The Employee Mood Card - Feeling Your Employees

Although employee motivation can be a simple behavior to recognize, I’ll be honest with you, it’s a complicated process to monitor; and in order to be as effective as one wants this to be, realistically, a manager would need to monitor employee motivation, satisfaction, and performance on a daily basis. I personally believe that an employee’s behavior, motivation, or a lack of, is greatly affected by personal experiences outside of the workplace. Along these lines, factors relating to such issues could highly be attributable to non-workplace stress.

Based on the youth of my current venture, I’ve begun experimenting with different management techniques, some off the books, and some on. But more so, with eccentric techniques.

One experiment is the mood/assignment card, which I’ve asked our managers, or should I say, GM, to slowly blend into the workplace. For the past 52 days, it’s sincerely been a turning point; an eye-opening realization, that not all employees will be motivated, satisfied, or perform as expected, on that day of work. But, its success, is just simply phenomenal.

I began introducing this as a form of “monitoring” based on the underlying principle that employees shouldn’t feel compelled to do anything they are not motivated to do. And its foundation formed on the idea that a business manager, in addition to portraying the acts of professionalism, should feel some type of an emotional connection with his or her employees. Fundamentally, I’ve always been intrigued with the administrative structure that Zappos’ CEO implements into his workplace. For example, in a nutshell, I’ll outline one example of Zappos.

Bill Taylor of Harvard Business Publishing states, “The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: "If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you've worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus." "Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!” Why? Because if you're willing to take the company up on The Offer, you obviously don't have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It's hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture--which means, by definition, it's not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there's a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick--and it's willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later" (2008).

One day, while packing some things, I found a mood card, tried it, and it didn’t work. To make the long story short, I had an idea of using a mood card to assist me in determining why our workplace sentiments have been productive, but emotionally limp. Through the card, employees can tell other employees, or me, how they are feeling through one word outlined in a list of words (or include their word in an empty box labeled other (in case I missed one). Currently, not only did it allow me to visualize performance, it has helped with employee diversity by allowing other employees to learn different tasks they never would have learned with their traditional occupational roles.

The details? At the beginning of every employee’s shift, they would outline what their moods are and see a list of assignments. Of course, assignments are first come first serve. Also, on a side note, we’ve had to hire an additional 13 employees (which we needed anyways). Again, a long process short, I’ve learned that some employees can be more motivated than others on a specific day, and if they simply didn’t feel like coming to work, they didn’t have to. 100% of the time, a different employee would never be asked to assume a shift, they would volunteer to. As for legalities goes, we’ve also reminded them that their hours, i.e. employment status, will not be altered by management, but must adhere to employee labels outlined by the laws of California. (For this I mean, part-time, full time, exemptions, etc.) Even though the experiment is still rather immature, I’ve learned tons of kung-fu management type techniques, and have seen a turnover rate with better productivity, less absentee calls, employees getting to work on time, more customer interaction, more customers, and much more motivation to work. In a sense, it creates a competitive realm of working hours amongst employees, because each and every employee desires now, to work. Keep in mind, every employee has a set schedule, and the flexibility of hours (choosing to work or not) is up to each and every one of the employees.

The GM and managers are exempt from this experiment, and agree, that their “managing” has become less complex and troublesome.

Reference:

Taylor, B. (2009). Why Zappos Pays Employees to Quit: And You Should Too.