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Productivity Initiatives
In the late 1980s and 1990s, the corporate quest to match Japanese innovations in quality management and performance improvement brought on the formalization of the performance improvement process. Instead of introducing self-contained performance goals, companies launched customer-focused, enterprise-wide process improvement programs such as Six Sigma, Baldridge, Total Quality Management (TQM), and Kaizen (itself a Japanese quality management process).
Large global companies have embraced aspects of process improvement programs. Many organizations have successfully used the measuring and monitoring tools to better quantify quality improvements. But the results of employee-focused or motivational initiatives, on the other hand, have been mixed. Broad-based programs, with highly structured systems that require massive changes in the way employees work, have proved challenging to implement – often because of employee resistance. Organizations that have managed to extract enormous value out of quality improvement initiatives have two things in common: a general understanding of human behavior and specific knowledge of the employee behaviors already prevalent in their respective companies.
Why Some Quality Initiatives Fail
Overcoming resistance to change is critical to any performance management project, but equally important is understanding the reluctance to embrace new behaviors. General employee resistance is straightforward. Employees display an unwillingness to adopt new process and procedures. In this case, employees themselves are solely responsible for their failure to adopt new behaviors.
While resistance to change is typically characterized as exclusively an employee phenomenon, the truth is that there is often a second pocket of resistance within a company: supervisors and managers. Supervisor resistance can be more subtle and, thus, harder to spot. In such cases, employees embrace the change initiative and want to get the job done in a way that supports new process improvement initiatives, but managers and supervisors do not themselves support the new program
Employees, at the urging of their immediate supervisor, are encouraged to retain behaviors that are inconsistent with the initiative. At first, this may look like an employee issue, but on deeper inspection supervisors either don’t have the tools or don’t know how to support the initiative. Here, management is responsible for the lack of change.
Here’s a hypothetical example: Lean manufacturing strategies are introduced into a plant to decrease manufacturing lead-time, while minimizing inventory build-up. If the success of the lean strategy is measured exclusively by manufacturing speed (order in-product delivered), behaviors inconsistent with goals could be generated and likely mischaracterized as employees' unwillingness to adopt the new system. The problem, however, may not be resistance from employees, but supervisors who are reinforcing actions not aligned with the goals of the initiative.
There are two critical management steps in the adoption of a new performance initiative. First, employees must understand the benefits of the initiative, recognize what is required to achieve the desired results, and embrace the goals of the initiative. Second, managers and supervisors must provide positive reinforcers consistent with the organization’s goals.
Without employee acceptance and the right support from management, any process improvement is doomed to fail. People resist change in the workplace in many ways, but among the more common behaviors are:
- Ignoring the new processes
- Not working to understand what is required
- Criticizing the tools or software application used for the new behaviors
- Not working to understand the benefits of behaving differently
- Delaying implementation
The reality is that any ambitious change management program challenges employees with a variety of new required behaviors. Too often, however, companies simply present the prescribed changes to employees in the form of edicts, and assume that employees will eagerly adopt the new practices and integrate them into their workday.
A few will. But, if the company is at all typical, many will go about their jobs as if management had never communicated its new expectations. If a critical success factor in all performance improvement initiatives is affecting employee behavior, organizations must better understand why their employees act the way they do and identify and encourage the behaviors that support the new initiative. Few have systematically sought to understand and incorporate this important knowledge into their change initiatives.
Behavior Principles Are Well Established
The principles that explain and influence employee behavior are well established and need to be integrated into management systems and performance initiatives.
For example, there is a large volume of data detailing the successful results of applying behavioral tools to safety and health programs. Companies can apply these same behavior-based tools to other facets of their business and better realize the potential of performance initiatives.
For instance, it’s long been established that company-wide phone messages or e-mails from top management, in and of themselves, have little or no influence on employees’ daily effort level or commitment. Instead, intangibles like job satisfaction, discretionary employee effort, and organizational commitment are influenced by factors such as:
- Supervisory Behavior – daily patterns of attention to and communication with employees
- Organizational Recognition – the response of the organization to employee improvement, accomplishment, and value added behavior
- Reward Systems – incentives, bonuses, and promotions for employee performance
Behavioral Technology: The Best Tool for the Job
More than 50 years of academic research confirms that the principles governing human behavior can be easily applied to the workplace. Understanding general human behavior allows managers to understand why employees occasionally act counterproductively or neglect to follow correct work procedures.
There is a group of tools based on research into behavior principles known as behavioral technology. Behavioral technology is a positive reinforcement approach to maximizing employee performance. While Six Sigma and similar initiatives may include occasional celebrations of achievement, frequent feedback related to behavior is not central to these programs.
Behavioral technology, on the other hand, relies on supervisors and managers to accelerate, optimize, and sustain change through well-timed comments, questions, and actions that reinforce employees for mastering new tasks and behaviors. Behavioral technology can enhance any performance improvement initiative by assisting a company to:
- Recognize and understand that people behave in a manner consistent with the consequences they have experienced as a result of their behavior
- Track behaviors in the organization
- Compare these behaviors with “best practice” behaviors
- Pinpoint which behaviors in the organization need to be changed and which are necessary to achieve the goals of the organization
- Develop ways to reward those employees attempting the new “good” behaviors
- Measure the effectiveness of the new behaviors
- Evaluate the benefits of the new behaviors and pinpoint which new behaviors are not being accepted or not creating the anticipated benefits
Embarking on a large-scale performance improvement program is a major step in the life of a company. It is wise to do so only when the employee behavioral aspects of such a radical change are understood. Organizations that launch an enterprise-wide program in tandem with a commitment to fostering the right kinds of employee behavior can help employees to avoid errors, anticipate problems, volunteer discretionary effort, and assist team members.
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