NEW YORK–Work sucks (sometimes). But credit unions have some strong and unique advantages for making sure that is not the case (at least on most days).
Laszlo Bock, the well-known former Google executive vice president who wrote the book “Work Rules,” shared rules for work that demand credit unions rethink many aspects of employment and hiring with CO-OP Financial Services’ THINK Conference here. That rethinking, which he organized around four principles, will lead to ROI and observable competitive advantages, according to Block, who donates proceeds from his book sales to charity.
“What hit me one day is we spend more time working than we do anything else in our lives,” said Bock, who spent more than a decade every Monday afternoon reviewing new hires at Google. “The experience of work for too many people sucks. But science shows if you make it better people are more productive and happier. Culture is not beanbags, it’s not lava lamps and it’s not having money. It’s all about whether you believe people are inherently good, or inherently evil. It all comes down to how you treat people.”
Bock urged credit unions to consider these five points for work environment improvements:
Give Your Work Meaning
“Science says the number-one thing you can do is give your work meaning,” said Bock. “How connected do people feel to purpose and meaning in their work? One study found that in every profession one-third of people found meaning in their work, another third do it because they want to make a buck, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And another third just want to move up. But if you can connect people to a meaning in their work, productivity goes up and it’s a happier place.”
Bock urged CUs to identify members who have been most affected by what the credit union has done for them, and to have those people come in and share their stories as another way of helping employees to really connect with their work.
Trust Your People
“If you believe people are good, give them freedom and they will do good things,” Bock said. “A good rule is to give your people a little more freedom you are comfortable with, and let them know. A little freedom goes a long way.”
Laszlow shared a study done on a Nike Factory that basically turned over autonomy to its workers. It went from 80 shirts per day per employee to 150 shirts per person per day. Average costs went down to 11 cents per shirt, but employees were paid more. “Everyone won by simply asking people, ‘What do you think?’” said Bock.
Hire People Who Are Better than You
“Hiring people who are better than you is the secret to building an unbelievable organization,” Bock posited. “We all suck at hiring. By definition, we’re all average at hiring. We’re faced with a choice as leaders to keep hiring people as we do to get average people and average results, so we can invest, invest, invest in training them. The other option is to have a higher quality hiring process that gives you better people from the start. Any time you hire someone your rule should be, Are they better than me?’”
Bock said in most cases all job interviews do is manifest confirmation bias.
“Confirmation bias means I have a sense from the moment I meet you whether I’m going to like you or not, and then I spend the rest of the interview subconsciously looking for ways to confirm your hypothesis that I like this person,” he said.
Bock called job interviews a “terrible predictor” of whether a new hire will work out, even though everyone thinks they’re “awesome at it.”
“A good indicator of that is if you’ve been at your company for a few years and you sometimes find yourself thinking, ‘Why did we hire these idiots?’” he said.
A better approach, according to Bock is to determine the job characteristics. He called job descriptions “useless.” He said at Google, for instance, part of the hiring process is to identify people who have “Googliness,” which is intellectual humility and consciousness. At Google, teams of people conduct interviews. Those teams are informed of what the company is hiring for, and they conduct the interviews twice, with participants rating prospects on a scale. The company does not allow the hiring manager to make the decision. Instead, Bock said the best approach is to have a hiring committee composed of people who will not work with the person if hired determine whether this person is a “quality hire.”
Pay Unfairly
I’m a deep believer in this,” said Bock. “The traditional way of paying people is a bell curve distribution of pay. But human performance follows what’s known as the power law distribution. You have a ton of people who are just OK. And then you have a few who are so amazing they pull the average up, so that the majority are below that mathematical average. You see that same distributions across industries and job functions. I’m not saying you should have a one-to-one map on contribution to pay, as they are not doing it themselves. And there will be people who are quiet and make everyone else successful, and there are ways of identifying them. But in most organizations the top performers will get paid 20% or 30% more than the average. That’s crazy. The market will pay those people 2x what you are paying. You should feel fine about paying those people 30% or 50% more, and you should feel fine about letting other people know about it. You can pay unfairly as long as you have an explanation for doing so.”
Nudge
This is the concept that people respond really well to small interventions or changes, said Bock. “It’s really hard to manage and lead and bring people to water. What’s easier is tiny, tiny changes you can make in someone’s environment that cause them to change behavior,” he said.
At Google, for instance, new employees who are known as “Nooglers” were taking 9-12 months to reach full productivity. What the company discovered in improving their time to full productivity is that if it just sent an email to new employees that says, “do these five things,” such as meet two new people or be proactive at asking questions,’ it could get to full productivity three months faster. Managers of the new employee were also sent an email.
“Even a 2% productivity increase means that for every 50 people you have it’s like having a free person,” said Bock. “And it took just an email.”
Bock said that another issue to look at is the meetings a credit union holds.
“Think about your physical architecture and the message it sends to people coming into your organizations. Think about your meeting and where the boss sits and how people talk to each other and who speaks when. All of these things have an impact. They are vital tools to boosting happiness and productivity in your workplace.”
Go Back & Start Page
Even if a credit union is doing all those things right, Bock reminded, “Go back to number-one and start again. “Building remarkable organizations that are purpose-driven happens when people are more productive and are happier and want to stick around is not a one-time thing. You tweak it and improve it and do it again.”
What credit unions can’t do he said, is not let employees know that new programs or procedures are experiments, and if it doesn’t work the CU will move on and try something else.
“Don’t just say we’re going to do all these great things, and then three months later it hasn’t happened and employees are left thinking, “We can’t trust management.”
“Work sucks,” said Bock. “Or at least it’s like that for some of the time for everyone. But we get to choose our own path. The options are to do something, or do nothing. If you do something, there are two possible outcomes: it gets better or it’s the same and work sucks less.”
When asked by an audience member if the Google example can really apply to credit unions, as CUs aren’t as “sexy” or big as Google, Bock responded, “That’s not true. One thing people want is purpose and meaning and mission. You have this. If you were gas stations or retailers, it would be different. The promise of a smaller organization is an individual can have an impact on lots of things. The winning argument is you can be employee 99,527, or part of a team of 50 or 1,000, and a lot of people would rather have that sense of community.”