True or False?

“True or false: If an employee is having significant problems at home, it can have a negative impact on work performance?” I have asked this question over and over in my training and consulting work, and the answer has never been anything other than “true”.

Never.

There is genuine consensus that work and personal life overlap significantly in terms of impacting performance. It is little surprise, then, that work/life balance has become a critical issue in employee engagement and retention. In an article entitled Balance: The New Workplace Perk by S. Brent Ridge, M.D. (Forbes, March 28, 2007), a principal at Deloitte Consulting is quoted as saying that “People’s lives are not going to change. The working environment needs to.”

A number of factors create tension and/or stress for employees – non-traditional homes, two working spouses, the usual schedule conflicts between personal life and work life. The savvy manager MUST understand his or her employees and the challenges they face in the non-work lives in order to maximize their workplace performance. Surveys continue to reinforce the notion that employees are more engaged and less likely to bolt from a company when the direct supervisor cares about them personally.

Here is an excerpt from my upcoming book, “1-on-1 Management:™ What Every Great Manager Knows That You Don’t:

In 1946, the Labor Relations Institute of New York surveyed employees to determine what was important to them at work, but, unlike the SHRM survey, they asked that the following ten items be ranked in order of importance from one (most important) to ten (least important). Here are the results:

What Employees Want at Work

1. Full appreciation for work done
2. Feeling “in” on things
3. Sympathetic help on personal problems
4. Job security
5. Good wages
6. Interesting work
7. Promotion/growth opportunities
8. Personal loyalty to workers
9. Good working conditions
10. Tactful discipline

Look very closely at this list. The first three items are profoundly revealing. If we could step outside of the workplace for a moment, we would recognize these things as simply generic human needs. Employees want to be appreciated or valued for their contributions; they want to know what is going on and feel like they are a part of things; and, they want people to understand that life outside of work has an impact on their attitude and work performance.

At least that was so in 1946. Sixty years ago. But a few things have changed in that time span, don’t you know? Personal computers, wireless phones, Blackberry and Bluetooth, flex-time, the Family Medical Leave Act. This is a new era – with completely new challenges. Right?

Not so much. This particular survey has been replicated several times – in the 80s, the 90s, and most recently in 2001 – with almost identical results. Big surprise. People are people, and it is unlikely that basic human needs are going to change much. Even in today’s workplace, with all of the technology we could possibly imagine, we still have basic needs. To be valued. To be appreciated. To be listened to.

By the way, compensation is fifth on this list – high enough to be important, as I mentioned earlier. Employees definitely care about getting paid. The interesting fact is that employers were surveyed as well and given the same list of items to rank, but they ranked compensation as the most important element in employee job satisfaction. They ranked the first two items – the most important to employees – at 8th and 9th, respectively.

Some employers, however, have gotten the message. One good example is Chuck Knight, CEO of St. Louis-based Emerson Electric from 1973 to 2000. During his tenure as chief executive, he led Emerson through the second half of an almost unprecedented business winning streak – 43 consecutive years of annual increases in earnings per share and dividends per share. In 2006, McKinsey Quarterly interviewed Knight and asked him specifically what actions a company should take to retain talented employees:

“Make it hard for them to leave. At Emerson, part of that is finding opportunities for people—for example, challenging jobs in other divisions.

But the environment here is really the key to retention, and I wish I could explain it better. We’re a demanding company, but we’re fair. I mean, I could be pretty tough with a group in a planning conference but then have dinner and drinks with them afterward, and nobody would remember how tough the discussion was. It wasn’t personal, nobody got fired, and the next day everybody was working to get the plan on track.

We really do care about our people. We worry about them. For example, we do a survey every two years to gauge the attitudes of our employees. We do this everywhere, at every plant, for hourly employees as well as salaried. And we track the results. If there are bad managers or supervisors out there, it shows up and we either fix the problem or get rid of them. If there’s an issue, we see it and deal with it. That’s one reason why very few of our plants are unionized—our employees are satisfied.“

Do you really care about your people? This is one of the important factors in determining how engaged an employee is on the job! Many managers would like to care more about their employees individually, but TIME is most often cited as the constraint that keeps them from doing so.

It is an inevitable certainty that your employees will encounter difficulties in their personal lives. Are your managers prepared to successfully negotiate through those issues and maintain a high-performance culture?