The Horsepower Survey: A tool for putting employee engagement on the management dashboard

[Paul Herr]

Dear Enlightened Managers, HR professionals and Consultants,

I've been a member of the Employee Engagement Network since November, 2008, and I have enjoyed the honest, enlightened, and sometimes spirited, discussions on this site.

Today I am announcing the release of my book, "Primal Management: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Nature to Drive High Performance," which hit the bookstores several weeks ago to critical acclaim. PM is a featured book this spring by the American Management Association, one of the most respected names in management-training.

The early uptake by the national business press, academia, the business community, the consulting community, and groups like the "Winning Workplaces Organization" has been gratifying. These reviews are available on my website: www.primalmanagement.com.

I am also announcing the commercial release of the Horsepower SurveyTM, an intrinsic-reward survey described in Chapter 2 of my book. This simple, monthly, online survey puts human capital front-and-center on the management dashboard for the first time. Think of it as a control chart for tracking the state-of-repair of one’s employees.

Motivational horsepower is arguably the single most-important parameter a business owner or manager can measure because: How people FEEL determines how they FUNCTION, and how they function determines organizational PERFORMANCE. If managers can get this feeling-based metric to go up, I argue, then all of the desirable financial, operational and HR metrics will go up with it.

Corporate America has a deeply-flawed payroll-accounting system. It accounts for monetary pay and benefits to the nearest penny, but utterly fails to account for the intrinsic rewards (emotional paycheck) that are equally motivating to employees. The Horsepower SurveyTM remedies this situation by capturing the five forms of intrinsic reward that drive high performance.

This simple, monthly, online survey determines whether one's human capital is functioning optimally or malfunctioning. It is based upon a compelling, biology-based theory that describes five motivational hot-buttons that nature built into our brains to promote our survival. I show where these hot-buttons reside in the brain, which neurotransmitters, hormones and neuropeptides regulate them, and how human beings malfunction when any of these reward circuits are disrupted by disease or injury. Chapter 1 (attached) discusses the underling theory in some detail.

The Horsepower Survey is now available for commercial use, and I already have consulting partners in the US, Mexico, Brazil, Canada and Japan who are planning to incorporate it into their consulting practices. My first Mexican partner called me excitedly several months ago, and, with a strong Spanish accent, said, "Paul, this is FANTASTIC! I have not been this excited since I read Dan Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence 12 years ago."

If you are interested in this novel survey, I can send you a demonstration link to try it out. Please read Chapters 1 and 2 of Primal Management (attached) before you do so.

If you are a consultant who would like to incorporate my intrinsic-reward survey (Horsepower SurveyTM) and employee-engagement methodology into your consulting practice, please give me a call to discuss a win-win proposition (608-833-9446). I plan to have millions of employees on the survey before long because every company ought to track the horsepower of its motivational engine! I didn't mean to pontificate, but I think the survey is going to be a hit.

Best Regards,

Paul Herr
Author of Primal Management
[e-mail]
www.primalmanagement.com
608-833-9446

[Adam Hibbert]

I'm impressed by the way this survey collection technique handles "Net" experience, but I'm tempted to say that the label is unfortunate ... in that it still smacks of treating employees as livestock, who we'll poke with a thermometer once a month to see if we need to up their feed or something. If words like that were to leak out into employee awareness in the UK, woah daddy!

[Paul Herr]

Hi Adam,

Sorry that you didn't resonate with the term "Horsepower." This looks like a cultural disconnect. In the US we use the term "horsepower" to rate the power output of engines, so the Horsepower Survey refers to cars and engines, not horses and stockyards.

This is a feeling-based survey. It asks employees to provide sensitive, personal information--how they feel deep down. I use automobile lingo to make this subject more palatable to male managers who are often uncomfortable talking about personal things like feelings and emotions. The automobile metaphor is my way of packaging feelings in a way that male managers find non-threatening (Horsepower Survey, Horsepower Metric, Tune-Up Metric, Tune-Up Tips). The survey's reporting interface looks like an actual car dashboard, not a stable. The "speedometer" shows the current horsepower for the current survey round.

