Leadership Spotlight

Knowledge@Wharton: Your research shows most workers are happy at a new job for about six months before the honeymoon ends. What goes wrong?
Sirota: We are often asked how to motivate employees. Our response is, that's a silly question. The real question is: 'How do you keep management from destroying motivation?' When we look at the data we find that people coming to a new job are quite enthusiastic. Most of them are very happy to be there and looking forward to meeting their new coworkers. But as you study the data you find morale, or enthusiasm, declines precipitously after five or six months. One theory is that there is a natural honeymoon that is bound to end. And yet we find that in 10% of companies the honeymoon continues throughout a worker's entire career. So there are organizations that are able to maintain enthusiasm.

As a general proposition it is hard to be enthusiastic about an organization that is not enthusiastic about you. Let's look at a few specific things. One is job security. We expect employees to be enthusiastic, loyal and engaged in an organization, but with the slightest downturn or prospective downturn we get rid of them. They are expendable. They are treated like paperclips. How can you be loyal and committed to an organization that seems to have absolutely no concern about your job?

According to one of the trendiest notions so popular during the booming 1990s, job security is not important to people, particularly young people in high tech, because if they lost a job in tech, they could just walk across the street and get another one. But with the collapse of the high-tech companies, surveys found that job security went to the top of the list. Take a high-morale company—Southwest Airlines. After 9/11 it said: 'We will take a hit in our stock price and not lay off anybody.' That's putting your money where your mouth is.

Other things that suppress enthusiasm are obstacles to performance, such as insufficient training, poor equipment or findings that fit under the general heading of "bureaucracy." These include useless paperwork and the inability to get a decision made, or a decision made on time.

Conflicts across the organization are another obstacle. Some of the most negative findings were between IT and their internal customers, the employees. [The two sides] often find themselves in a battle. Conflict between functions is debilitating. People don't come to work to fight.

Finally, there is the status structure of companies that treat employees as second-class citizens. Consider, for example, the distinction between hourly and salaried workers, as if two different categories of human beings exist. Salaried are professional, the thinking goes, and hourly are the ones you have to watch out for. There are status symbols, such as the parking lot. At large factories in the Midwest, salaried employees have one set of parking spaces and God knows how far away the parking lot is for the hourly workers. The high-morale companies have eliminated a lot of this stuff, which has nothing to do with conducting business. All it does is feed the egos of some people at the expense of the self-esteem of the bulk of the workforce.

Knowledge@Wharton: You acknowledge that some employees are "allergic" to work. How should managers deal with them?
Sirota: About 5% of every workforce is allergic to work. These employees are shirkers. But managers in many companies, especially where there are large numbers of blue-collar workers or back-office operations such as call centers, treat the entire workforce as if it is the 5%. They set up rules and punitive measures for taking too long a rest break, etc. There is close supervision, so people who come in wanting to work, and hoping to take pride in their work, find themselves treated as if they are children or criminals.

About 16% of the companies we deal with have a hostile workforce. But the bulk of the problem is not hostility. It is that people have become indifferent. That is the silent killer. There are people who just don't want to work for whatever reason. They become troublemakers and you have to deal with them in a very tough way. You have to focus on them. But you don't then generalize from them to the rest of the workforce. The mistake we make is we feel we have to be consistent, that we have to have the same rules for everybody. So companies are consistent in treating everybody as a child or a criminal. That's very, very destructive.

Knowledge@Wharton: Workers indicate to you that immediate managers are not the problem. Who is?
Sirota: The conventional wisdom is that if there is a problem, it occurs on the front line. Our data shows that large percentages of employees are quite positive about their immediate bosses. The biggest problem is not the first level of supervision. It tends to come from the middle. Workers see the problem at the levels above the immediate manager. They often consider their own bosses as buffers to middle management. Workers say, 'I like my boss.' Morale goes down when it comes to middle management, then goes up again at the senior level. The top guy can do no wrong. That's a fairly common response. What workers don't realize is that all the pressure is coming from the top. They are the ones telling the middle what to do. The villain is viewed as middle management, but the real villain is senior management.

Knowledge@Wharton: What happens when workers have top managers who are dishonest and greedy?
Sirota: The employees at Enron are not only out of a job, but also out of their pensions and IRAs. Yet what we find in the analysis of the data and in focus groups is concern not just about the hanky-panky we have seen in the last three or four years, but also about cheating the customer. Employees want to be proud of the quality of the work they and their company do. When I was in the auto industry in the 1970s, the unions and the workers were blamed for poor quality. When we interviewed them, they said they felt terrible about the garbage they were producing. They said all management wanted was to get the cars out the door. Workers have a strong need to feel they have done something and done it well.