Want to double your productivity or that of your team? Adam Grant did an experiment with call centre employees. He randomized them into three groups with exact conditions except for what happened five minutes before their shift. Each group read a different story.
Group 1 – read stories from previous call centre employees explaining how the job had helped them by teaching them transferable sales skills (the personal benefit group)
Group 2 – read stories from university alumni who had benefitted from the donations raised by the call centre group. They talked about how the scholarships had helped them (the purpose group)
Group 3 – read stories that had nothing to do with either personal benefit or purpose
The results? The personal benefit group had no change in dollars raised while the people in the purpose group more than doubled their dollars raised!
A five minute exercise that doubles productivity!? Why aren’t we doing this? This is the #1 secret to moving others.
Tip: In everything we do; serve – improve another’s life and improve the world. This should and must be at the base of everything we do.
To read more:
Pink, Daniel (2012) To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others
Grant, A. “The Significance of Task Significance: Job Performance Effects, Relational Mechanisms, and Boundary Conditions,” Journal of Applied Psychology 93, no 1 (2008): 108-24.
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