The Emotional Roots of Employee Engagement

I begin this blog with a declaration that I intend to validate throughout the body of this entry: The key to employee engagement is emotional commitment which is in turn most closely linked to discretionary effort. Rewards, transactional positive reinforcement (supervisor occasionally using verbal reinforcement), and incentives in general do not change behavior in the long term; the biochemistry of the brain—serotonin, dopamine, and other neurotransmitters—the chemicals of employee engagement, of emotions and learning—are most effectively catalyzed through ongoing manager activities and attributes. Reinforcing work dialogs, which in turn build reinforcing manager-employee relationships, are the most effective means of eliciting employee emotional commitment to the job and the organization.

In 2004, the Corporate Leadership Council published a study—Driving Employee Performance and Retention through Engagement: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Employee Engagement Strategies. They surveyed 50,000 employees in 59 organizations within 27 countries. These data support the results of many other studies on employee engagement: Individual acts of reward and reinforcement do not compensate for a negative relationship with one’s organization or one’s manager. The best way to achieve emotional commitment from employees is through the creation of an emotionally nurturing organizational environment—a “reinforcing environment,” a history of reinforcement--a reinforcing relationship.

Neuroscience and neuropsychologist—through new technologies like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission topography (PET), and wave analysis can study reward and fear centers in the brain—in real time. The results of their research are finally being translated into management practices. The March, 2008, issue of H.R. Magazine has an article entitled, “The Brain at Work.” The article describes what happens in the brain when we have differing experiences at work—when someone says or does something positive or does something we don't like.

The article reports that when employees experience “social fairness and respect,” the neurotransmitter serotonin is released in the brain’s “reward pathway” creating a sense of well being in much the same way drugs and alcohol do. The association between a pleasant sensation and an environmental stimulus (someone saying or doing something we like) conditions a positive association with the stimulus (the person who said or did something we like). We feel good about that person—the positive emotion that facilitates emotional engagement.

When we are exposed to positive stimuli—when serotonin is coursing through our axioms and dendrites—the brain is in a positive mode to think, decide, create, and learn. Negative stimuli—someone criticizing, mocking, berating, or disrespecting us—create an opposite effect; our brain falls into a fetal position and its efficiency is crippled. Learning is facilitated by the neurotransmitters that are secreted when employees are provided some ownership in change processes; if they are told what to do, facilitative connections are repressed and resistance is evoked. Neuroscientists seem to be corroborating what our intuition tells us.

Since positive emotions are associated with high levels of employee engagement, and subsequently discretionary effort, it is clear that effective positive reinforcement enables that emotion-building process. Although the article states that “social fairness and respect” create serotonin-induced positive emotions, the author neglects to point out that social fairness and respect are abstract concepts which cannot be directly observed. Only the verbal behavior that represents them can be directly seen, heard, and perceived. I only know that you are fair if you “say or do” (a behavior) something that I hear and interpret as fair; that’s when the neurotransmitters start to flow.

My perceptions of being fairly treated and respected are acquired one behavior at a time. If you say 10 thoughtlessly critical things to me, one positive comment does not lead me to feel respected. Many organizations are trying to use rewards and recognition strategies and management positive reinforcement policies to compensate for negative organizational strategies and policies or for dysfunctional supervisory-employee relations--circumstances that create negative employee emotions and disengagement. In the end, it does not work. It is expensive and you add a new problem; the institutionalization of tactics that do not solve your original problem and money off the bottom line.

A supervisor, manager or leader is in a pivotal position to compensate for punitive organizational policies and practices through diplomatic verbal comments—using reinforcing work dialogs. Similarly, supervisors with poor interaction skills can destroy the well-intended efforts of organizations who have committed to positive employee strategies and policies. Conversely, a supervisor is well positioned to help employees sidestep the negativity of a toxic organization. No matter what you do to make your organization one that fosters employee engagement, the failure to create meaningful dialogs between your supervisors and employees will restrict your best efforts. The issue will not go away.

