295. Unlocking Employee Motivation: The Science Behind Engagement with Kurt Nelson
37m 56s
In this episode of *The Brainy Business*, host Melina Palmer interviews Dr. Kurt Nelson, an expert in behavioral science and employee motivation. They explore the underlying causes of workplace trends like "quiet quitting" and the "Great Resignation," arguing that many organizations fail to address core human needs. Instead of over-relying on pay or superficial perks, companies should foster respect, psychological safety, and purpose. Dr. Nelson emphasizes that employees perform better when they find meaning in their work and feel heard. He shares a success story where a company with 42% sales force turnover reduced it to under 5% by improving executive communication, holding regular town halls, training managers, and clarifying organizational vision. The discussion underscores the importance of applying behavioral science to create environments where employees can thrive, ultimately benefiting both individuals and the organization.
Welcome to Episode 295 of the Brainy Business, understanding the psychology of Why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to have Dr. Kurt Nelson of Behavioral Groups and the Lantern Group back on the show. Ready? Let's get started. You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast, where we dig into the psychology of Why People Buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain-friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer. Hello, hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer, and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Kurt Nelson. Kurt is a co-host of the podcast Behavioral Groups and CEO of the Lantern Group. Kurt is an expert in employee incentives and motivation, which we're going to be talking about today. This is Kurt's second time on the show, and I know a lot of you listening also tune into behavioral groups, so you probably know about him already. But for everyone who doesn't, he will introduce himself quickly as we start our conversation, so I won't use more time on it here. Just know that Kurt is a master of why people do, or don't, do what they should at work, and to help companies set up communication and incentive plans and programs to help people naturally choose their best paths, both for them, and the company as a whole. Sound good? Really quickly before we get into the interview, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for everything, including related past episodes, links to articles and books, and so much more. It's all within the app you're listening to, and at thebrainybusiness.com/295. Now let's jump right in. Dr. Kurt Nelson, welcome back to thebrainybusinesspodcast. Thank you for having me again. Absolutely. I just have to say I'm one up on Tim, so I'm excited about that. That is the dream. That's how it. That's the goal I know, and then we'll just keep on like, stares stepping and. Oh, wait, you're going to stare stuff now. You're going to invite Tim now. Oh gosh, I'm going to have to up my game, man. I'm going to have to up it. Well, and it's, you know, potentially it's selfish leverage because I've been on behavioral grooves twice, so gotta get like to then keep the steps going right. True. There you go. Visit number three. Well, for everyone who doesn't yet know you in a saying like, "What are you guys talking about?" Can you share a little bit about who you are and the work that you do? Yeah, so probably most prominently for your audience, Kurt Nelson, co-host of Behavioral Groves along with Tim Hulland. It's the guy that we were just dissing. And we have a similar, we talk with behavioral scientists and talk about, you know, the application of behavioral science and life and work in ours. And I actually do that in my work as well. So I'm a behavioral scientist, have a PhD in industrial organizational psychology and my company works with organizations, mostly Fortune, 500 Fortune 1000 companies in applying behavioral science inside to apply to kind of increasing engagement and motivation within their workforce, oftentimes with sales forces, but total employees. And then communicating using behavioral sciences all ends to help improve communication, everything from videos to power points to workshops, webinars to, you know, writing speeches for presidents of companies. We've done all of those. So. Yeah, I love that. And when you were on the show before we talked about motivation and incentives and you've been kind enough to be a guest lecture in my internal communication and change management course. Now, so it's the like meta of all these of like, when we're recording versus when things are happening. So will be twice and will have been when the episode comes out of, you know, behind the scenes that's not helpful for anyone else. And I don't know why I feel the need to give that context, but, you know, there it is. So. Yeah. So on that, you know, we were touching base and saying, you know, what's the most timely thing we can talk about right now and what's really important to people, what's kind of the next piece and what we landed on is the quiet, quitting, great resignation. I think I just saw something else recently that was, oh gosh, what was it called? Amy Porterfield was sharing something about it. It was, and it was about resentment, is something silly that people are calling it now, which is like, you're just going to be the most unruly, obvious nightmare of an employee or something. And like, please don't do that. I haven't heard