Do you know why you come to work?

After last week’s brief interlude to pay our respects to the death of free speech and free thought, and which led to Cicero being considered ‘ a sexist pig’ by some, no doubt Guardianista types, who know little of Cicero, we are back this week with more considered thoughts on the business of business. No doubt this will be a relief to you.

A few days back Cicero was re-acquainting himself with the works of Kipling (the author not the cake maker on this occasion even though Cicero is also well acquainted with the works of the cake maker as well, hence the girth).
We digress.

In particular Cicero met once again Mr Kipling’s ‘six famous serving men whose names were who and what and where, and how and why and when’. For those of a questioning and challenging disposition these serving men have proven invaluable, especially ‘why'. But do these serving men not also apply to the structure of a modern business?

Consider this. The training and development department, and sometimes even a corporate university, take care of the H – how employees do things. The HR people, along with the headhunters, handles the “who”. Meanwhile, the Head Honcho of the business aka the CEO, often flanked by a few high-priced consultants and his Grand Fromages, devises the strategy – the “what”. The “where” and “when” of products is the domain of the logistics and supply chain team, while the “where” and “when” of people is the responsibility of the facilities manager and administrative staff and even line management.

But who is responsible for the why? Now don’t all cry out at once.

The 'who', 'what', 'where', 'when' and 'how' in any company will be on the organisation chart but 'why’, ‘the why we come to work question’, and surely this is the most important question, is conspicuously absent. Sure businesses will often go about being number one in chosen markets or maximising shareholder value as the ‘why’. But will this get our people out of their beds in the morning? Doubt it. Does that why excite you? Probably not.

And that can be a costly mistake as recent studies have found.

Introducing “why” – even in surprisingly modest ways – can have a big impact as we will now demonstrate.

In one study, employees at a call centre made phone calls to alumni to raise funds. These were randomly divided into three teams. For a few days, before they made calls, people in the first group read brief stories from previous employees about the personal benefits of working in the job – how they developed communication skills and sales know-how that later helped them in their careers. The second group also read stories before hitting the phones, but their stories were from people who had received scholarships from the funds raised and who described how the money had improved their lives. The aim of these stories was to remind workers of the purpose of their efforts. The third group was the control group; they read nothing before hitting the phones.

The results from the three groups were startling and enlightening.

The people in the first group, who’d been reminded of the personal benefit of working in a call centre, did no better than those in the control group. Both groups earned about the same number of weekly pledges and raised the same amount of money as they had in the weeks before the experiment.

However, the people in the second group – who took a moment to consider the significance of their work and its effect on others’ lives – raised more than twice as much money, in twice as many pledges, as they had in previous weeks and significantly more than their counterparts in the other two groups.

In other words, reminding employees about that missing W – the “why” – doubled their performance.

Similar results in another call centre study back this up. There, when employees spent just five minutes talking to the recipients of the funds they were raising, those employees spent twice as much time on the phone with prospective donors and raised nearly three times as much money as they had in the past. Surely big lessons here for people working in the charity sector-sorry the Third Sector. But also is such thinking also not applicable in all businesses? Surely it makes sense for us all of to know why were are doing something. And buy into it. And it must be about more than just making money for the shareholders. Cicero as you know found it especially to be inspiring to have some small role in safeguarding the safety and security of us all. That was his 'why'.

It’s often difficult to do something well if we don’t know the reasons we’re doing it to begin with. People at work are thirsting for context, yearning to know that their efforts contribute to a larger whole. And a powerful way to provide that context is to spend a little less time monitoring who, what, where, when and how – and little more time considering why.

Do your people even have a “why”? Ask them this question: “What’s the purpose of this business?” What do you hear? People needn’t recite the same lyrics, but they should be playing the same basic tune. If they’re not – if answers range all over the place or people don’t have answers at all – you might have a problem no matter how good you are at the where, when and what.

So what is your why? Why are you really in business? Will it inspire your people to something more than a yawn and a glazed look in their eyes? Do they really know why they come to work? And do they believe it?

Is it only me..........but please try this at home.

Now for my sins I have to sit through a lot of meetings and a lot of Death by PowerPoint presentations. And of course from time to time I have in my time had to present myself. Sometimes these are good presentations, sometimes bad but there are some words that are said that always strike terror in my heart.

Now no matter how good or presentation might be invariably the speaker inflicting Death by PowerPoint on his or her audience will be running late, or will feel as if running over, if especially bad. And at this point you will hear words ‘I will just whiz through the next few slides’ or ‘I will speed up’ or ‘I will skip through the next few slides quite quickly’. Whenever you hear words like ‘speed’, whizz’ or ‘skip’ in the context of PowerPoint, you are in trouble. It never happens.

I don’t why it is but Death by PowerPoint presenters even when they know they are running over or late, find it impossible to change gear. It is as if time no longer seems to exist when you are absorbed with PowerPoint or the presenter’s script is so hardwired that it is impossible to deviate no matter how pressing the audience is willing the presentation to end. Or maybe said presenter is thinking ‘I have spent bloody ages pulling this presentation together that not even the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is going to stop me saying what I wanted to say’.

You think I’m joking? You think it’s only me? Well this is a game we can all play. Next time you are enduring Death by PowerPoint listen for any words to do with speed being introduced into the presentation and let us know if you discern any increase in the speed. I would be really interested.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.