The Reinforcing Work Dialogs I have been discussing in the past few blogs are a powerful tool for creating employee emotional engagement in the organization. They provide a vehicle for continuous, interactive, participative feedback and communication from one’s supervisor or manager. The dialogs provide a comfortable, credible context for positive reinforcement—positive comments about employee performance and contribution—for demonstrating respect for the person and valuing of his or her job.

Positive reinforcement, properly delivered, is a continuous source of performance-encouraging, relationship-building serotonin. The neurology of fairness and respect reside in one’s history of interactions with one’s boss. Sparse contact, little or no communication or feedback, autocratic social style—all this creates the context that makes transactional reinforcement (the occasional positive comment about one’s job) destructive instead of constructive.

The reinforcing relationship created by effective work dialogs, creates the foundation to optimize employee emotional engagement and to support and facilitate all the key employee engagement drivers. It provides supervisors with an opportunity to reinforce discrete contributive behaviors--one behavior at a time.

How to Identify the Behavior's That Lead to Success

What is a “behavior analyst?” Behavior analysts are psychologists who specialize in arranging (designing) physical and social environments to elicit useful, productive, value-added human behavior(s). Behavior analysts are experts in changing human behavior. When I use the word behavior, I am referring to something a human says (verbal behavior) or does (non-verbal, physical behavior), and behavior analysts work with fine grained, very specific behaviors when the situation requires them to do so.

In business and industry, behavior analysts help organizations improve human performance. The core purpose of quality initiatives and management development efforts is to change employee behaviors. U.S. corporations spend billions of dollars trying to encourage their employees to do things differently (change their behavior)—to come up with new ideas, work more safely, improve interpersonal effectiveness (talk to employees in a manner that encourages engagement and commitment to the companies performance goals), and do things to eliminate waste.

The efficacy of performance improvement initiatives, training, and management development are drastically constrained by the fact that behavior change principles are not incorporated (designed) into the initiatives. Most corporate improvement initiatives are full of waste (to use the “Lean” vernacular for emphasis); they leave out critical behavior change tools that could accelerate both the rate of behavior change and the effectiveness of the change process. The most expensive problem in U.S. organizations is that leadership does not recognize what they don’t know about human behavior change.

For example, when you were working your way up the career ladder, did anyone in authority ever say to you that you needed to “develop” a “sense of urgency?” Or perhaps, your supervisor, parent, teacher or coach told you that you needed “to become,” or “to be,” one of the following:

• Ambitious
• Organized
• Committed
• Dedicated
• Energetic
• Self-starter
• Dependable
• Responsible
• Team player
• Problem solver
• Focused
• Sense of urgency
• People person

Did it irritate you? Make you mad? Confuse you? Overwhelm you? Did you take it personally—cause you to become emotional, defensive? Make you feel bad about yourself? Cause you to dislike your supervisor or manager? Using sloppy, imprecise words in performance coaching elicits emotionalism, defensiveness and resistance to change. Managers who do not understand how to break down words that describe traits into words that describe behaviors—something employees can change—are doomed to frustration.

If you responded emotionally to sloppy verbal coaching, it was not because you are oversensitive; when your manager says you “need to develop a sense of urgency,” it sounds like a criticism about “who we are,” when we should be getting feedback on “what we have done or not done,”—your behavior. Leaders, managers, and supervisors do not have experience in breaking down tasks into the subsets of behaviors, then breaking down the subsets into finer grained, more precise individual behaviors that are linked together to culminate into a performance result.

The process of dissecting tasks, accomplishments, results, and achievements into the specific behaviors that compose their architecture is a form of behavioral root cause analysis. Telling a supervisor that he or she needs to be “a people person,” is the same as telling an employee working in a factory to “avoid getting hurt;” neither admonition will be effective. The employee needs more guidance—more specificity around exactly what he or she needs to do or not do that leads them to improve interpersonal skills in the first example and to work safely in the second example. The error in each of these instances is one of not being precise—not specifically identifying the behavior you want from the performer.