that one. I heard the just enough Monday, though, which is a huge, I think tick tock thing like, Monday's are these horrible days. So you just show up and do just enough to get by and you start your morning up with a whole bunch of self-care kind of things and doing all of that. So that was the last one that I heard of at least, so, but yeah. Interesting in the priming of that. So like the first piece of the just enough Mondays are terrible and thinking like, wow, you are really priming yourself to have terrible Mondays. It's really best of your life. That's no good. But like extra self-care and being more thoughtful about that is a good strategy too, right, to make sure it's not such a bad situation. So yeah, there's a ying-yang there, right? There's kind of this good and bad kind of all mixed together. But it is interesting, at least, you know, from the world that I work in, what has been interesting about the great resignation, particularly around that time. What I saw with many of these organizations is this refocus in on the employee experience and on how do we ensure that we are doing the right things by our employees to keep them engaged, to keep them motivated. And wow, we haven't really changed any of the practices that we've been doing for the past 10 years. And yet the world has drastically changed after a pandemic and work from home and all of those hybrid kind of components and just the total kind of gest of work in itself. And so it's been really interesting to see these pretty big organizations kind of pivoting on their heels and going, oh crap, we might have messed up and not like looking at this. So yeah, well, this episode is going to be coming out after some really related ones. So we've got Amy Gallo, we'll have recently talked about getting along and having difficult people and things like that had an episode on the book, "I Human" from Tomas Chamorro, "Chamorro, pre music." Oh, it's hard. I'm glad you said it, not me. I know. You know, looking at technology and things with an organizations and the shift of how we look at that. Also, the human experience with John Cills and mixed signals with Uighur Gnese in his new book, which is so awesome. And very much related. So I think that this really ties in. And if we now can be looking at in this way, he said organizations should be looking at how they can be helping their employees to be engaged and to care about them in a different way. It's an interesting double edged sword, isn't right, but it's in a lot of ways. It's not the organization's job to ensure that everyone has an amazing work experience every single moment of every single day. And at the end of the day, you are being paid to do a job. So that is, there is potentially on one side, there's a bit of people believing, feeling like the company they work for owes them utopia or something, which I don't feel like is right either. There's a other side of the pendulum here if we get into that both in thinking from Wendy Smith and Mary Ann Lewis. Like, it doesn't have to go all the way to this side. But hey, there's also a lot that's not great. So when you look at empowering employees and changing things up, you know, what have you been talking with your clients about? So one of the things that we've noticed in this isn't necessarily just in the past three years, it's been even a little bit longer, actually a lot longer than that is that organizations, leaders within organizations, not all of them, but many of them get myopic in their view. And they look at how do we engage and motivate people? And they only focus in on one or two lovers that they feel they have. One is paid and bonus and incentives. It's this extrinsic reward. Oh, I need to pay these people more because that's the only way that they're going to be engaged various different pieces. And then the other is kind of around, well, how do we enhance their work through elements of, I don't know, how to even describe this, this idea that they need to create an environment, teen kind of focused environment where everybody gets along. And there's this happy, go lucky kind of thing. And those are kind of the levers that at least we had seen in the work that we do. And what I think organizations are realizing are a
At least we're trying to point out to them is that humans are complex people, are complex creatures. And that, you know, behavioral science kind of shows us that we are driven by a lot of different factors and the environment that we're in, the social environment that we're in, the way that our managers are giving us challenges and various different things. And to your point, I don't think that most employees, at least those that are relatively saying don't believe that they need to have a utopia at work, but what they want is they want respect. They want to have a psychologically safe place. They want to make sure that the stresses that they're being placed under aren't undue and that it is manageable. And to that point that we talked about, you know, that self-care component is that they shouldn't have to feel like Monday is the worst day in the world because they're coming back to work that they should actually feel some element of anticipation and joy of coming into work. It doesn't mean that every moment of every day is going to be that, but man, you need to at least bring that to the table so that people feel they're contributing and have a purpose and bring some of that into the world. Oh, yeah, for sure. And that's when you were saying that it reminded me to of another