What Employees Really Want
but don’t know how to ask for….
Today’s workplace is dominated by knowledge work, relationship management, innovation and constant change. To successfully lead you must understand, leverage and influence the cognitive needs of employees. Designing the workplace based on how employees think-and-feel makes for happy, productive and loyal employees.
Historically managers, product developers and organizational designers have viewed “thoughts and feelings” as far too subjective and variable to design and run a business on. Fortunately, that is changing. We are beginning to uncover deep and stable patterns in the mind – cognitive biases, mental models, metaphors, learning mechanisms, emotional processes and psychological needs – that provide requirements. When these requirements are met through good management or design they release blockbuster products and high performance workplaces.
Classifying the cognitive needs of employees and codifying the best practices for how to meet them is an active frontier in management and design innovation. New positions are appearing regularly. Take for the example, the SCARF model recently published in Strategy + Business online in the article Managing with The Brain in Mind. You might need to register to read the article but it is worth it.
The author provides research-based insight (drawing on the latest social neuroscience) into the cognitive needs of employees which is summarized as SCARF – status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. The article is rich in advice for leaders on how to operationalize the model.
The author takes a strong position:
“When historians look back, their judgment of this period in time may rise or fall on how organizations, and society as a whole, operated. Did they treat people fairly, draw people together to solve problems, promote entrepreneurship and autonomy, foster certainty wherever possible, and find ways to raise the perceived status of everyone? If so, the brains of the future will salute them.”
Clearly a challenge to any cognitive designer working on organizational or social design problems!
April 13th, 2010 at 12:17 am
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