If you listen closely to leaders, managers, and supervisors you will hear them use ambiguous descriptive terms like those above in performance evaluations and work discussions. Each of these words collectively summarizes many behaviors. The problem with using these words in reference to human performance is that they are connotative; “they have the power of implying or suggesting something in addition to what is explicit,” they convey and elicit emotion.

There is an ethos surrounding specificity that inveighs against its practice; often leaders assume that it is codling employees to precisely pinpoint the behavior that will lead them to succeed. Generally, managers and leaders seem to find it distasteful to coach others about precise responses (behaviors). It is as if an employee can only demonstrate their worth or earn their pay if they “figure out” what behavior is necessary to be successful.

Many leaders are self-motivate, highly intelligent, work-oriented, obsessive types; maybe most are. They rise to the top by pushing themselves past barriers and pushing themselves to perform better—to be the best. It is understandable that they would find micro-level behavioral coaching distasteful. The feeling that “others should do what I did,” is pervasive. When we pay a price for what we have, we hate to see others being handed the answers—being spoon fed with the “right behavior.”

If you ask your best salesperson, customer service agents, IT personnel, and HR representatives to describe 2 things that they say or do that causes them to perform better than their peers, you will find that their success is most often a product of something they “do” differently—a behavior, rather than some innate trait or talent they were born with. In the company you are currently working in, is there anyone who is identifying the differentiating behaviors—the behaviors of excellence for every job description, work unit, team, department, and business unit?

My experience in interviewing leaders and employees at every organizational level and function tells me that sometimes one behavior can make the difference between the mediocrity and the exemplary. In customer service, one sentence spoken in the right tone can defuse a problem and create a life long customer. The best salesperson usually does one or two things that the average salesperson does not do. Every behavior that can build a stronger organization, team, customer base, or sales force that is unidentified is lost profit and opportunity.

Client Example

One of my clients experienced performance success by using behavioral investigation to resolve what appeared to be a resistant quality problem. They were in the business of producing sterile egg embryos that were later used to create a vaccine that prevented a certain disease in chickens. If the embryos were not perfectly sterile, the vaccine was useless. They were achieving about a 91 percent success rate in producing the quality embryos.

Several managers were in my training class learning about the value of being able to identify specific job behaviors that were critical to performance. One manager had a flash of brilliance; “Why don’t I ask the employees in the lab if they know what specific behaviors would improve quality?” This seems like an obvious tactic, but it is not available to managers, supervisors, or employees who do not know how to break performance tasks down into specific behaviors and analyze the impact of those behaviors.

The manager was so excited about the potential of this approach that he went out during the next break and phoned the lab. He spoke with the lab supervisor and asked, “Iris, could you and your team come up with three or four things you could do that would reduce the number of off-quality embryos we are making?” He proceeded to give her enough information to understand that by “to do,” he was talking about specific behaviors that would reduce off-quality embryos.

Iris said, “Sure!” When he called her back an hour later the lab team had produced a list of five key behaviors that would reduce off-quality embryos. They were going to track them for a few days until the behaviors became habit. Within one week, quality embryos had risen from 91 percent to 98 percent; the only change had been the identification of key behaviors related to solving a problem.

One of the largest hospital systems in America reduced its billing cycle time by 50+ days. All they did was ask employees to identify behaviors—things they could do—to reduce the cycle time. Over a period of 12 months, employees identified behaviors that saved the hospital over $200,000,000.

There is a big return for identifying success behavior.

Bottom Line:

• People can change what they say or what they do—they can change behavior
• Business results are compilations of individual, discrete behaviors linked to an important result; they can be identified and modified
• Every organization is experiencing waste and diminished profits because they do not know how to coach their employees to discover value-added behaviors—best practices, creative shortcuts, discretionary practices—that would lead to enhanced performance
• Dormant value-added behaviors represent the largest untapped equity in American business and industry
• Any leader, manager, supervisor, professional, technical, or frontline employee can identify several behaviors--things they can do to increase the companies profitability—in less than an hour.
• Untapped improvement behavior represents a source of organizational profitability; it is there for the taking...I mean identifying.