Can a company’s success be summed up by the figures in a bottom line? While achieving monetary gain is certainly one goal of most businesses, reliably achieving that result takes a deep understanding of workplace psychology. What drives employees to be productive, innovative, and ultimately fulfilled?
Ultimately what makes a group or organization truly successful means taking steps to improve the well-being and performance of an organization and its employees. That’s where workplace psychology comes in.
Through studying the dynamics of a workplace, industrial, and organizational (I/O) psychologists can assess vital questions like:
- How are decisions made?
- Are communications open and positive?
- Do team members interact and collaborate effectively?
Then, a business can begin to solve organizational problems, resulting in a better quality of work-life, which leads to enhanced performance and growing profitability.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Although it has been around since the 40s, Maslow’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs remains an effective tool to understand workplace psychology. Abraham Maslow’s Maslow’s pyramid of needs has a bottom line. It starts with lower-level physiological and safety needs that we must meet before pursuing high-level needs.
If these needs are met, we can fulfill our need for respect, esteem, and ultimately self-actualization, or fulfillment.
See more about Maslow’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in the short video below:
Changing Workplace Psychology to Achieve Success
Understanding workplace psychology can have exciting rewards for people who make up all organizations. For example, consider the story of Paul H. O’Neill, a former CEO of an aluminum company, Alcoa. By focusing on satisfying employee’s needs to feel safe at work, he was able to make the company far more profitable in five years.
From Medium:
“Before he was Secretary of the Treasury for the United States, Paul H. O’Neill was the CEO of Alcoa. During his first meeting, he didn’t talk about profit margins, no fancy presentations, his mission was to change the culture of the company by having one goal, making the company, an aluminum company, the safest place to work.
This affirmation — what would later become known as a ‘keystone habit’ — became the internal mantra of the company. Everything that the company did; meetings, calls, having employee suggestion boxes, surveys, everything was done with the goal of creating the safest places to work. This one mission became so ingrained in the culture that employees and managers did whatever they could to look out for one another, improved productivity and employee happiness.
As for Alcoa’s bottom-line? Within five years, the company’s profits hit record highs, and when O’Neill stepped down to retire, Alcoa’s annual net income was five times higher than when he started.”
By uniting the company around safety, the result was better morale and productivity.
No One-Size-Fits-All Approach
Alcoa is one example, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Measuring productivity simply with numbers or key performance indicators (KPIs) won’t work. Instead, businesses must understand and customize their plan to satisfy diverse individual needs.
Experts at Entrepreneur offered these insights to boosting productivity through workplace psychology:
- Tailor workplace settings for different age groups, such as tech-savvy Millennials
- Drive motivation with genuine recognition for accomplishments, instead of merely finishing tasks
- Encourage a culture of open, transparent communication
- Understand that employees want meaningful achievements and purpose
- Outline a clear business vision so employees can align with it
- Be flexible to emerging workflows like telecommuting, remote work, and co-working
- Understand that productivity is better when employees take regular breaks
By employing workplace psychology, you can help ensure employees feel more valued, invested, and included. Then, the organization can begin to thrive and reach true success, a positive, productive, and more innovative work environment.