book in the, just even these last couple of weeks that people will have been hearing me talk about. So the micro stress effect from, I'm going to be talking about cross. And again, recording soon will have come out. Yeah, but hopefully that way did I get those mixed up? Oh, no, it's not out yet. It is out. Yeah. No, okay. There you go. Sorry, world. If I'm off in that episode yet to come, my apologies, but it'll be soon. If not yet. It's a micro stress that you're having right now that you're like, you're like, don't know when. I know that all the tensions of that. But I mean, that's even like you're saying there on the other side of when quiet quitting was being talked about a lot. And I remember I was on a trip as in Chicago actually. I think it was when we were both in Chicago for IEX behavior and was reading about it a lot because my book was about to be coming out what you're in play Z and can't tell you. Yes. And I was thinking about like articles to write as I'm promoting, you know, the book launch. And that was right as quiet quitting was a big deal. And it's like, you know, be this argument of I shouldn't be having to like, I'm going to do the bare minimum and just do what my job description is. It's like, why is that bad? Like why? Why? I mean, like we're just going to do what we are being contracted to do. Like it's I am, of course, an ambitious achiever. I don't like to say overachiever. So like I will, I always do more than what's required. And like I think that companies also shouldn't be expecting that people are going to give 150,000 percent every minute of every single day. So it's like we say all these paradoxical stressors of all the things happening at once that makes it be a bit complex, a bit, quite complex. And there are those some some rules of that could come into play right of be more thoughtful about that these are human people at the end of the day. And let's create jobs that aren't going to be someone's trying to do 55 things every minute of every day. And let's get our priorities in line and not be trying to do 200 top projects or even 10 at one time. Because people just can't split up and that stress makes it so our employees are less creative. And they're more likely to work on the status quo and worse problem solvers more likely to make mistakes, which is which is exactly what you when you're talking about that quiet quitting. And I hear you when you're saying like why are we expecting them to go above and beyond. But I think particularly with knowledge workers, right? There is this element that if I'm just coming in and giving the bare minimum, I'm not really being creative. I'm not giving it the ideas which aren't necessarily might be written into the job description, but they're kind of unexpected. We are we are here because you're being hired hopefully because you're an intelligent bright person who is going to add value and bring ideas and thoughts and your your passion into this job because hopefully that's what it is. And I think for those organizations that that I worked with at least in those times, that's what they were feeling. They were feeling that this was a component of a we're losing some really great talent. We're that great resignation. I worked with one company before we start working with them that year before they had lost 42% of their sales force. And I mean, that is you think about what that does to any any organization, you know, 42% turnover and then even, you know, that was in one year and then they still had a pretty high turnover the first couple of months. And so over half of their sales force within a little over a year was was turned over. But this idea of making sure that you're having that connection that you're bringing your full self into the work, I think is something that when people actually do it, they enjoy their work better. That's what the research is pointing to, right? If you can find meaning and purpose in your work, we just talked with Yale. I always forget how to pronounce her last name. She just wrote a new book about parent work, parent thrive and this idea that, you know, when we, when we show up as our full self, either as parents or as in our work, we enjoy ourselves more. We have more satisfaction out of our life. And this idea, I think, is one of the things that we try to at least I've been trying to work with organizations to say, how do we do that? And one of the things that we know is that, you know, frontline managers, even second-line managers often are promoted into their position, not necessarily because they're great at managing, but because they're good at their individual job and they don't have any clue as to how to manage and how to engage people and work with them and talk to them and get the, you know, understand what's going on so that they can troubleshoot all these issues. And that's a huge issue when we think about why that turnover is happening, why the quiet quitting is happening. I mean, the organization can be set up for success, but if you don't have the right people or trained, the people that are leading your employees, you're in for a world of hurt. Yeah, definitely. I'm going to refrain from saying much about my book, What Your Employees Need and Can't Tell You, because that's like the whole theme of what the book is. So that'll be linked in the show notes. I'm like helping through that problem. But it's true. I mean, your book is great on that, right? I mean, when you think about, I mean, some of the stuff that I talk with clients is directly from