heartharmony.com.au

Humans seem to be hardwired for information and gossip. We see it every day in the celebrity gossip magazines, and the paparazzi industry. This industry is founded on taking micro facial expressions, snippets of conversations and creating a full operatic production from the information.  … And people lap it up in droves.

But this love of gossip is not limited to celebrity watchers. In a workplace, people watch “the boss” with the same intensity as they watch the latest scandal over Brittany. They look for facial expressions, the odd comment overheard as they pass by, cryptic post-it notes and pieces of paper left in photocopiers are pored over, and in the absence of any other information, people create a story around their interpretations of what they see. In stable times, this interpretation generally revolves around who are the bosses favourites and who gets the plum projects.

In more challenging times, the interpretation can swing wildly from businesses closing down through to sackings or takeovers. In challenging times, people naturally turn inwards and want to know “what does this mean for me”. In the absence of other information, they run these micro pieces of information through their internal mental representations of the world, and leap to conclusions. These conclusions then colour their actions – ranging from looking for other jobs, to disengaging mentally from the workplace, through to spreading their thoughts (gossiping) to other workmates and triggering mass hysteria.

There were studies done a few years back that looked at how people want to hear information about change or challenge in their workplace. Hands down winner was that people wanted to hear about the changes from their immediate boss, and not the CEO, company spokesperson or general briefing. They want to hear it from the person who they have the closest relationship with.

And yet, most businesses in times of challenge, sit on information. They wait until all the facts are known, trying to protect employees. The problem with this approach is that the micro snippets of information do get out and the workforce already starts the rumour mill running.

It is far better to share what you know when you know it, and answer honestly “We don’t know that yet and will tell you when we do”, rather than sit stoically silent waiting for all of the information. You need to share your story and your information as openly and as honestly as you can, as soon as you can. You need to fill in the blanks for your team, not allow them to create their own version of the truth that you then need to correct.

But it is not only employees who fill in the blanks. Customers do the same thing. When looking at businesses to buy from, they do the same hunt for micro expressions, snippets of information and then draw their own conclusions. Many company websites seem more designed as a “do it yourself mystery” rather than actually sharing full information with their clients. They leave out core information, they share images which may or may not be what they are like to work with, and they leave unanswered questions in the minds of their customers. In the absence of information to the contrary, people make an assessment about the business based on what they read and what they see. Businesses need to look at what they are communicating, and find ways to share their stories more fully with their customers and not leave them to make stuff up based on snippets of information.

You see, the thing is that once a piece of information is in someone’s mind, it can’t be erased. Marketers use this “priming” deliberately – anchoring the thought that the product or service is not this ridiculously high price, but this relatively more modest price point. Your mind remembers the first figure named. In business, employees and customers remember the first bit of information or gossip that they hear about a person or a business – even if it is false and subsequently overturned by correct data. If you wait to respond with information until you know all the facts, then you are no longer in control of the information that is recalled by your employees or customers.

So the bottom line is – get in first, give as much information as you can, there is no crime in saying “I don’t know the answer to that right now”, and repeat the message until you are heartily sick of it.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance writer

Invisible people are all around you. Each day, no matter where you go or no matter what you do, you pass invisible people. And no, I am not going all woo woo on you, I am simply talking about the people we all take for granted. Our taxi drivers, receptionists, shop assistants, cafe attendants, admin assistants and a myriad of other people whose job it is to care for us.

You can tell a lot about the character of a person by how they treat the invisible people around them. As an inveterate people watcher, I often sit and observe how people treat the invisible people around us. Most people barely acknowledge their existence, treating them as a funny shaped vending machine – put money in and get some goods or service in return.

And yet some people stop, take the time to give eye contact, a smile and a comment about their day or their lives. When this happens you can see the invisible people do a double take, stand a bit taller and smile. Someone has taken the time to make them visible, to be seen, to be acknowledged. Their customer service usually lifts for you and for the people after you – they feel better about themselves and their jobs – all from one simple contact.

We all crave human contact. We all have wants & desires. We all have hopes & dreams. Yet, the invisible people learn that their hopes and dreams are of lesser importance than those of the people they serve. Do we really want this to be the case?

So today when you travel about, when you grab your coffee, when you talk with an admin person, or you buy something in a shop, take a second to look at how you treat the invisible people around you, and then step out of your comfort zone to connect with them. Today make the invisible people visible.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance writer

In a world where we are switched on, tuned in 24/7, with hundreds of  online “friends” you could be forgiven for thinking that deep human needs are being met. And yet, when I talk with my clients, the need that they most crave, and are missing in their lives, are deeper connections with other people. They want to be known and accepted as they are by others.

