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Structuring rewards and engaging people

No, Im not going to reinvent the wheel, yet again. I suspect youd disappear faster

than a Krispy Kreme at a weightwatchers meeting. However I would like briefly

explore what brain science has to say about the age-old problem of keeping people

happy at work.

Engagement is a term that has lost its currency, a notion cheapened by recurrent

efforts to intensively farm it in big companies. It strikes me that there are as many and

varied definitions and interpretations of engagement as there are organisations and

industries and the individuals who inhibit them. Measuring engagement is also fraught

with difficulty. Rather than answering the whatand how questions, I think we

need to look at the why.

Most of the folk I have seen in a career coaching context have testified to bad

relationships with managers or colleagues as a primary driver of career dissatisfaction,

as opposed to problems with their functional roles.

The Social Brain

Emotions are everything. In the first of this series of short notes, I highlighted the

point that the limbic brain assesses events in terms of threat and reward, or more

succinctly, avoids or attaches emotionally to events as they happen. What happens

next seems to follow a mysterious process as this diagram, adapted by Professor Paul

Brown, illustrates so well:

You can get an idea from this of how events are processed. The profoundly social and

emotional nature of the brain indicates that performance will be foundationallyaffected by emotional processing of any event and state of relationship between

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people involved. These feelings (step 5) are what create behaviours and it is these

behaviours which drive our performance at work.

Efforts to engage are missing the target

We want engaged workforces because it has some commercial benefit, right? Butefforts to improve cultures, whether through leadership programmes, talent strategies,

training, communications, new rules, bonuses, EVPs or off-sites, are nothing if the

relationship between person A and person B on the ground does not improve. And

relationships improve only if behaviour changes. But behavioural change requires

physical change to the brain by creating neural growth that supports new behaviours

and neglecting neural pathways that entrench unwanted behaviours such that they

start to wither away.

This is a different proposition to much HR intervention now that overly focuses on

fostering engagement through process to try to get people to play nice at work.

Relationship difficulties occur at the individual level because we are not great atseeing the world through someone elses eyes. The brain will do all it can to resist

change to existing neural patterning and make this process well-nigh impossible,

unless the person feels safe to try out different ways of interacting with others. It

explains why so many well-meant change initiatives fail. If done well, a coaching

culture works so much better by allowing someone to bring to awareness the non-

conscious habitual emotions driving their existing behaviours, model different ones

and practice new ways of interacting that over time hardwire and become normal.

As I mentioned last time, people dont want to be managed, they want to be

unleashed. Gen X and Y think differently. They want freedom and independence, to

feel a belonging at work and to enjoy themselves. Giving people ownership is key;

telling them what to do just doesnt seem to work anymore. When people solve things

themselves, the brain makes patterns and emits a rush of dopamine. The reward

response from real ownership of tasks can be stronger than a bonus. In these cash-

strapped times, that should be of serious interest.

You first

Leadership styles must move from command and control to collaboration. Your

people will give of their best under optimal conditions of each domain of SCARF

(Rock, 2007), a model for collaborating with and influencing others. These 5 domainseither activate reward or threat responses in the limbic system and determine neural

circuitry that drives behaviour. Provided you help maintain an individualsbalance of

SCARF, such approaches deliver higher performance from staff and help find this

elusive thing called engagement. It requires trust to flow from the top down, so if

leaders arent engaged with engaging, the whole thing wont get off the ground.