your book. It's bringing some of those aspects out to say, look, you're sitting here, you're making assumptions about how people operate again. We tend to oftentimes the leaders are like, well, you know, this is really rational. We just pay them more and they're going to do X and you go, that's not what they're looking for, right? They're looking to make a difference in the world. They're looking to be heard. They're looking to feel valued. They're looking for an opportunity to participate and to feel like they have value and that they're making a difference as we talk about. Yeah. Well, I would love to dig in. And whether you're able to talk more about the specific client with the 42% turnover at which then became over half of their sales force, if you can talk about what you did with them, if you can't, do you have some generic sort of advice for people based on all the work you do? Yeah. And I can talk about that. I tell you that we work with them and their turnover right now, at least in the sales forces, under 10%, actually, it's under 5%. And now it's not attributing all that to us. What we did is we came in and we're looking at helping the organization, A, they brought in a new president, right? So that in and of itself was a big piece and kind of digit the dynamics of what that president was the vision and mission. But what they had not been doing was they had not been communicating really well from an executive leadership down to that employee level. They had not been setting out a clear vision of where the organization was going to go and how individuals can participate and enhance that. Their incentives were designed in such a way that people were scared that they weren't going to be able to make enough money that they weren't, that the potential in the upcoming years was going to be just drastically dropped. And so we looked at all of those things and so we worked with them specifically around the president of the company and his communication. So started writing a monthly email, email from the president that went out that kind of highlighted some of the key things that are going on, some of the metrics. Again, what we heard from some of the upfront initial insights that we were doing was people felt out of the loop. They didn't know what was going on. They were kind of in kind of this own little world of, hey, here's my team, but I don't know what the larger organization is doing. so we tried to fill the. them in on a lot of those, but also working with them on the vision that they were doing and kind of bringing some of that in. And you'll be happy about this. We brought in achievement words into those messages and we tried to prime kind of some of those elements as we're doing that. We did a monthly town hall where we're designing the messaging that's coming through the town hall and having different organized people from the organization talk. And again, giving an insight and pulling back that curtain to help them understand what was going on and really developing out the communication that goes with that, worked with them on their national sales meeting, actually national employee meeting it and brought everybody together and what are the messages that we're talking about there and how are we getting people to interact with each other in ways that they probably weren't doing before and then worked with their managers on saying, "Here's how you can communicate. Here's how you can work." So teaching those managers what it is and giving them tools. We're actually developed out action plans for them and built out various different facets so that they can take the lessons that we learned. But now how do I apply that in my situation with my eight people that I am leading and I have a way to work? All right. Molina. Okay. Here's what I know about Molina. Here's what I need to be able to do with Molina over the next 13 weeks. Here are the action steps that I'm going to be working with her on. And oh, here's Kurt. All right. I need to work with Kurt on this and it's going to be slightly different and helping them understand all of that. So those are just some of the things that we did there and it's obviously a lot more complex when we get into some of the dynamics in different pieces but really it's been an amazing kind of transformation to watch and to see how the organization is responding and it's cool. It's really fun to see. Yeah. Well, and I of course have, as you were talking, I was like, "Oh, I should ask about that. Oh, I should ask about that." One thing before we jump into a question, I would have asked to follow up on this would be, I don't even mention the achievement words which we, I think, talked about when you were on the show before. I know you've mentioned it in the guest lecturing with my class. For everyone that's not familiar, do you have, can you share a little bit about what you're talking about? And I think you're now looking up a stat. I was trying to go and go, "I'm not sure if I can remember those 12 achievement words." So the research was this. It was Gary Latham. Gary Latham did this work where he had an organization that he asked said, "Hey, President sends out this email once a week. It's a kind of a rar-ra email to the entire company." And the entire company kind of goes, "Oh, great. Here it is." And what Gary said is, "Look, can I just replace 12 words? I just want to take this email that you're doing. I'm going to replace 12 words. It's already rar-ra, but we're going to put these specific achievement words in." And I