Science Found the 5 Things That Drive Employees to Go Above and Beyond

Good Morning. It’s John Garrett coming to you with another episode of Green Apple Slices. I have with me the Accountants Group Leader for Sage in Canada, two weeks in a row, nailed it, Rachel Fisch.

Rachel: Hey, John. How are you?

John: I just had to give my — that’s not actually part of your title, “Two weeks in a row, nailed it” is not technically part of your title.

Rachel: No, it isn’t.

John: You’re back home and back from all your training travels.

Rachel: Yeah, which went awesome so thank you to all of those who attended. It was an awesome time. Thank you, guys, so much.

John: Very cool, yeah, absolutely. But every Monday, we get together and talk through an article and I found this one on Inc., it’s called Science Found the 5 Things That Drive Employees to Go Above and Beyond and it was by Marcel Schwantes and yeah, it’s pretty interesting how it quotes this IBM Smarter Workforce Institute and Globoforce’s WorkHuman Research Institute. Both of those just roll off the top but they did this global study more than 23,000 employees in 45 countries and found these common factors that show what makes people want to go above and beyond.

Rachel: It kind of amazed me. We’ve been talking for a while now. We’ve been recording this 5-minute Monday mini episodes for a while now and all of these studies, it kind of seems to me like they all say the same thing or they all support each other. I haven’t yet seen a study come out going, “Oh, my goodness. I never thought of that before.” We’ve got all of these same themes about co-working relationships, about work-life balance, whatever that is, about giving your staff purpose.

These are things that are kind of all-encompassing in the employee engagement piece and really build to create great culture and of course the employee experience as a blend of the two, right? So all that to say nothing in here is shocking but again, it just goes to reinforce what I think we already know is true.

Those five core facets of positive employee experience, we’ve got belonging, feeling part of a team, purpose, understanding why. The why, right? Why your work matters, achievement, happiness, and vigor, so the presence of energy and the way that I like to explain that is that when you’re working with a client that you seem to get a lot of energy from, that’s definitely one that you want to keep, there are staff that are very similar, right? The ones that you’re with and they just give you a lot of energy and fire you up and make you want to do your job even better so that’s kind of — those are a couple of the different ways that I’ve seen vigor kind of present itself.

John: Yeah. I mean every Monday on the Green Apple Slices, Rachel is exhibit A, B, and C your honor. So that’s where vigor happens. But I think it’s also pretty cool. It goes into something called discretionary effort which is where people that are just way into their jobs emotionally even where the values of the firm, the values of the company align and the values of the people that you’re working with and the clients like you said, and so then it makes people want to go above and beyond just the basic that’s my job. I’m willing to help out a little bit extra. I’m willing to do a little bit more and give a little bit more discretionary effort so that’s the first time I had ever heard that as a phrase.

Rachel: No, it does too. I was reading it going, “What?” And then I’m like remembering my kids report cards and like exceeds expectations like, okay, that’s what that is.

John: Right, exactly. But yeah, but then it goes into talk about employee experience which is also something that we’ve talked about but just a big part of employee experience is there are several factors there but one of the big ones is just co-worker relationships which dovetails perfectly with the whole Green Apple Message.

Rachel: Yeah, and so there are six of these experiences and we’ve actually talked about each of these six in prior episodes. Again, it’s just kind of reinforcing. So we learned a cool new term – discretionary effort, but other than that, the principles that are outlined here, just go back to reinforce those things.

So what is needed, organizational trust, those co-worker relationships which again, bringing your passions into the workplace which you might know a little something about, really helps you connect not only with your clients better but also with your peers, meaningful work recognition, feedback and growth, empowerment and voice, and work-life balance but we’re not going to talk about that.

John: Right, because you have to get back to work so that’s how that works. But yeah, if you want to read the whole article, you can go to greenapplepodcast.com, check that out there and subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any of the future episodes.

And yeah. So thanks so much, Rachel. Have a great week at home and we’ll talk to you next week.

Rachel: Thanks. Talk to you later, John.