For those who haven’t come across the term ‘Employee Engagement’ before, it’s simply a new term for ‘employee commitment’, or good old-fashioned ‘employee motivation’.
Employee engagement, or employee motivation if you prefer that term, is important to you and your organisation. There is now considerable evidence from many sources that low employee engagement generates lower employee productivity, business unit performance and profit; along with generating higher employee theft, accident rates and employee turnover.
Many research and survey companies measure employee engagement. A number position themselves as the company whose research has uncovered the true drivers of employee engagement. The real truth is that the underpinnings of employee engagement were identified more than 30 years ago by Thomas Gilbert. He trained under the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard University, and his work led to the establishment of the International Society for Performance Improvement.
In 1978, Gilbert published his ideas in the book, ‘Human Competence – Engineering Worthy Performance’. Early in my career I was so taken by Gilbert’s work that for a while I called myself a Performance Technologist. That didn’t last long as no-one had a clue what I was talking about.
The Skinnerian behaviour change model suggests that all behaviour has three components:
- Information comes to a person telling them what to do (Activator)
- The person responds in some way (Behaviour)
- The action of responding has an outcome that increases or decreases the likelihood that the same behaviour will occur again in similar circumstances (Consequence)
For example, you walk into a dark room (Activator) so you flick down the light switch (Behaviour) which results in the light coming on and you can see what you are doing (Consequence). This sequence is generally known at the ABC model.
Gilbert took this concept further. He applied the ABC model to the world of work by observing that performance is a function of the interaction between a person and his or her environment. This suggested that for adequate performance to occur, several conditions needed to be met. Taking the example above, we can construct a table showing the ABC model related to both the work environment and the person:
COMPONENTS OF BEHAVIOUR
|
|
ACTIVATOR (Information) |
BEHAVIOUR (Support) |
CONSEQUENCE (Motivation) |
|
Environment
|
Data (dark room) | Instruments (light switch) | Incentives (light on) |
|
Person
|
Discrimination (perceives darkness) | Response capacity(can flick switch) | Motives (likes a light room) |
Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.
Taking this further, we can understand how telecommunications companies, for example, engineer telephone-answering behaviour by manipulating three of these six variables, all of them environmental. They do much research to get the right tone and the right loudness of ring (data), to make the receiver easy to handle (instruments) and to ensure that the caller can be heard (incentives). It looks like this:
CONDITIONS FOR BEHAVIOUR TO OCCUR
|
|
ACTIVATOR (Information) |
BEHAVIOUR (Support) |
CONSEQUENCE (Motivation) |
|
Environmental Support
|
Data
The phone’s ring must be loud enough |
Instruments
The receiver must be removable or be built in |
Incentives
The caller must be audible |
|
Person’s Potential Behaviour
|
Knowledge
The answerer must have the ability to hear the ring tone |
Response Capacity
The answerer must be able to reach for the ‘phone |
Motives
The answerer must want to talk to people on the ‘phone |
Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.
Gilbert commented that the two causes of poor performance most commonly suggested are motives (“they don’t care”) and capacity (“they’re too dumb”). Nothing seems to have changed much in the intervening years. But these are usually the last places to look for causes of incompetence. Except for a few strange individuals that your selection process should have weeded out, people generally care about how they perform on the job, and defects in capacity (mental or physical) are the exception, not the rule.
As a result of these observations, Gilbert developed a behaviour model for creating incompetence. This forms the basis of a performance troubleshooting approach for solving problems of poor performance:
A BEHAVIOUR MODEL FOR CREATING INCOMPETENCE
|
|
INFORMATION |
SUPPORT FOR BEHAVIOUR |
MOTIVATION
|
|
Environmental Supports
|
DATA
1. Hide from people what is expected of them. 2. Give people little or no guidance about how to perform well. 3. Don’t let people know how well they are performing. |
TOOLS
1. Design the tools and processes of work without ever consulting the people who use them. 2. Do not provide the tools, materials or processes to assist people to perform their job |
INCENTIVES
1. Make sure that poor performers get paid as well as good ones. 2. Don’t make use of nonmonetary incentives. 3. Design the job so that it has no future. |
|
Person’s Potential Behaviour |
KNOWLEDGE
1. Leave training to chance. 2. Make training unnecessarily difficult. 3. Place people into roles of which they have no knowledge or experience. |
CAPACITY
1. Schedule performance for times when people are not at their sharpest. 2. Select people for tasks they have intrinsic difficulties in performing. |
MOTIVES
1. Select people who have an inherent dislike for the type of work they need to do. 2. Avoid arranging working conditions that employees would find more pleasant. 3. Give pep talks rather than incentives to promote performance in difficult situations. |
Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.
We can see from this table all the things that managers can do to make behaviour inefficient, and thereby ensure poor performance. You may have previously experienced some of these tactics in the past. You may even recognise that some of them are happening in your workplace right now.
Since the factors identified by Gilbert in the table above also lead to lower employee productivity (and inevitably lower business unit performance and profit), we can deduce that they are likely to have a significant impact on employee engagement or motivation.
Next week we’ll take a look at switching this model around to engineer high performance. And we’ll compare the factors in that model with the key drivers of employee engagement identified through global research.