know some of them are like thrive and strive and achieve in different pieces like that. So they were qualified achievement words that they had done some from previous research. And then they track performance. And this was a call center. So everything was measured. So they measured performance in a couple different ways. One was, like, how long did it take you to resolve the issue that you had? They're calling in its customer complaint, basically. And so they're calling in. How long does it take to resolve that? And then number two, how many times do you have to elevate the issue up to the next level? And when they looked at that, the people that got- and this was blinded to managers, this was blind, this was a well-done study. When they looked at the results, the people who had gotten the achievement words at the end of that week had a 15% increase in performance and a 30% increase in the, like, the bringing up, the leveling up having to go to the next level. And so when you account for that and they're going, "Oh, well, you know, 12 words were the difference between that." And when they looked at it, they're going, "Oh, well, maybe it all happened on Monday too, because that's when the email came out." No, that performance increase had a long leg. It wasn't just a spike on Monday for those people that got it. It lasted for multiple days, and it was still higher at the end of the week than it was at the beginning, or compared to the control group. So it's fascinating when you think about priming and what priming can do. Jeffrey was also the one who did a great study where, again, at a different call center, he had some people get a tips guide, right? They got a sheet that said, "Here are some tips when you're trying to go out and do this." And this was a student-led fundraising. They were trying to get funds for the scholarship fund or something from school. And in one case, they had the tip sheet that was just plain. And another one, they had a water drop on the back or a picture of a woman going through a tape. And actually, they did some alternate versions of this, and they had different pictures that actually improved better. But the one with the tape, they found a 40% increase in donations from the people that got the tips that had a picture in the background versus those who didn't. And again, you think about why? That doesn't make any sense if I'm a rational human being. Having a picture on the tip sheet versus not, but you're activating these goal components within your brain, the neurological networks that are there are primed so that you're going, "Oh, yeah, I want to achieve. I want to accomplish stuff." And so, I'm going to, and changes the way that we actually behave in ways, and we're not even aware of those other things that are just fascinating to me. Yeah, definitely. I am all about framing and priming, I think when I tell clients I talk about it on the show, and everything is like, "If you have to start somewhere, this is where I always say you should start," because changing one word can have such an impact on behavior. And in a way that, like you were saying, people don't even notice annoying that changing 12 words, adding them or whatever in that made this difference in lasting behavior change. And I just love these two because other than hiring the consultants or whatever it is, but you don't have to spend a lot of money. You're sending the thing anyway, and it's an email or a letter or something that you're already doing. And you can just tweak it and make it not even just a little better. Successful versus not, or the difference between being super successful and being harmful. Exactly. And what's interesting when you look at the research around that and just the way that you do it, and we do a lot of work with Glass-Time, we talked about incentives, right? And we do a lot of communication around that. And I always talk to people and say, depending upon your culture, depending on where you are, you're either going to frame this incentive as a, hey, look at how much you can earn with this new plan. Or we're going to frame it as, make sure you're not leaving money on the table with this new plan, right? And that change can be significant in how people respond to it. One is a loss frame. Don't leave money on the table. Don't lose money, right? Don't let something go. And one is a gain frame. And again, depending upon the culture, you don't want to do a loss frame if there's some negative components going on. Other people are fearful of various different aspects. But oftentimes that works better. And again, if you can target performance of people, and that's one of the things that we're starting to see more and more too, is individualized messaging going out to people. And you can target the certain amount of people, the certain type of people based upon their performance and then customize their messaging. It's fantastic. So. Yeah, definitely. Well, bringing it back to, you know, being a better organization that people don't even want to think about, great, resonating, whatever, what term we want to turn that into. What advice do you have? You know, what's a good place for people to be starting if they want to be one of these, you know, top tier organizations that people just really love to work at. Yeah. So again, there's lots of work around psychological safety, which I'm sure you probably talked about on the show, this idea that, you know, the one thing that you can do. So a, make sure your incentives are aligned with the behaviors that you're