Many employees fall into a rut. They do their jobs and respond to challenges in a set way to deliver stable results. But consistency can give way to performance gaps between a company’s high achievers and its weakest links.
Fortunately, seeking help and adopting the practices of higher-performing co-workers can help those employees improve.
“When you are exposed to different ideas or a different way of working, it can change your own behavior,” says Christopher Stanton, the Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.
A number of issues, however, can block employees from benefitting from their more successful peers. For example, an employee might not recognize themselves as underperforming, so don’t seek help. Or, if they recognize their weaknesses, they might not know who to turn to. But in general, two barriers tend to get in the way: lower-performing employees are too reticent to ask for help, or higher-performing employees are reluctant to give it.
This suggests that performance is more malleable and can be changed if you give people the right environment to gain knowledge about their jobs.
“People might be intimidated to approach the sales superstar and reveal that they are having problems because of self-image issues,” Stanton says. “And the best salespeople may want to hold on to their information because it gives them status within a firm.”
In a recent working paper, Workplace Knowledge Flows, Stanton investigates the barriers to see which is stronger and how companies can overcome them. The study—conducted with the University of Utah’s Jason Sandvik and Nathan Seegert; and the University of Michigan’s Richard Saouma—tested targeted interventions at a call-center for a telecommunications company in which there was a greater than 50 percent difference in revenue-per-call between top-quartile and bottom-quartile employees.
“There are common pitfalls that people face in the sales process,” says Stanton. “People repeatedly run into the same types of issues, but every salesperson handles those issues slightly differently. It’s hard to train for that because everyone has a different style and way of talking to customers.”
Tackling reticence and resistance at a call center
For the study, Stanton and his colleagues introduced two interventions:
In one, employees broke into pairs and filled out worksheets about their strengths and weaknesses as salespeople. They then compared notes and talked through how they could improve.
In the other, pairs of employees received a financial bonus based on their combined performance to incentivize them to help their co-workers succeed.
The first intervention aimed to overcome reticence among lower-performing employees by giving them a structured process to speak with their colleagues. The second sought to overcome resistance from higher-performing employees by rewarding them for helping their peers.
Stanton and his colleagues assumed that both approaches would help improve performance, and that using both interventions together would lift it even more.
After four weeks, they found that, indeed, both strategies worked—at least during the study period. The structured meetings increased revenue-per-call by 24 percent, while the monetary incentives increased it by 13 percent. Combining the two interventions boosted the total by a small but statistically insignificant amount over the structured meetings alone.
After the study period ended, however, something surprising happened. When the researchers measured performance about five months later, the employees who participated in the structured meetings had held their higher performance, with revenue-per-call up 18 percent to 21 percent. The incentive group, however, had completely fallen back to their original performance levels.
Prioritizing the means over the end
Stanton surmises that the structured meetings helped employees talk through consistent problems that bedeviled their performance, and to make lasting changes. When the researchers looked at transcripts from the sessions, they found employees talking through meaningful difficulties.
For example, one worker shared a trick for keeping track of information customers share at the beginning of calls, reducing a source of stress. Another advised a colleague not to “unbundle” the price of features when presenting customers with potential packages, but to present only bundled prices so customers couldn’t separate out features.
“Just correcting these mistakes and providing another way of doing things seemed to explain a lot of that productivity improvement,” says Stanton.
On the other hand, he says, there is no evidence that the people in the incentive group even met with each other, much less compared notes on how they could improve. Stanton speculates that the bonus offer encouraged people to work harder during the promotion period, and then effort fell sharply when it ended.
Talk is cheap—and more effective
Taken as a whole, the results are encouraging for employers, Stanton says. Financial incentives—the more costly approach—didn’t inspire lasting change, while the more successful intervention didn’t cost anything more than employees’ time to participate in meetings.
“If you talk to many managers, they would say that the distinguishing feature between their top performers and others might be just a natural variation in ability,” Stanton says. “This suggests that performance is more malleable and can be changed if you just give people the right environment to gain knowledge about their jobs.”
Setting up an open office or giving people incentives to talk with one another, however, may not be enough.
“You need to have more active or curated interviews, giving people a reason to talk to one another, and an agenda so they can reflect on their strengths and opportunities for growth,” Stanton says. “You don’t have to break the bank on compensation to make this happen.”
Sometimes a little push like that is all employees need to get out of a rut.
About the Author
Michael Blanding is a writer based in Boston.
[Image: Mark Kostich]
