Can you, as a Manager or CxO, identify the happy and bored people in your org?
An employee must be fully aware of the performance expected by him throughout a given year. It’s usually the Team Manager who apprises the team of the Projected Plan and Activity Split for the team as well as the individual member. The plan can be given as quarterly breakups. Each quarter can be further divided into monthly and week wise expected output activity. Each task completion, then itself is a goal for a particular day. The goals can be further ascribed to a timeline during each day and hence the target jobs completed in this hourly manner will reflect a productive and successful environment.
Now, all along what helped throughout this exercise?
Effective planning translated into multiple goals which were uniformly distributed across a finite and available time frame. So anyone can see that following these goals step by step would lead to the work getting “completed”.
Are we missing something here?
I should suppose so. What we are missing here is the employee himself. Sure the presence, more or less, the physical activity, the churn out, all are mostly required during the operations of any kind of work. But are we measuring resourcefulness, enthusiasm, emotional functionality, personality needs etc here? How do we bring those in as goals to stimulate the employee? We need a literal understanding of the human mind in this case. According to celebrity American life coach, Tony Robbins, there are six human needs that need to be fulfilled:
- Certainty. Assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure.
- Uncertainty. The need for variety, the unknown, change, new stimuli.
- Significance. Feeling unique, important, special or needed.
- Love/Connection. A strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something.
- Growth. Expansion of capacity, capability or understanding
- Contribution. A sense of service and focus on helping, giving to and supporting others
Robbins asserts that the first four are “needs of the personality,” and are secured by all people, in one way or another. The last two, Growth and Contribution, are described by Robbins as “needs of the spirit,” and these provide fulfillment. These often are not attained by many people. Every manager must have certain goals set aside for their employee which are above and beyond the stipulated and obvious workflow goals. So when you observe a certain pattern in the employee’s work process, you could try and aim for supporting the first four needs. This fuels the employee to find an acquaintance with the last two needs, that of growth and contribution, which are of utmost benefit to them AND your organization.
With PeopleWorks Performance Management Module, you can track every employee’s performance accurately and regularly, and monitor your workforce productivity at one go. This gives you a welcome relief from paperwork assessments, as our module is cloud-based and scalable to your requirement. Within a few clicks, you can compare notes and moderate appraisals. You can collate and translate all scores into final ratings. There is zero ambiguity as we are nipping managerial bias here in the bud. All data is transparent and analyses are straightforward. This gives Managers a creative and intellectual space to understand further goals needed by the employee, like joining a course, upgrading particular skills etc. Employees on the other hand, when nurtured in this way, can reorganize their time and aim for creating ancillary goals for themselves, as they are now able to track and monitor their progress independently.
Stephen Richards sums it up in his book Think Your Way to Success: Let Your Dreams Run Free, with the following quote: “Happiness is something we reap from the seeds we sow.”
So, plant goals, water the soul of the employee and let the team spirit soar!
