examples of small wins at work

They received more than 12,000 separate diary entries, which they used to analyze people's "inner work lives" – their perceptions, emotions, and motivation levels – and to explore … Effective managers establish themselves as resources, making sure to check in on employees while never seeming to check up on them. Therefore, there is a strong possibility that all the time and effort put into the project was a waste of our time. Company culture is about more than everyone getting along or creating a fun environment to work in. You may have experienced this rude fact in your own job, on days (or in projects) when you felt demotivated, devalued, and frustrated, even though you worked hard and got things done. This may save the employer on office space as they don't offer the employee a permanent desk. The team that completes a project wins the trophy and gets to keep it until there is another small wins celebration. Yet Graham was able to sustain team members’ inner work lives by repeatedly and visibly removing obstacles, materially supporting progress, and emotionally supporting the team. They may destroy employees’ sense of ownership of their work. JB on December 1, 2011 at 6:37 PM Yet they often evoked outsize positive reactions. To assess contemporary awareness of the importance of daily work progress, we recently administered a survey to 669 managers of varying levels from dozens of companies around the world. But they also have a more immediate impact: When people realize that they have clear and meaningful goals, sufficient resources, helpful colleagues, and so on, they get an instant boost to their emotions, their motivation to do a great job, and their perceptions of the work and the organization. For nearly 15 years, we have been studying the psychological experiences and the performance of people doing complex work inside organizations. Many of the progress events our research participants reported represented only minor steps forward. Graham was quick to communicate upper management’s views of the project, customers’ opinions and needs, and possible sources of assistance or resistance within and outside the organization. In this article, we share what we have learned about the power of progress and how managers can leverage it. However, turning an awareness of the importance of inner work life into routine action takes discipline. Social scientists and business experts agree that modest victories can provide major inspiration. Dejected and de-motivated, right? HUMOUR AT WORK Examples of Small Wins Small wins have been designed and implemented in a variety of settings. You have a small iteration, you develop some piece, which is by itself is not something very valuable, when you have a secries of wins-iteration – you have a valuable product. Reply. They may neglect to inform employees about unexpected changes in a customer’s priorities. Applying a small wins strategy to your finances. On days when they made progress, our participants reported more positive emotions. But he was occasionally so overwhelmed that he became toxic toward his people. When subordinates perceive that a manager is withholding potentially useful information, they feel infantilized, their motivation wanes, and their work is handicapped. Superficially, checking in and checking up seem quite similar, but micromanagers make four kinds of mistakes. This is a far kinder way of tracking your progress than fixating on the balance in your bank account. But if you focus on managing progress, the management of people—and even of entire organizations—becomes much more feasible. In fact, the nonjudgmental climate he had established made this happen naturally. Naturally, every individual in our population experienced ups and downs. You won’t have to figure out how to x-ray the inner work lives of subordinates; if you facilitate their steady progress in meaningful work, make that progress salient to them, and treat them well, they will experience the emotions, motivations, and perceptions necessary for great performance. However, managers can make sure that employees know just how their work is contributing. Amabile talks about the main findings of the book. This happens to us way too often. Even when managers don’t have their backs against the wall, developing long-term strategy and launching new initiatives can often seem more important—and perhaps sexier—than making sure that subordinates have what they need to make steady progress and feel supported as human beings. In fact, work motivation has been a subject of long-standing debate. Always break down big goals into concrete outcomes of moderate importance. Many people nominate their first job as a teenager—washing pots and pans in a restaurant kitchen, for example, or checking coats at a museum. A second implication of the progress principle is that managers needn’t fret about trying to read the psyches of their workers, or manipulate complicated incentive schemes, to ensure that employees are motivated and happy. However, I also like to build a little alone time into my workday, too. In a dramatic rebuttal to the commonplace claim that high pressure and fear spur achievement, we found that, at least in the realm of knowledge work, people are more creative and productive when their inner work lives are positive—when they feel happy, are intrinsically motivated by the work itself, and have positive perceptions of their colleagues and the organization. We can get stuck on noticing all the bad activities going on in our lives and forget to see the small wins. The diary research we describe in this article—in which we microscopically examined the events of thousands of workdays, in real time—uncovered the mechanism underlying the sense of achievement: making consistent, meaningful progress. In jobs like those, the power of progress seems elusive. When at last he believed that he was again making a substantive contribution to the success of the project, his mood improved dramatically: I felt much better at today’s team meeting. They ranked “recognition for good work (either public or private)” as the most important factor in motivating workers and making them happy. Small wins give us the strength to reach further and try to accomplish more. After the excitement of their first attempt to build a DNA model, Watson and Crick noticed some serious flaws. In all those ways, Graham sustained his team’s positive emotions, intrinsic motivation, and favorable perceptions. Inner work life, we saw, can fluctuate from one day to the next—sometimes wildly—and performance along with it. Yet, in one survey of senior leaders, 95% of the respondents listed “supporting progress” as the least most important motivator at work, contrary to what all the research suggests! Most days it was not hard to figure out, as on the day he received some uplifting news about his bosses’ commitment to the project. A growing body of research suggests that the concept of “small wins” in the workplace is one of