This tool is NOT a burdensome system of control designed to squeeze another drop of productivity from employees (my book makes this crystal clear). Rather, it is a tool to assess whether a company has created a rewarding, human-friendly work environment where employees can thrive. The best workplaces, I believe, are also the most emotionally rewarding, and this is what the survey is designed to measure.

I am hoping that female managers will wink and realize the necessity of the automobile metaphor. Men tend to be unaware of their own emotions, much less those of the people around them, so a tool that helps guys become more emotionally-balanced and emotionally-aware is a good thing, a valuable thing.

I hope this response addresses your concerns. Please take a look at the attached chapters if you would like to learn more about this approach to measuring the state-of-repair, or emotional paycheck, of your employees.

Best,

Paul Herr
Author of Primal Management

[Adam Hibbert]

OK, just for one more round, I'm going to continue to play devil's advocate on this. Labels aside, many of the assumptions behind this line of enquiry look highly biological?

I don't believe that's a proper domain for us - which of these questions would we struggle to answer without peeking inside brain chemistry? I'd argue for treating people's rational choices and stated reasons as the raw material of engagement 'science', such as it is, not reducing beyond employees' personhood and subjectivity into the realm of what's genetically determined. It feels disrespectful and potentially manipulative?

[Paul Herr]

Dear Adam,

I respectfully disagree. If you set out to press my motivational hot-buttons, you succeeded. I'm going to push back hard because I think your approach is flawed and harmful to all parties.

There is nothing disrespectful or manipulative in my approach. On the contrary, the current hyper-rational approach to management, which you apparently subscribe to, is HIGHLY DISREPECTFUL to human nature because it attempts to deny the primacy of our emotional nature. Your rational paradigm has created a world where only 29% of employees care about their work (Gallup). It has also created a world where 50% of us will suffer from a mental illness in the course of our lives (World Health Organization) and where additional millions turn to drugs to find the rewarding feelings they are unable to find in life (because of the failed, hyper-rational paradigm you subscribe to). If this were a college exam, corporate America would get an "F" for employee engagement, and whatever hyper-rational, tactical, strategic "best practices" we are currently using get a big fat "F" too.

I have spent 30 years trying to figure out what human nature "looks like," and I believe I have succeeded. Human nature consists of 5 biologic appetites and 5 social appetites that regulate our survival. These 10 appetites, taken as a whole, represent an elegantly-designed bio/social survival system, or guidance system, that has allowed a puny primate to thrive over millions of years in nearly every ecosystem on the planet. These 10 appetites constitute the motivational engine that drives all human activity. The output signals from this survival engine are feelings of pleasure and pain. Feelings, in other words, are proxies for our vital survival needs, and to deny their primacy in business is pure folly. Feelings tell us what we need to survive and our logical, rational mind tries to fulfill these vital needs. In other words, feelings and emotions rule over rationality in business and in life.

If we could somehow turn off this emotional engine, we would all drop to the ground and never get up again, because there would be no incentive to get up again. A rational mind, without emotional incentives to guide it, is inert. In a truly emotionless world every path into the future would yields an expected emotional return of zero, so the rational mind would do the rational thing--absolutely nothing. We know this for a FACT. From 1930 to 1955 13,000 lobotomy patients had their emotional engines turned off FOR REAL. This did NOT turn them into super-efficient Mr. Spocks. Rather, it caused them not to care about their friends and family, not to care about their careers, not to care about their communities, and not to care about themselves as growing and developing human beings. This is the nightmarish world that your hyper-rational approach to life leads to.

Engagement is a purely emotional concept. A recent study by the Conference Board, an industry-funded think-tank in New York, compared all of the major employee engagement surveys on the market and concluded that they all measured the emotional connecting between employees and their employer. Don't try to go down the rationality-road when discussing engagement, because you will lose the argument based on biology, based on statistics, based on pure, deductive logic and based on case studies.

You are heading 180-degrees from the optimal direction. The correct path is to align our corporations harmoniously with human nature--not to deny human nature. My path leads to a more promising future where everybody wins. If we continue down the hyper-rational path we will get more of the same--a broken economic system gasping for air.

