Making Work Human summary

When it comes to choosing their employers, their work models, or their pay structures, employees today have more options than ever before. This seems only fair, because they also have more responsibility and less job security than ever before. But this situation creates a unique challenge for employers: How can you attract the best employees, help them give their best, and make them want to stick around?

The answer is that you make them feel good about themselves and their work.

We’ve just learned how important a good work experience is – for both employees and businesses. Let’s take a closer look at three elusive emotions that are essential for a positive work experience: purpose, meaning, and gratitude. Ideally, a human workplace should prompt all three of these positive feelings in employees.

Purpose in this context means the shared mission of all people in the company. Google’s mission statement, for example, declares that the company’s purpose is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

As a company, Workhuman specializes in creating moments of thanking, talking, and celebrating through what they call Human Applications. These are company-wide networking apps that allow employees to give each other feedback, rewards, and support. Combined with deep analytics, the data gathered through these apps can chart an insightful picture of what’s going on within a company – and how they can improve the company structure to the benefit of all employees.

Some of the most powerful human applications are based on the principle of social recognition. Social recognition happens when people recognize and reward each other for their work. Social recognition platforms let managers and employees express their gratitude for displays of hard work, special effort, or kindness. Such positive feedback tools can have amazing effects on people’s happiness, engagement, and performance at work.

In order for gratitude not to become a hollow gesture over time, it needs to come with tangible benefits, gifts, and bonuses for employees.

That’s why every human workplace should have a flexible, crowd-sourced reward system that ties social recognition to real rewards. This means that news of any bonuses, gifts, and benefits employees receive is shared and celebrated with coworkers – for example, through a social app. It also means that coworkers can award bonuses, gifts, and benefits to each other based on their performance.

In traditional companies with a top-down command structure, performance reviews between managers and employees only happen about once a year. During such a review, the manager typically focuses on an employee’s past work – and particularly on past mistakes. Understandably, hardly anyone looks forward to this annual beatdown. And hardly anyone gets anything out of it.

Today, decades of business research have proven what disgruntled employees knew all along: negativity isn’t a very good motivator. Of course, constructive feedback isn’t the problem. In fact, humans crave constructive feedback because learning and growth are deeply satisfying to us. But we also want to feel good about ourselves and appreciated for the work we do. Meticulously pointing out employees’ past mistakes isn’t the way to make them feel valued.

Until quite recently, people believed that men were naturally more talented as musicians than women. As a result, symphonic orchestras were almost exclusively male. When, in the 1970s, orchestras started holding blind auditions to disprove this stereotype, men still outperformed women.

Why? Because those judging would subconsciously register a musician’s gender by listening to his or her footsteps on the stage. Once blind auditions started being held on carpeted stages, male and female musicians were judged to perform equally well.