Social media for many people is the equivalent of the head nod as you pass someone whose face you recognise on the street.  The people who do social media really well add in the hearty g’day and a chat about the weather – but they are still not meeting the needs for deeper connection between people.

Managers struggle with having honest and open conversations with their team members because they know they have no relationship & connection with the people they manage. We all instinctively know that we listen more if feedback comes from people we trust, respect and like, than someone who is part of our business wallpaper.  And yet, these same managers view the step to connect with their team in the same light as setting sail for the new world back a few hundred years – fears that “there be dragons” on the journey.

Women seem to find it easier to connect. Put two women in a room with some coffees between them and often the level of disclosure quickly heads into the “wouldn’t put that on Facebook” territory.

Guys on the other hand seem to struggle. I’m sure there are piles of wonderfully academic books written on this one, but here’s some home spun wisdom. If you want two or more blokes to “connect” or have a hard conversation, make sure there is some form of sporting equipment between them.

I have seen blokes deal with grieving the loss of a child over a few hoops of basketball. I have watched a few blokes fishing and in the process sort out inter team work conflicts.  I have seen handball courts form the backdrop to working on thorny goals, and have observed indoor cricket made from improvised equipment (you can’t beat the old rubber band balls) resolve stalemates in projects.  It doesn’t matter the form – just make the conversation not the focus but the sideline to something else.

So if you are serious about being a successful manager or business owner, work out how you can help fill the deeper need for connection with your team and clients … even if that means playing the odd round of  golf or lawn bowls.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance writer

This week I have been debating with a colleague about logical decision making. In normal situations, most businesses simply do not take enough account of available data to help inform their decisions.  They don’t look at Google search data before choosing their keywords, they don’t understand their balance sheets and instead make decisions based on flawed logic.They ignore information from government agencies about demographic trends & build their stores in areas of falling population. In normal cases, a simple look at the numbers will improve the quality of decision making 100%.

But what happens when the situation is not “normal”?  When you have all of the statistical data in the world and yet raw, messy emotions get in the way of logical decision making?When logic takes a holiday and emotion takes over?

I have seen this in many businesses over the years. Business owners holding onto their first store in a chain of stores, decades beyond when it was no longer profitable – purely for sentimental reasons. Business owners staying firm on price points for their products, ignoring feedback from clients that the items are over-priced, and conversely business owners not charging enough because their self esteem cuts across the data, making them believe that they are worth less than the data says.

I have  seen it in managers who have evidence that one of their team may be bullying or harassing staff – yet try and wave it away as an anomaly.  Other managers who have massive turnover in their team try and blame everyone else but themselves. And managers who hire family or friends who blatantly do not have the skills needed because they feel sympathy for them, and wonder why it all goes pear shaped in a few short weeks.

Decision making is not an exact science. Yes, we should try and gather as much logical data as possible. But when emotions are high, we need to run three “non logical”, emotion based rulers over our decisions.

1) What does our gut tell us about the decision? Is it right for us & the situation we are in right now? Does our gut feel smooth or are butterflies doing backstroke in there? Is our hunch that this will fail or work out?

2) What does our heart tell us about the decision? Does this decision make our heart sing or sink? Does it make our life feel lighter or heavier? Does it match or conflict with our personal values?

3) What are the assumptions we have made about the situation? Are we assuming that sales will magically improve, that our price is correct and feedback is wrong, that we are worthless and not worth more. What are we assuming about the situation – and are those assumptions correct?

Paralysis vs compelled action

Humans then go into flight or fight mode. They either head into flight – feel compelled to act RIGHT NOW, or they go into fight mode – usually fighting the data.

Often when emotions are high, we feel compelled to take immediate action.  Putting in a breathing space (no matter how short), helps to get some perspective back. Go and get a coffee. Talk with a trusted colleague. Sleep on it. They are all useful ways to gain perspective and counter the flight risk.

The other approach people take is delaying – looking for more information to help them decide, or in other words fighting the data they already have. Many people get into decision paralysis – sitting and hoping for the right decision to be written in 50 metre high burning letters in the sky.  If you wait for that degree of certainty, I have to tell you that it will never happen. It is just procrastination under a politically correct guise.

Just make a decision will ya!

The thing with decisions are that they are rarely 100% cut and dried, with no escape clauses.  The people who are successful are those that make decisions that may not be perfect, yet they take considered action taking into account all of the information. Then they track the results of the decision, and if necessary, quickly adjust the rudders to steer the ship in another direction.  It’s always easier to change direction of a moving ship, rather than one tied to the wharf.