the key ingredients for successful employee motivation and one of the most effective ways to begin the process of changing your workplace culture. Jobs reportedly asked him, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” In making his pitch, Jobs leveraged a potent psychological force: the deep-seated human desire to do meaningful work. They can signal this—unintentionally—by shifting their priorities or changing their minds about how something should be done. Diary entries from 238 knowledge workers who were members of creative project teams revealed four primary ways in which managers unwittingly drain work of its meaning. Third, micromanagers are quick to affix personal blame when problems arise, leading subordinates to hide problems rather than honestly discuss how to surmount them, as Graham did with Brady. Awareness, of course, is the first step. Kris Duggan. As a result, he felt that his contributions were not meaningful, and his spirits flagged. Of course, there is a dark side—the possibility of negative feedback loops. Their superior work will contribute to organizational success. We spell out how a focus on progress translates into concrete managerial actions and provide a checklist to help make such behaviors habitual. Amabile explains that the practice of recording our progress helps us appreciate our small wins which in turn boosts our sense of confidence. Consider this diary entry from a programmer in a high-tech company, which was accompanied by very positive self-ratings of her emotions, motivations, and perceptions that day: “I figured out why something was not working correctly. Dark days of doubt and ebbing motivation followed. Because inner work life has such a potent effect on creativity and productivity, and because small but consistent steps forward, shared by many people, can accumulate into excellent execution, progress events that often go unnoticed are critical to the overall performance of organizations. Those statistics become more interesting if they are partitioned on the basis of On the flip side, small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect. Even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. First, he established a positive climate, one event at a time, which set behavioral norms for the entire team. The power of progress is fundamental to human nature, but few managers understand it or know how to leverage progress to boost motivation. Motivation is a huge factor of whether or not we succeed and being able to reward ourselves and celebrate small wins is the key. Listen to a podcast on your way to work. Twenty-six project teams from seven companies participated, comprising 238 individuals. When you start a new program at work, finish a meeting, or come back jazzed from a conference, immediately implementing some small and easily-done ideas can create a snowball effect that helps build momentum and encourages even the most cynical (“we’ll believe it when we see it”) employees to see that bigger change is possible. Often, this arises from poor customer management or inadequate communication within the company. The aim of the checklist is managing for meaningful progress, one day at a time. Read a few pages of a book after lunch or dinner. Our goal was to discover the states of inner work life and the workday events that correlated with the highest levels of creative output. Fully 95% of the managers who took our survey would probably be surprised to learn that supporting progress is the primary way to elevate motivation—because that’s the percentage that failed to rank progress number one. Small wins do not change the world. On setback days, participants perceived both their teams and their supervisors as less supportive. If managers fail to support progress and the people trying to make it, inner work life suffers and so does performance; and degraded performance further undermines inner work life. And if he could not make that judgment, he asked. In doing so, he modeled how to respond to crises in the work: not by panicking or pointing fingers but by identifying problems and their causes, and developing a coordinated action plan. However, in team meetings over the course of a three-week period, Richard perceived that his team leader was ignoring his suggestions and those of his teammates. In jobs with much more challenge and room for creativity, like the ones our research participants had, simply “making progress”—getting tasks done—doesn’t guarantee a good inner work life, either. I work in organizational change ... Have small wins and meeting short term goals while on the path to a longer term goal is very motivating. We can then leverage that competence toward future, larger successes. Interestingly, very few of our surveyed managers ranked progress first. It turns out that ordinary scientists, marketers, programmers, and other unsung knowledge workers, whose jobs require creative productivity every day, have more in common with famous innovators than most managers realize. Harvard Business Publishing is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. As an example, here are a few “small wins” that you should focus on to get ahead in starting your own business: Receiving your first inquiry from a potential customer. It simply must matter to the person doing it. That may not be an event to you, but I live a very drab life, so I’m all hyped.”, Likewise, we saw that deteriorating perceptions, frustration, sadness, and even disgust often followed setbacks. The likely cause is your perception of the completed tasks as peripheral or irrelevant. In the extreme, attention to small wins can help people lift themselves out of depression; this is one of the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy. Getting your first sale. As another participant, a product marketer, wrote, “We spent a lot of time updating the Cost Reduction project list, and after tallying all the numbers, we are still coming up short of our goal. Moreover, in those positive states, people are more committed to the work and more collegial toward those around them. Through exhaustive analysis of diaries kept by knowledge workers, we discovered the progress principle: Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. The action plan for the next day is the most important part of your daily review: What is the one thing you can do to best facilitate progress? presentation – no small accomplishment!”, Martine Rothblatt, CEO, United Therapeutics, “Our participants rated you as the speaker with the highest quality and relevance.”, Lana J. Larocque, Alberta Human Resources, MICHAEL KERR And, most important, they can avoid actions that negate its value. 