It’s not the Perks
August 24 by Rosa | Work
How would you like to work for a company like this?
- Exceptional care taken to provide tools of the trade, such as cell phones, pda’s, and laptops.
- Generous leeway and few questions ever asked about expense reports.
- Covered parking in a secure garage.
- Newly renovated break room, including seating on an outdoor patio.
- Continental breakfast catered in for casual Fridays.
- Partnerships with other businesses in the same locale, so that discounted tickets are available for movies, car washes, pizza deliveries, and a host of other things.
- Flex time options when you need to schedule dentist and doctor visits.
- Company sponsored daycare center.
- Lending library stocked with books and magazines.
- Quarterly staff outings, such as bowling nights and beach barbecues.
Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it.
I thought so, and I commented on the generosity of a company I visited recently. The young woman who was taking me on tour had worked for them for over five years. She nodded her head, but then she said,
“Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff, and we do appreciate it, but you know, it’s just stuff. The thing that truly makes me love my job isn’t any of this.”
“Really? What is it then?”
“It’s my boss and the way I am treated. He spends a lot of time with me, and I don’t feel like I’m a burden to him. He respects me, he asks my opinion about things, and if I do mess up with something he tells me gently, but he does tell me so I can fix it and get better. He trusts me, and I know he has faith in me. Those are the more important things.”
Can’t add much more to that; she said it pretty well.
Great management matters most of all.
Related Articles:
- To Show You Care, Show Your Respect
- Ensuring Dignity for Staff is Not Difficult!
- Roll up those sleeves: Mistakes and Trust Building
- Talking to your Manager
- Create Your Kipuka (A haven and oasis at work)
Rosa Say is the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business and the Talking Story blog. She is the founder and head coach of Say Leadership Coaching, a company dedicated to bringing nobility to the working arts of management and leadership. For more of her ideas, click to her Thursday columns in the archives; you’ll find her index in the left column of www.ManagingWithAloha.com
Rosa’s Previous Thursday Column was: New to Management: A Learning Hit List
To an outsider one of the best guages of the mindset of a company is still going to be those other perks. Sure, you could end up with a great manager at a stingy company or a bad manager at a good company, but the other perks will help set the tone of the people that manage there.
Yep- give employees perks, and they will appreciate them, but truly solid morale comes from fulfillment on a much deeper level. Great managers and leaders understand that to develop and maintain excellent performance, you need to obtain and keep excellent performers.
Restrictions placed upon recruiting, hiring, and firing practices result in less than talented people and people that do not enjoy or fit in their roles entering your organization all the time. In the interest of being *fair*, we often push the interest of being *effective* aside.
Generous perks end up keeping everybody, regardless of their contribution level or talents. They motivate your best employees to be better, but only motivate your B and C players to do *just enough* to keep the perks. This is fine for an organization that wants to *just enough*, but stagnation is death in the business world.
I can only see this type of generosity working if your recruiting process was near flawless, consistently placing ideal candidates in the roles they were made for- like pro sports teams, or elite advertising and design firms. But in organizations with a high percentage of entry level positions (take any customer service callcenter, factory, or Walmart for example), this generosity does not directly translate into bottom line success.
Excellent performers are most likely people with a definite direction and stay with companies regardless of the lack of superficial perks if that direction is encouraged, fueled, and supported.
There is research that supports this notion. A great book to read on this topic is “First Break All The Rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.
The book is analysis of a huge study conducted by the Gallup Organization involving 80,000 managers across different industries to determine the most effective means for attaining, keeping and measuring employee satisfaction and focused on the common characteristics used by the top performing business units. The most important thing I gained from reading and re-reading it was the fact that certain employee needs must be fulfilled before fulfilling others will produce results. For instance, employees need to be certain of what is expected of them and have the materials to do their job properly before any efforts to *engage* employees with praise and recognition, or discussions about their progress and development will have significant effects.
I guess the bottom line is that people don’t work for, love, hate, or leave jobs or organizations. They work for, love, hate, or leave people and talented leaders and managers know this.
The perks are a symptom – a symptom of good management that appreciates its employees. The perks are not the cause of good managemment – they are the result. In almost every case, I think you’ll find that perks are the “icing on the cake”. They help keep turnover down which keeps productivity up and saves a lot of money.
I’d also say that if you have B or C players, you should (as a manager) be managing them up or out. That is, as Ed said, outside of the perks themselves.
Aloha Y0mbo, Jonathan and Ed, thank you for your comments.
Jonathan, I am very familiar with FBATR, Soar with your Strengths and the work of Gallup, and indeed, the statistical evidence they have compiled and present is quite telling – and compelling.
All three of you have added to my article nicely for a more complete picture on the balance we have to achieve, even when providing something “good” in their initial appearances – thank you.
When I got to my current day job over 9 years ago, I told my interviewers that I intended to quit after 2 years. I accidentally stayed, and haven’t found a good enough reason for them to fire me yet. It’s a loving place, with lots of interesting opportunities. I’m thankful that I’m here.
And yet, all cultures fall. Eventually.
An Environment for Learning…
Let’s say you decide to go back to college.
This time, you are going to do it on your own terms. Not because you have to, but because you want to. You are older and wiser now, and you have the ability to look back, taking advantage of the fact that h…
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