Yes, they consider the data from a range of viewpoints and work out ways to mitigate the risks, and strengthen the best points of the decision. They don’t go in blind. They don’t let one factor take precedence over the other factors. They weigh up all of the factors and take the best educated decision that they can.

Decision making when emotions are strong, are messy, complex and raw. After all, humans are not the logical beasts we would like to believe we are.  For logical situations, follow a logical decision making model. For emotion laden decisions, you need to bring in emotion based information.

At least, that’s my view. What do you think? How do you make decisions when logic takes a holiday?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance writer

This week I have been talking with a few not for profit groups and they reminded me of the challenge that many bodies who receive external funding face – the need for what appears to be 4 billion reports back to different funding bodies, government agencies and the community.  You can put some logic back into it … and the trick is to start with planning.

For a time I was in charge of planning & reporting for a core government department. I remember looking at all of the plans and reports we had to produce in a year to meet all of the legal & accountability requirements – and figuring there had to be an easier way (those of you who know me, know I love to recycle information – write it once and use it for multiple purposes).

What I ended up doing was create a planning calendar. I listed across the top of a spreadsheet the different months and down the side the various plans & reports that had to be produced. I then did a mini Gantt chart across the calendar looking at how long it took to create each plan & report. This calendar was made pretty by our graphic design team and every manager had a copy to put on their wall (no excuses that they did not know what was needed each month).

I then looked at each plan & report to work out specifically what was needed in each, and whether or not we could collect the data once and use it for multiple purposes.  I then renegotiated a few KPIs with funding groups to help make data collection easier – I wanted to reduce the number of KPI’s to manageable levels.

From a manager’s view, what that looked like on the ground was when our Executive did their strategic plan for the year, we took an additional half day out to look at the questions “If these are the goals & KPI’s, what are the HR, funding, IT, waste management, environmental impact etc implications and what are the KPIs’s for those?”  This meant we covered off all the planning & measure setting in one fell swoop. We used these existing measures in as many funding submissions as we could, rather than create new measures.

We included individual annual performance plans in the process. We had a set “performance review season” where every annual review had to be done & linked back to the overall kpis.

We then had managers do just one monthly report against each of the KPI’s (so they were happier as they only had one report to do). I collated the data from all of the separate managers reports and then split it out into the different reports that had to be submitted.  I started doing this manually and then got to the stage where I had a macro pull the data off excel spreadsheets into one central spreadsheet and then another macro pull the data out of that spreadsheet into the different report templates I had created. There is always technology to make things easier.

The point is, there is always another way with writing reports.  You don’t have to be bound by what is. Take a step out, reflect on your assumptions and then take action to fix the 4 billion reports.  And if you find yourself writing the same stuff over and over … there is always another way!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

“You are only as strong as your weakest link”. “One bad apple spoils the barrel”. If you think about it, there’s a lot of sayings about the negative difference one person can make. But is this really true? Can one bad employee wreck  a team? This was the puzzle given to me by a client – they wanted proof that one bad egg can spoil the batch.

So … what proof is there?  Well there has been some very elegant research done by Will Felps, Terence R Mithcell and Eliza Byington back in 2006. They first did a review of all of the current research on the issue and then conducted clinical tests to find out exactly what happens when one negative group member joins a group.

In their research, they defined negative group member in one of three ways. They used academic language, but the categories were:

• The slacker - someone who doesn’t pull their weight, doesn’t take on tasks or responsibilities, who doesn’t contribute or meet deadlines.
• The jerk – someone who is obnoxious and puts people down, makes fun of people, these are the ones making ethnic or sexist jokes, publicly embarrasses people and are generally rude .
• The depressed pessimist – someone who always believes that anything the company tries is doomed to failure, they are highly anxious, insecure & irritable

I am sure most people at one time or other in their careers have met one of these charmers.

But what happens to the group when you add in one of these people? Well according to their findings, the group productivity drops between 30-40%. Add to that effect, you start to see other team members begin to exhibit the traits of the negative person, which increases the problems for the team in terms of productivity, cooperation, creativity, morale and learning.  People are less interested in finishing a task – they just want to “get it over with”.

So the next time a manager avoids dealing with a negative person in the workplace, you may want to point them in the direction of the research, and ask them if they are more willing to reduce their team’s productivity by 30-40% than have an uncomfortable conversation with one person.