trying to drive and they're not driving unintended consequences. B, make sure you're setting up your environment so that it's psychologically safe. So people feel like they can have a voice and that they can show up as their true self there as opposed to having to put on my work game face in Monday's a horrible place. But this is part and I feel valued by my team and my ideas, even if they go against the grain of what the rest of the organization or team is saying, at least I'm heard. Now, they might not agree with me and different pieces, but I'm heard and I'm not just dismissed across the board. And then three, I think is give your managers and your employees the tools that they need. And not tools like, oh, this is the productive spreadsheet and here's how to, you know, do your call planning or here's how to, you know, put your expense report in. No, the tools I'm talking about are tools to understand a, what are the goals that we have and then what
why I need to do in order to break those goals down into smaller manageable chunks. If I'm a manager, the tools of understanding what I can do in order to engage and motivate and things that I can, you know, props and reminders and various different aspects to do that because at the end of the day, it comes down to changing the behavior of the people, right? And aligning that behavior with the outcomes that you're trying to achieve. And if you can give people, make it easy for them by giving them tools, by setting up the incentives so they're right and creating a culture and atmosphere where people feel valued and safe, then you're going to have success. Perfect. Well, as we go to close out the show in the, it's not even a, like, hard shift, which now people will get the joke of a lead in there, our own little priming of our brain shift that we're going to take here of helping people to shift their brains and something that you've created at the lantern group. You have some products for people speaking of tools to help them. Can you share a little bit about what, what y'all have been putting out there recently? Yeah. So as we were, you know, we talked about the tools that we create for inside of organizations. And so we've been doing that for a number of years and trying to help people, employees, you know, with their goals and setting goals and bringing, breaking those down. And what do they do on a daily basis and kind of how to think things and all sorts of mindset, elements and variety of other factors. And what we realized is that, wow, this stuff that works for employees in a, in a work environment is also the same stuff that can kind of work for people just in their everyday life. And we hadn't done anything there. So we actually have been working on creating tools, a set of tools called brain shift. And then one is the brain shift journal that you are now doing the van a white and showing up there. Thank you for that. And this is a journal. It's a guided journal, 13 weeks of daily prompts. There's three to five prompts a day based upon the day of the week. And then each week has a behavioral science insight. And what I think is really unique about this is that's a really good journal. Lots of people who do journal out there. And we looked at a bunch of them and we go, you know, many of them are pretty good. But we felt we could enhance that based upon the insights that we have from behavioral science and understanding human behavior and motivation and engagement and all of those factors that come into this. So when we put this together, we developed out like, how do you, how do you actually create a good goal? And we call them keystone goals because they align with kind of keystone habits. These goals that are going to have a larger than life impact. In other words, that they impact more than just, I want to get a car. Well, no, I want to, you know, thinking about those goals that are going to have a bigger impact on your life than maybe some of the more things that we just tend to gravitate to. And so how do you determine what is the right goal? And then what do you, how do you break that goal down into milestones? And then every week we're going through every day has different prompts. And some of those prompts are similar across like Sundays and Mondays. You might have the same prompt every Sunday and every Monday. But there's also different prompts within there in order to, we are novelty seeking creatures. And we, oh, well, this is new. This is something I have. But we know there's some great stuff around consistency. And then we have elements around progress. And so you can track your progress and be motivated by that. We can do, we do priming prompts every day. It's like, how do I want to show up today? Do I want to be bold? Do I want to be thinking? Do I want to be kind? And again, just writing that down, simple little things like that. We have a whole, every day has a gratitude component in it. But we've changed up those gratitude prompts because again, we know that asking just the two or three things you're grateful for is good, but you can be better. And we're looking at a variety of different ways of doing that and bringing people's minds to how to think about gratitude differently. And, you know, not only what am I grateful for, but what have I done this week that's somebody would be grateful for that I did and variety of different factors along that line. So we brought all of this behavioral science thinking into the building of this. And it took us over a year to kind of get it down and to