“Everyone must be in, but everyone cannot be be in” the Growth Guru said, Cleas Knutson.
He meant that
1. Everone must be on fire about what your organizational vision.
2. The unexcited must leave.
“Who is a rotten apple”
This was not the first, nor the tenth time I heard this message. It is bounced about quite often. Sometimes as “one rotten apple spoils the barrel”.
Boris Benulic, president of Energy company Kraft & kultur decided to put this idea into action. At the Christmas party he told his people that there are two kinds of employees: the ones that are on fire for the company and the ones that just there so they can pay their rent. Next he asked his personnel to line up in one of two lines. The first line was for the zealots. The second line was for lukewarm employees. They would recieve six months of pay in return for a resignation.
Does this sound good?
Boris ended up with one small and one long line. Pretty much as he had probably hoped. Only the small line was the line of excited employees. A large minority chose the option of leaving. Letting all of them leave would have left the company incapable of functioning even if there had been enough money to pay them all off. He had to retract his promise.
The Growth Guru has a point. Brilliant analyses of what drives corporate profitability clearly shows that the higher the percentage of enthusiastic employees, the higher the profitability. The average level of enthusiasm is far from as useful in predicting corporate performance.
The key issue here is what to do with unenthusiastic employees. Are they really rotten apples that threaten to spoil the enthusiasm of everyone else? This is actually a testable hypothesis. If Boris Benulic and the Growth Guru are right the unenthusiastic remain unenthusiastic…year after year.
I produced a file of some 2 500 responces. Next I ran correlations and regressions on individual responces to the same questions in 2009 2010 and 2011. I chose to concentrate on issues relating to strategy and engagement.
The employees familiarity with the corporate strategy explained 12 percent of the variance two years later. That is remarkably little, considering most people still have the same job and the same manager.
Pride explained about 1/5 of the variance one year later.
Enjoyment of work explained 1/6 of the responces one year later and a tenth of the results two years later.
The NPS issue “How likely is it that you would recommend [company] to a friend as a place to work? was the only one to give some support to the bad apple hypothesis. 2009 results explained 1/3 of the responces one year later and a fifth of the results two years later. Using this issue Boris Benulic would have been about 1/3 right and 2/3 wrong.
Imagine that someone like Boris Benulic had gotten hold of Brilliant data from his company. This would never happen, but let’s just imagine it did, and that this person bought every demoter out. That is everyone that had responded with a low mark. My analysis shows that a majority of the people that had left would have been would-be-ambassadors two years later. And that’s not all. Another 40 percent of those that remain would have to be bought out two years later because they are no longer ambassadors.
Moral of this story:
1. Noone is a rotten apple.
2. You cannot know who is going to be your ambassador in two years.
Boris Benulics offer would have been a lousy idea even if only ten percent of the employees had declared themselves unexcited.
Note: The wording in this blog post is mine. The growth guru in question would never call people bad apples, but that is a language I have heard repeatedly, usually from American or British managers. Perhaps this offensive phrase dates back to Chaucer’s quote that a “rotten apple ruins its neighbors“.
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