Are You Encouraging Selfish or Selfless Employees?

There’s an old saying that “sports do not develop character; sports reveal it.” As the disaster unfolding in Japan clearly shows, so too, does crisis reveal a person’s true colors.

Over the last week, you’ve probably read about the “Fukushima 50” — the unnamed heroes who have sacrificed their own health and safety to try to prevent a full-scale nuclear meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daichii plant. On the other hand, you’ve probably also seen and read about how in the midst of the chaos that the tsunami unleashed, some frantic people disregarded their neighbors to save their own skin.

It got me thinking about how a business owner might encourage employees on his team to act selflessly or selfishly. To some extent, how a person reacts under stress is not up to you; it’s baked into that person’s nature. But I do think nurturing the right company culture can inspire more selflessness than you might think.

Here are several ways to foster the kind of environment where employees will want to pull together instead of fend for themselves:

1. Praise team accomplishments as much as individual accomplishments. When employees do things that help their coworkers, they deserve high praise.

2. Recognize effort, even in the midst of failure. When individuals take initiative and fail, highlight the effort for the team. Ostracizing someone who screws up will only lead to a team of people afraid of trying new things irrespective of the outcome.

3. Reinforce the importance of helping others. I’m a firm believer in establishing a company priority to help others who are less fortunate. Organize volunteer days or set up annual charity drives — both send clear signals to everyone that you value employees’ willingness to look outside themselves.

4. Make sure bonuses reflect individual and team performance. Compensation, especially bonuses, must contain some meaningful component of achieving team goals.  So for instance, our call center employees are paid in part on how fast the entire department answers the phones. The faster our average speed to answer, the more money they make. That puts some pressure on folks who might not show up for work, causing unnecessary delays in responding to customer calls. Another good practice: At the end of the year, take a portion of profits, and then share that amount equally with every employee, no matter their tenure or level in the organization.

5. Reward managers based on both department and company performance. Again, rewarding individual achievement is good but it’s just as important to make some of those rewards contingent on the greater good of the company. At Blinds.com, company earnings strongly influence the senior leadership team’s remuneration, even though these employees don’t always have a direct role in how individual departments perform.

The point is you must think consciously about how you can align your company goals with individual goals. Sure, you can tell people to play nice and cooperate, or that it takes a village, etc. But unless you take deliberate action to prove you mean it, many will resort only to what’s in their personal best interest.

What do you do to promote teamwork?

Related Posts:

• Trust, Integrity, Teamwork and Other Core Value B.S.
• The Real ROI of Corporate Giving
• How to Give Performance Reviews That Make Your Company More Valuable

Photo courtesy of Flickr, by Official U.S Navy Imagery