made-up awards/trophies/certificates, bring a joke to work day, cartoon caption contests.

Visit TheFunMinuteManager.com for free articles and to get the book. Send me an email at BPike@BobPikeGroup.com and let me know how you’ve recognized and celebrated people. We’ll provide a summary in a future newsletter.

Until next month–add value and make a difference.

 Email This Post