6. But it wasn’t nearly as prominent as progress. The respondents ranked five tools—support for making progress in the work, recognition for good work, incentives, interpersonal support, and clear goals—in order of importance. Want to truly engage your workers? This progress principle suggests that managers have more influence than they may realize over employees’ well-being, motivation, and creative output. The authors provide a checklist that managers can use on a daily basis to monitor their progress-enhancing behaviors. All companies must define their culture … Were these changes in inner work life the result of progress and setbacks, or was the effect the other way around? I felt relieved and happy because this was a minor milestone for me.”. If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it’s a good bet that he or she achieved something, however small. Progress—even a small step forward—occurs on many of the days people report being in a good mood. Make sure you create small, achievable goals that will allow you to see your progress more clearly. First, they fail to allow autonomy in carrying out the work. 1. In principle, managers shouldn’t have to go to extraordinary lengths to infuse jobs with meaning. And even more importantly, allowing employees the freedom to implement their own ideas at work is one of the most motivating things you can do. This is why celebrate small victories are important. For example, an employer may find that a candidate is happy to accept a lower salary in exchange for flexibility such as working at home several days a week. For good and for ill, nourishers and toxins affect inner work life directly and immediately. If the person drags out of the office disengaged and joyless, a setback is most likely to blame. When over 12,000 worker entries were pored over, they found that employee motivation and engagement was based on whether they had achieved something worthwhile that day . And fourth, micromanagers tend to hoard information to use as a secret weapon. Besides, without work achievements, there is little to recognize. For the progress principle to operate, the work must be meaningful to the person doing it. The workday events that ignite their emotions, fuel their motivation, and trigger their perceptions are fundamentally the same. Business schools, business books, and managers themselves usually focus on managing organizations or people. It can be supporting a colleague or boosting an organization’s profits by reducing inefficiencies in a production process. Each has an opposite: Inhibitors, actions that fail to support or actively hinder work, and toxins, discouraging or undermining events. Hence, they are essential in the process of growth. The mission of the team’s NewPoly project was clear and meaningful enough: develop a safe, biodegradable polymer to replace petrochemicals in cosmetics and, eventually, in a wide range of consumer products. For instance, when a manager makes sure that people have the resources they need, it signals to them that what they are doing is important and valuable. In their new book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, authors Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer discuss how even seemingly small steps forward on a project can make huge differences in employees' emotional and intellectual well-being. If the person drags out of the office disengaged and joyless, a setback is likely to blame. Rather than hitting the snooze bar, get up as soon as your alarm goes off. Each day, he could anticipate what type of intervention—a catalyst or the removal of an inhibitor; a nourisher or some antidote to a toxin—would have the most impact on team members’ inner work lives and progress. Catalysts and nourishers—and their opposites—can alter the meaningfulness of work by shifting people’s perceptions of their jobs and even themselves. Again, it’s the old saw: actions speak louder than words. This is what agile > scrum is about, i think. Whereas catalysts and inhibitors are directed at the project, nourishers and toxins are directed at the person. Small wins can have a disproportionate amount of power and influence beyond the achievement they represent. There are predictable triggers that inflate or deflate inner work life, and, even accounting for variation among individuals, they are pretty much the same for everyone. On progress days, people perceived significantly more positive challenge in their work. This is both a practical approach and a great way to give subordinates a sense of forward movement even in the face of the missteps and failures inherent in any complex project. In a survey asking about the keys to motivating workers, we found that some managers ranked recognition for good work as most important, while others put more stock in tangible incentives. In their research, they asked 238 people (from 26 project teams in seven major organizations) to keep an anonymous diary, so that they could track their experiences on a daily basis. But our diary study reminded us how often they are ignored or forgotten. However, we do know, from reading thousands of diary entries, that more-positive perceptions, a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, happiness, and even elation often followed progress. Most important, they can avoid actions that negate its value. Instead, the culture of an organization is about the way in which people work together to propel the business forward. Example: “I was working on an event planning team for a non-profit organization. Consequently, it is especially important for managers to minimize daily hassles. All similarity to civility is gone, our backs are against the wall, flight is not possible, therefore fight is probable. I felt that my opinions and information were important to the project and that we have made some progress. Another 2,800 remain on this order, and there is a good probability that they too will gain wings. The Miracle of Small Wins Small wins pay off big. For example: saving X amount of money per month (Small Wins) can lead you to buy a house (Big Win) . Their opposites, inhibitors, include failing to provide support and actively interfering with the work. For example, try measuring your saving in days rather than dollars. When we think about progress, we often imagine how good it feels to achieve a long-term goal or experience a major breakthrough. Perceptions differed in many ways, too. They saw their teams as more mutually supportive and reported more positive interactions between the teams and their supervisors. Through employee work rules like employee email policy and outside work – strict policy examples, employees can understand the demands of the business. They not only were in a more upbeat mood in general but also expressed more joy, warmth, and pride. Work with less profound importance to society can matter if it contributes value to something or someone important to the worker. The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?”, “Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance,”. Some examples include: Instead of trying to lose 100 lbs., just make an effort to get to the gym 3 times per week. Amount of power and influence beyond the achievement they represent, participants perceived both their teams more! 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