“When we first used 360 degree feedback, we used it as a performance management tool. It was not popular. So we left it for a year.

“When we introduced it again, we presented it as a development tool. Completely different, people loved it – and even come to me to ask if they can do it.”

It is a good lesson. It reminds me of a discussion I had with a doctor about two surgeries he knew. One used ‘performance management’ to deal with any problems and had a support staff turnover around 50%. The other focused on creating a good working environment and supporting people. They hadn’t lost a member of staff in years.

It comes back to MacGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y. The standard approach to Performance Management is implicitly based on the Theory X idea that people are lazy and need to be managed to perform. Instead Theory Y poses that people are self-motivated and eager to do great work.

Remember that lesson from ODA: People don’t generally enjoy being performance managed, but they love being developed & improving their ability and performance.

So the key question: Is your organisation’s approach based on believing in your people?

Georgie Fienberg is the founder of Afrikids, an inspirational charity working to improve the quality of life of vulnerable children in northern Ghana. Sustainability is key to its approach and its aim is to cease to exist, because their work is done, within a decade.

Afrikids recently held a strengths session for staff. First, they put all the skills needed in the organisation on pages and put them on the wall.

For the full post, click through to Delivering Happiness

One of the simplest ways to make your people happier, and more productive, is to ensure they spend their time at work doing what they are good at. That may sound obvious but it is surprisingly rare. Based on asking over a million people, Gallup found the number agreeing with the statement, “At work today, I got to do what I am best at,” was just 20%.

The book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham, outlines the Strengthsfinder philosophy. One of my strengths is ‘Woo’ (Win Over Others). This means I am great at networking and meeting people. At corporate exhibitions, I love going greeting strangers and engaging them in talking about our service. And I used to get frustrated with colleagues who stayed at the back of the stall and didn’t talk to anybody unless approached.

For the full article, click through to Delivering Happiness

I met this week with Ole Kassow whose Danish company (www.wemind.dk) works with companies to create happier cultures. One example was working with a Danish mobile phone company. Most European mobile phone companies have customer turnover rates of over 40%. Yes, they lose 4 in 10 customers each year and have to spend millions winning over new customers to replace them. Ole was working with them to focus on spending some of that money on making their customers want to stay and recommend the service to others. I liked this story he told:

For the rest of the blog click through to my post on the Delivering Happiness site.

The core of the problem, it seems to me, is that the bankers bonuses that we hear so much about are never based on the amount of money made for the customer, but instead on the amount of money made for the bank. This means that, at every decision point, the incentive is to find a way to make more for the company even if this means less for the client.

For many years I had a personal pension primarily invested in the Stewardship Fund, managed by what was then Friends Provident. At an awards ceremony I met somebody from the company and mentioned that it hadn’t done very well. “Oh really?” they replied. “The Fund Manager is hugely well regarded and gets big bonuses for the performance of that fund.” But, after commissions and costs are taken out I had calculated the return over 18 years at 0.5% a year, after inflation is deducted. The Fund Manager might be doing very well, but I certainly wasn’t.

Most people have a similar experience. Whether its our endowment, our personal pension, or our savings we have generally seen lousy performance (even in the stock market boom years of the 90s) at the same time as many in the financial sector receive massive bonuses. Now I don’t know if its always the same people who manage these elements who get the money and, like most people, exactly how the financial sector works is slightly hazy to me. But let me use an analogy to explain my view:

The cat and the cream

Let’s say I leave a bowl of cream on the kitchen table, planning to cook with it, and leave the room. If I come back and find no cream left in the bowl, but a very  contented cat strolling around the kitchen floor, I may not have seen what happened but – with me now having no cream and the cat clearly looking well-satisfied – I can make a fair guess. The same for me is true for bankers. We gave them our money, in various forms. We ended up with not much money and they ended up with lots. Its pretty clear there is something odd about what happened and continues to happen.

We also know that the same is not true of other European countries. In Denmark for instance, where I understand banker bonuses are much lower, the pension you would get is said to be 31% higher than for somebody making the same contributions in the UK.

Back in 2008, just after the crash, I remember being told by a colleague in the financial sector about the effect of the way the system worked. “I know of cases”, he explained “where people knew the deal they were making did not make sense in the long-term. But the bonus they would earn on that one deal would pay off their mortgage. It was so great that they put aside their reservations and did what they were incentivised to do.”

One simple change – pay bonuses based on how much money has been made for the customer

Incentives, such as bonuses, are intended to drive behaviour and of course they have that effect. So here is my suggestion: Let’s change the nature of bonuses so that they are paid on the basis of how much money has been made for the customer. If that was the case, then perhaps Goldman Sachs directors would start talking at their meetings about how they could help clients.

Do you work at a company where bonuses are based solely on income or profit for the company? if so, how would behaviour be different if it was based on benefit to the customer?

Imagine, asking your customers what they want! It is an act that seems so stunningly obvious, you would imagine everybody would do it. But have you ever been asked in a shop which products you would like to see on the shelves? Since reading the article, I have been racking my brain to think of any time when this has happened to me and I can’t think of one. There are shops I’ve gone in several times a week for over a decade and never been asked if there is anything else I’d like them to sell.

But that is the simple strategy that Ozzy has adopted. He asks his customer what they want to see on the shelves and then makes sure he gets it and puts it there. You too could try this radical idea: Ask your customers what they want and then give it to them.

This classic book, written by Dale Carnegie in the 1930s, encourages you to understand the people you work with and to walk in their shoes. ‘I had been chasing this debt for weeks,’ explains Diye, ‘and it was getting increasingly antagonistic. I had threatened legal action and he [the client] had responded with, “See you in court.”’

For the full post, click through to Delivering Happiness

That principle is the core of everything we do at Happy (a training business in London, UK). Think about whether you agree with it. If you do, and I find over 95% of people do, then what should be the key focus of management? By simple logic, it should clearly be creating an environment where people are happy and feel good about themselves.

When I speak at conferences, I like to ask the audience to raise their hands if that is the main focus of management in their organisation. Generally one or two in a hundred raise their hands. (I suspect I’d get a different response if I spoke at Zappos.) Yet there is strong evidence to suggest such a focus makes good business sense.

For remainder of post click through to the Delivering Happiness Blog

“Happy Computers’ Learnfizz is an innovative application that is aimed at crowd-sourcing learning content within the public domain and making it readily available on a world-wide basis. Contributors are encouraged to develop their own, or highlight, learning content that is freely available and then, in a collaborative environment, it is made available throughout the world in an easily accessible format.

“The programme has the potential to create enormous benefit in both deprived and wealthy communities, and it is an excellent example of the way in which social media technology and collaboration architecture can integrate learning resources in the public domain and make them accessible through an advanced learning portal.”

“I am so delighted with this award”, explained Happy Chief Executive Henry Stewart. “It is a great endorsement for what we believe is a product that can help shape the way people learn in the future. We hope that whether you are a learning professional, an inner-city teacher or a child in Africa this will enable you ton find great learning resourcers – for free.”

Runners-up in the award were BT and the Open University. The Learning & Performance Institute was until last year known as the Institute of IT Training.

We worked with one company who had a problem with their Marketing Manager. Let’s call her Sarah. Now Sarah was brilliant at marketing and vital to the company’s success. But she was not good at managing people and lost around half her staff every year as they moved to other jobs.

Click through to Delivering Happiness for the full post