If you want more information about the study, here’s a link to an interview with Will Felps, and a link to the full research report “How, When, and Why Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel: Negative Group Members and Dysfunctional Groups”.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

As a card carrying people watcher from early childhood, I love to find out what makes people tick. So I went to Uni and studied Psychology and then spent decades in the field observing how employees and people responded to different situations (and then tried to work out why they did what, on the surface, looked like totally illogical behaviour).

I grab my latest copies of psychology and neuroscience research with all the unbridled joy of a kid being let lose in a Darrell Lea chocolate shop with an unlimited budget … but I have to tell you … a lot of the best research is boring to read. I mean dead boring. I mean it is so boring and soporific that I swear that they use it to knock people out in sleep clinics.

Which is why I love this You Tube Video (thanks Brandrally for sharing it). It takes normal, rather boring research and turns it into a work of art. This is the ultimate example of why Powerpoint should be banned and more creative ways adopted to get messages across are adopted.

What’s the video about? Well in a nutshell, why motivating employees with money sucks, and why cash bonuses as an employee motivation strategy suck even more. Interesting viewing!

Love to hear your thoughts about both the video and the technique.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

I have been talking with quite a few teens lately (and no I didn’t need a translation service to allow this to happen). Teens traditionally see themselves as 10 foot tall and indestructible. There have been a myriad of scientific studies explaining why this is the case … and yet to date all our focus has been on stopping our teens doing physical damage to themselves with cars and alcohol.

What I have noticed though is teens really don’t have any clue of the concept of “forever”. They think in the now which is all great and fun, but what happens when now turns into tomorrow and tomorrow after that. What am I talking about?

Teens post all sorts of wonderful and creative things on Facebook and Twitter. Sharing their birthday seems like a lot of fun – but it opens the way to identity theft. Once your birthday is public on the net – it stays there, no matter how much you try to remove it later.

Teens make throwaway lines about other students, parents, teachers and friends. They also make less than positive comments about social issues, work and study. These are the equivalent of getting these comments tattooed onto their skin. They last and will impact on future employability.

Photos of them in strange costumes and doing things and people make the net and can’t be removed. It used to be that embarrassing photos were the province of parents at your 21st, now they are there forever.

Listening to Bernard Salt on 612ABC this week he raised the issue of our future MPs and Prime Minister in years to come. If today is anything to go by, when someone aspires to public office the media checks out all the dirt they can find on the net. I have this vision of our future leaders being Amish, as they are the only ones without embarrassing historical photos & comments on the net. Unless our culture of digging for dirt changes, it will make our political ranks rather thin.

The other problem is their comments stick. Social media sites rank well in search engines. If they make a derogatory comment about a teacher or other person (whether true or not), then these comments tend to appear at the top of Google.  This damages the person’s reputation and can cause amazing stress.

Most people don’t know how to deal with this, so there is a whole new industry out there doing “Online Reputation Management” – cleaning up the electronic mess left by unthinking people.

So, what can we do about it? Well for my kids I have tried to explain it like this…  “Remember when you loved Barbie. Everything had to be Barbie and pink. Now imagine that you had had Barbie tattooed onto your skin back then. Would you be happy with your tattoo today? Your tastes change. Tattoos are like wearing the same set of clothes for the rest of your life. Writing anything on the web is like getting a tattoo. Whatever you write stays with you forever, so you had better seriously work out what you want to wear for the rest of your life when you write each word”.

I have no idea if my little homily has worked with my kids, but we can only hope. What do you do to help the next generation understand net permanence?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

I have just been going back through some New Scientist issues. There was an interesting article on the psychology behind why sports people take drugs and while others stay clean. In summary, the series of studies referred to found:

• those motivated more by a desire to beat others had more permissive attitudes to doping than those who were motivated more by mastering their sport

• athletes who said their coaches frequently criticised them, punished them for mistakes, encouraged rivalries and gave unequal recognition to teammates had the most favourable attitudes towards doping.

They also found that those who did take the drugs did so because they felt they had to do so to compete.  They also found health concerns of taking banned substances caused very little mental concern, and yet the feelings of guilt about letting themselves and their families down weighed the most heavily.

So what? Well these studies give us an insight into a lot of other areas (and yes the purists would say we need to test each area individually to ensure there is a correlation).

The factors causing people to cheat sound a heck of a lot like a lot of workplaces. How many stock traders for example are motivated more by a desire to beat the other traders than simply master the stock-market? How many company directors want to beat the competition rather than just being great at what they do? Do these feelings encourage breaking the law?

What about managers and how they manage. How many managers either deliberately or inadvertently create rivalries between team members and other work areas? How many managers punish people for mistakes or give unequal recognition? By their actions are they creating the toxic work culture that encourages people to take short-cuts with the truth?