[Adam Hibbert]

Paul, your "hyper-rational" characterisation looks to me like a nasty case of false dichotomy - I wish you a speedy recovery.

My point about being wary of reduction beyond the Subject is simply this: some entities must be treated in science as irreducible. I believe 3,000 years of relentless but unresolved philosophical inquiry into the nature of humans tends towards the conclusion that we are just such an entity. I'm afraid nothing in the little I understand of your picture of human nature persuades me that you've resolved the timeless issues at stake, there.

To be clear, I'm not averse to a bit of passion in business - I fully agree there has to be a passionate core driving any human enterprise. But any attempt to corral the wellsprings of such passions into a simple n-step system smacks to me of, in anything, avoiding the convoluted, many faceted, rational/emotional complexity of human subjectivity ... ironically, shepherding it towards a neat, instrumental model which treats us as less than fully subjective persons.

To come back to my initial question, though, which was an honest attempt at sounding out your proposition: which questions of employee engagement would we struggle to answer without peeking inside brain chemistry?

[Paul Herr]

Dear Adam,

Sorry if I got overly aggressive with my last response--you actually seem like a very thoughtful and well-read guy.

I am not trying to take human nature apart using the reductionist approach because there is too much of that going on in science already. Rather, I have worked for 30 years to put the puzzle pieces together and develop an overall sense of what human nature "looks like." My conclusion is that the motivational engine pulsing at the core of human nature consists of 5 biologic appetites and 5 social appetites that regulate our vital survival needs--a survival autopilot, if you will. Emotions, I believe, are the business end of that mechanism. They are the proxies that embody our vital survival needs and without them we'd be dead--extinct.

My message to managers is "Ignore emotions and feelings at your peril, because they are the fundamental forces that move us." As "forces," they obey the laws of emotional physics. My first law of emotional physics is, "A human being at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an emotional force--a feeling."

I have endeavored to bring simplicity and clarity to "convoluted, many faceted, rational/emotional complexity of human subjectivity." I demonstrate that there is something simple and elegant operating underneath all that complexity, and, believe it or not, I think I have resolved some of the timeless issues you mentioned by using evolutionary logic and the latest science to fit the puzzle pieces together. Which is more satisfying to you? A hodgepodge of disconnected pieces, or a beautiful picture?

[Adam Hibbert]

At this point, I'd have to invest in reading your thesis in full to do the argument justice - evolutionary logic and all. I'm going to have to ponder whether I've got spare capacity for that ... if you'll bear with me?

But on what satisfies me more (a whole big crazy mess, or a beautiful, harmonious system) isn't that the kind of question the Pope might address at Galileo?

Regards, A

[Paul Herr]

Dear Adam,

It would be great if you'd read Primal Management and then comment. Who knows, you might even enjoy my engineered-system approach to human nature!

The way I look at it, evolution by natural selection is the puzzle maker, so, if we really want to truly understand human nature at a deep and fundamental level, we need to put the pieces together the way the puzzle maker intended by using evolutionary logic.

Life is like clay that gets pressed into the environment. It takes on the shape of environment and gets wrapped around the laws of physics, chemistry, statistics, engineering and mathematics that define the environment. The human hand, for example, obeys the laws of mechanics, the human eye obeys the laws of optics, the human heart obeys the laws of fluid mechanics, and the human metabolism obeys the laws of thermodynamics. The human mind obeys the laws of ???

In other words, there is order and logic to our design that is, amazingly, accessible to the human mind. The complexity and chaos of our subjective experience is made possible by the orderly, "engineered" system underneath. I am trying to identify the laws of emotional "physics" that underlie human motivation and subjective experience. I assumed, 30 years ago, that human motivation ought to be just as elegantly designed as the human hand, the human eye, or the human heart. If we can discern that order, then we can work harmoniously with human nature rather than against it. We currently work against it, which is why there is so much pain out there.

Human beings are hunter gatherers who belong in small bands foraging in the wilderness. We have thrust ourselves into an artificial world of our own making and we are suffering on account of it. If we can determine our true nature, then we can design our corporations and organizations around it rather than on top of it. That is my ultimate goal with PM.