get it right. But we're pretty proud of what's resulted from that. Yeah, as you should be, it's a really great tool. And I know it's one of many that are either already out or yet to come from the lantern groups. So people should go check that out. We'll have a link in the show notes. We'll have our curiosity principle here, right, of getting people wanting to go to the show notes to learn more. And for everyone who's excited to, you know, connect with you to learn more, what is their best path to do so? So LinkedIn is fantastic. You can I'm Kurt W Nelson up there on social media Twitter is what is it? Motivation Guru I think is only intern group. And then I forget what the other one is anyway. You can reach it. You have 100 behaviors. There's 100 behaviors, which is the Instagram one. And then there is behavioral grooves as one behavioral groove. So there's all sorts of different ways, but just, you know, motivation guru out there, I think is from Twitter. You can go out. Not I'll get that one. So cool. So that will be the main Twitter handle that we link to in the show notes. And for anyone, the good news is all paths lead to Kurt. That's what I hear here. Right? You can always find him. And if for some reason you have difficulty, let me know. And I can help to get you connected to him. So thank you again for joining me on the show. It was so fun to chat with you again today. And I don't know, I guess I better email Tim so we can schedule his interview. Molina, thank you. And I will send you the wrong email for Tim as you change. So there you go. But no, thank you. It's always a pleasure. Always fun. You do such a great job. So thank you. Thank you again to Dr. Kurt Nelson for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing into day's conversation? For me, I always love talking with Kurt and hearing about how he's helping companies to align their incentives and motivation to get amazing results. Use turnover, increase productivity, increase sales, happier teams. Why choose when you can have it all? It really is possible when you understand people and what motivates them, which Kurt has shown in our conversation today. Plus, the Lantern Group has leveraged that even further to create those brain-shift journals. So if you want to check out what those are like and pick one up for yourself, there is of course a link for you in the show notes. Along with links to all those related past episodes and books and ways to connect with Kurt and check out behavioral grooves in the Lantern Group and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/295. And thank you again to Dr. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain-friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The episode discusses employee motivation and engagement in the context of trends like "quiet quitting" and the "Great Resignation."
Organizations often rely too heavily on extrinsic rewards (like pay) and superficial culture fixes, neglecting deeper human needs such as respect, psychological safety, and meaningful work.
Effective strategies include improving communication from leadership, creating clear vision and purpose, training managers, and designing roles that allow employees to contribute creatively and feel valued.
A case study highlights how a company reduced high turnover by implementing better communication (e.g., monthly updates, town halls), manager training, and aligning incentives with employee engagement.
Summary:
In this episode of *The Brainy Business*, host Melina Palmer interviews Dr. Kurt Nelson, an expert in behavioral science and employee motivation. They explore the underlying causes of workplace trends like "quiet quitting" and the "Great Resignation," arguing that many organizations fail to address core human needs.
Instead of over-relying on pay or superficial perks, companies should foster respect, psychological safety, and purpose. Dr. Nelson emphasizes that employees perform better when they find meaning in their work and feel heard.
He shares a success story where a company with 42% sales force turnover reduced it to under 5% by improving executive communication, holding regular town halls, training managers, and clarifying organizational vision. The discussion underscores the importance of applying behavioral science to create environments where employees can thrive, ultimately benefiting both individuals and the organization.
FAQs
The podcast explores the psychology of why people buy and how to apply behavioral economics to make businesses more brain-friendly.
Dr. Kurt Nelson is a behavioral scientist and co-host of Behavioral Grooves, specializing in employee incentives, motivation, and applying behavioral science in organizations.
Organizations often focus too narrowly on extrinsic rewards like pay or creating a superficially happy environment, neglecting deeper factors like respect, psychological safety, and meaningful work.
Quiet quitting refers to employees doing only the bare minimum required by their job description. The discussion suggests it highlights a need for better engagement, but also questions unrealistic expectations of constant overachievement.
By improving communication from leadership, clarifying vision, redesigning incentives, and training managers to engage and support their teams effectively.
Managers are crucial; if they lack training in engagement and communication, it can lead to high turnover and quiet quitting, even if the organization is otherwise well-structured.
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