This leads to some other interesting ideas in terms of marketing. For example – emphasising how you are letting yourself and your family down may be more effective in cutting smoking than focusing on health warnings.

Imagine the shift in behaviour of some of our footy larrikans if the impact their drinking and partying had on their family or team members.  Video footage of fallen greats wives, kids and parents giving “victim impact” statements of how it felt to be front page news may be more powerful than bravado filled chats.

Teaching ethics or stopping shoplifting by focusing on the impact a breach has on your family may be more effective than hundreds of hours of “thou shalt not” teachings. Perhaps politicians should be shown video footage of fallen QLD politicians heading off the jail, complete with comments from their spouses and families about the impact on their lives as part of their ethics programs.

It pays to keep in touch with studies looking at unravelling human behaviour. How can you implement this in your business?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Over the past few years we have heard a lot of managers complaining about the time their employees spend on Facebook. Many companies have taken drastic measures to close their internet access to these types of sites, while others have looked the other way.

Managers who are not technologically savvy deal with the issue as atraditional performance issue – that social media reduces time available for work in the same way that smoking breaks limit the available time for work.

Managers who are technologically savvy argue this is the way the world is going, and to retain good employees they need to allow a window into that world.

In the mean time we have scientists trying to prove that open access is great for productivity or is the worst thing possible for productivity, depending on who has funded the study.

But … all of these issues pale into nothingness compared with the whole raft of ethical issues arising from social media that have not adequately been debated.

What am I talking about?

• Managers “Googling” potential candidates to see what their social profiles may say about them. Smart managers ask more questions about candidates who list their hobbies as “getting wasted every night with mates”. Is this an invasion of privacy or should candidates realise that their information is public domain once they have posted it on sites such as MySpace and Facebook?

• Companies putting in permanent Google Alerts, Blog searches and Twitter searches to alert them whenever their companies’ name is mentioned in the social media – and then disciplining or sacking people who vent their anger at the boss in social media.  Recently a US coach was fined for an ill-considered comment on Twitter about the referee after a match.

• Companies are starting to hire Social Media Managers and teams to find and respond to customer complaints in social media. But what happens if they cross over the line into deliberately planting waves of positive stories? We all know spin happens – but where is the grey line between spin, propaganda and bald faced lies?  How do these strategies blend with corporate Codes of Conduct? What happens to the person who disagrees with completing a positive spin directive on moral or ethical grounds.

• Social media team members in  a company building a fantastic following on Twitter while they talk about their company – then being hired to work elsewhere. Who owns the followers – the company or the individual? (Thanks Duct Tape Marketing for raising this issue)

• Employees responding to questions on forums and sites like LinkedIn arguing that this is building the company profile, when they really are aiming to build their online personal profile and expertise (and then leave).

• Insider trading becomes much murkier, as people track comments by employees about their organisation in the social media, which can then impact on share prices.

• Managers deliberatly searching out the Twitter and Facebook accounts of their team and either joining as a friend/follower or just regularly checking in to see what is being said/done. Visa Versa for employees doing the same for managers accounts.

At this point of time, the ethical discussion about what is acceptable and appropriate within companies and within society around social media has not yet been had. There are some blanket policies in HR manuals and employee manuals, but in most cases managers have not had any discussion with their team about the relevance and impact of these policies.

Many managers are flying blind and don’t yet know what questions to ask to even begin the discussion with their team. Given at least 40% of all small businesses don’t yet own a website, let alone any form of social media presence – how many of these managers will have the knowledge or skills to be able to deal with these questions when they arise in their company?

For example, I put in a Twitter search to track people tweeting about their performance reviews. Comments like:

“I have to worry about costs on my performance review? #FAIL! I only deploy projects on free software from now on. No support contracts.”

“I sure hope the new bosses will review our payscales. @ev STILL hasn’t done my last performance review”

“I have my annual performance review today. No raises, so what’s the point?”

“Performance review was totally boring.”

“Annual performance review meeting coming up top of the hour. Bogosity shall ensue I’m sure.”

“There’s one person I work with who I’d really like to vote off the island. Typically, she’s now responsible for my performance review. Blah.”

“Just got a message from YMCA saying I have a performance review tomorrow- only worked once in the last 7 months. It’ll probably be bad.”

These are all just samples from a 3 day period. It isn’t hard to figure out where these people work – in most cases it is recorded in their profiles. How would you as a manager feel if one of your employees tweeted to the world about you and your reviews in that way? What action would you take? Would you even know how to find out what they were saying?

What other ethical questions do you think that social media creating for managers?

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – HR writers