At work, we all recognize the importance of enthusiasm – both our own and our team’s. Being passionate and enthusiastic about what we do creates positive energy and is especially important when interacting with existing or prospective clients.
There are periods in the market, however, when it’s tough to maintain our excitement. And while exercise to start the day, taking regular breaks and scheduling vacations can help, in tough markets such as we’ve seen this year, it can be challenging to stay positive and passionate. That’s why some surprising insights about how Google keeps its staff enthused can be helpful.
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The biggest surprise: The key to motivation has nothing to do with bonuses or stock options, but rather stems from the work itself and linking what people do to positive outcomes for clients.
The three keys to motivation
Laszlo Bock is Google’s senior vice president for “people operations.” In the article, Focus on Passion Not Perks, he addressed the misconception that Google maintains motivation through salaries and perks like free food and funky offices. He pointed to three keys that actually motivate Googlers:
“We spend more time working than we do on almost any other activity in our lives. People want all that time to mean something. Other companies make similar products, and yet our employees tell us that they are drawn to Google because being here means something more than ‘just’ searching the internet or linking friends.
The translation of our mission into something real and tangible has a huge effect on who decides to join Google, how much engagement and creativity they bring to this place, and even on how they feel and behave after leaving.”
“We share everything we can. We have a weekly all-hands meeting called TGIF, hosted by our founders, Larry and Sergey. In the first 30 minutes, we review news and product launches from the past week, demo upcoming products, and celebrate wins. But the second 30 minutes is the part that matters most: Q&A.
Everything is up for question and debate, from the trivial (“Larry, now that you’re CEO will you start wearing a suit?” The answer was a definite ‘no’), to the ethical (“Is Google going in the right direction?”). A few weeks into every quarter, our executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, presents to all Googlers virtually the exact materials that were presented to our Board of Directors at their last meeting. Our intranet includes product roadmaps, launch plans and employee snippets (weekly status reports), alongside employee and team OKRs (quarterly goals) so that everyone can see what everyone else is working on. We share everything, and trust Googlers to keep the information confidential.”
“Believing in a greater good and knowing what’s going on are important, but people then need to be able to translate their beliefs and knowledge into action. We try to have as many channels for expression as we can, recognizing that different people – and different ideas – will percolate up in different ways.
But just as important as generating input is doing something with it. We regularly survey employees about their managers, and then use that information to publicly recognize the best managers and enlist them as teachers and role models for the next year. The worst managers receive intense coaching and support, which helps 75 percent of them get better within a quarter.”
Why mission matters
Bock places special emphasis on directly linking what employees do to positive outcomes for clients. As one example, Google began showing salespeople videos of interviews with small business people who had been helped by Google’s products. Salespeople were more motivated and productive as a result.
In his best-selling book, Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google that Will Transform How You Live and Lead, Bock described how research by Wharton’s Adam Grant changed Google’s strategy on motivating its salespeople. In Putting a Face to a Name, Grant described an experiment at a college call center in which employees called alumni to ask for donations. Working in a call center is a tough job with lots of rejection.
In the experiment, people making the calls spent five minutes talking with students who had been able to attend the university as a result of alumni donations. The result of that five minutes? A month later, employees who had talked to beneficiaries of the grants had spent twice as much time talking to donors and had raised almost three times as much money.
For this to work, employees don’t even have to meet with students directly. In his book, Bock described another experiment by Grant that divided call center employees into three groups. Group A was the control group that operated as usual. Group B read an article about the personal benefits offered by the job such as opportunities for learning and bonuses. Group C read stories from scholarship recipients about how grants had changed their lives. After a month, employees in Group C had raised weekly pledges by 155% (from 9 to 23 a week) and weekly fundraising by 143% (from $1,288 to $3,130).
And this wasn’t the only experiment that proved the impact of showing people the outcomes of their work. Lifeguards who read stories about saving drowning swimmers were 21% more vigilant. Students editing a letter from another student seeking employment spent 20% more time if they had met the author.
Reconnecting with your mission
When meeting with clients, it is easy for advisors and their teams to focus on the tasks to be done and to lose sight of the long-term impact of their work. By focusing on how clients are better off as a result of this work, however, advisors and their teams will be more enthused and excited, even in tough markets. Here are a few ideas for how you can easily do that:
- When you hold team meetings to start the week, take three minutes to talk about one client you met with last week or who you’re meeting with in the week ahead who is better off because he or she is working with you.
- When preparing for a client meeting, jot down how the client has progressed since beginning to work together.
- When you end your day, take 60 seconds to write down the names of the clients you talked to who are closer to reaching their goals because of your work.
These are all small things, but do them and you and your team will be more positive in tough markets. You can read more about Adam Grant’s research in this McKinsey Consulting interview. Here’s an excerpt from that interview:
If you look at the data, what most employees are looking for in their jobs is a sense of meaning and purpose. And when you look at, in turn, what makes work meaningful, what enables people to feel that their daily lives in organizations are significant – more than anything else it’s the belief that “My work makes a difference.” That “What I do has some kind of benefit or lasting value to other people.”
… An interesting example of this that comes to mind is at Merck, where we’ve had a number of conversations about the idea that many of the jobs, particularly if you’re doing sales, are hard to connect to—“What’s the real impact on patients?” But if you could translate the value of a drug into life-years saved, or quality-of-life contributed, it really shifts the meaning of the work, and now the performance measurements are less mundane.
Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written commentaries, go to www.danrichards.com.
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