Chip and Dan Heath think they’ve found the secret to busting boring meetings and creating a positive workplace environment. In their new book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, the brothers argue that it’s all about engineering meaningful experiences.
“In a lot of organisations, employees go five years, maybe ten years without having a really special moment at work. That is a travesty,” says Dan Heath, a senior fellow at Duke University's Centre for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship. Working with his brother Chip, a business professor at Stanford University, Dan found that actively creating stand-out moments in the workplace can bring many advantages to a business. “It will improve employee engagement, employee retention and employee loyalty. It matters to people when you pay attention to the moments that mean something.”
“It isn’t supposed to be efficient or easy,” he says. “That’s the point.”
WIRED spoke to Dan about the new book and what employers can learn from it.
WIRED: Hi Dan. Your new book is called The Power of Moments. What makes a defining moment?
Dan Heath: Defining moments are moments which bring meaning to our lives — the moments we remember when we look back. These could range from a wedding day to a great holiday experience, or to a day at school when a teacher remarked on a talent you didn't know you had. These are often moments of transition, big milestones or pits that inevitably occur.
What sort of moments need defining and celebrating in this way?
There are three situations in life that really cry out for defining moments. One situation is celebrating a transition. Transitions tend to be celebrated with an event like a graduation ceremony. At work, we should be attuned to these transitions as well. Like, the first time you are managing some employees or an employee is retiring. All these moments are worthy of attention. The second is milestones. In general we do a good job of marking these based on duration and time passed but not achievements like 10 millionth pound of revenue.
Another category of moments that deserve attention are pits, which could fall in the spectrum of a stressful moment all the way to up to a real trauma like losing a loved one. We know these moments are coming, so shouldn't we be ready to make it as easy as possible for employees when they do come? Like being able to take time off, or shift work to others? Can we arrange to bring food to them to ease some of their burdens at that time? By doing this, we can create a more meaningful workplace but also ensure high employee loyalty.
You mention that moments of elevation, which you describe as extraordinary times of surprise and delight, are particularly hard to create in the workplace. How can managers effectively create these?
A good example is the first day of work. This is a big moment and yet in most organisations the day is neglected, awkward and often kind of put off until last minute. The company John Deere tried to combat this by creating a first day experience that treated it with the attention and investment it deserves. Employees received a proper induction: someone met them in the carpark and showed them to their desk; they show you a flat-screen TV that says your name and “welcome”; people come and introduce themselves all day and there’s a six-foot-tall banner set up next to your cubicle alerting people to the fact you are new. You are taken out to lunch by your boss and you receive a package on your desk which informs you of the company’s history and their aims, making you feel connected to the company’s mission. It was an experience that made the employee feel like they belonged and the work they did mattered and that people were paying attention to them.
What about in more routine moments, like a meeting?
One thing we know is that routine and memorability do not go together. The more routine something is in general, the less memorable it is. If you want to have a memorable meeting, for instance, then you’ve got to break the script somehow and disrupt the usual flow from what people expect from a certain experience. Breaking the script in a meeting might mean any number of things. It might mean holding a stand-up meeting, taking a walk or inviting a customer to join a meeting about customer issues. Depending on the meeting, there are a hundred different ways you could break the script. But even little tweaks to the routine could be powerful in making us pay more attention and be more present.
What is the one thing managers should do to create memorable moments for their team?
Recognition. The simplest thing a manager can do to create more powerful moments for employees is to recognise them more frequently. It's quick and easy to do — it's a puzzle why it doesn't happen more often. Recognition is mostly a moment of pride, but I think it's extra powerful because moments of recognition share elements of pride, connection and insight that we identified in our research. In our work, it became clear that people’s defining moments were often citing things that felt small on the surface. One employee interviewed said one of his most memorable professional moments was when his manager took him aside and complimented him on the way he had organised the bicycles in the inventory room. Even a compliment that feels small is something that people may well remember in years to come. That's why recognition is so powerful.
I think the one way to make recognition feel worthless is to have it feel obligated. Like the “Employee of the Month” tradition, which is a classic bad example of how to do this - it should not be arbitrary or enforced. Effective recognition is nothing fancier than one person saying, “I saw what you did and I appreciated it.”
The Power of Momentsby Chip and Dan Heath, published by Bantam Press, is out on October 5.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
