My spouse and I enjoy cooking and entertaining and we make a great team in the kitchen. When we have family or friends over for dinner it is not just a meal, it is an event. We want the occasion to be a very positive and memorable experience for our guests so we do not do anything half way. Most dishes are made completely from scratch. When we entertain, our typical dinner involves five courses. The meal begins upstairs in our library. Here we serve appetizers. Depending on the type of cuisine we are featuring that evening, our appetizer may be fresh bruschetta, spinach rolls made with a puff pastry, or chicken potstickers. After a time of socializing and nibbling on appetizers we move back to the first floor to the formal dining room. Here we partake of three candlelit courses: soup, salad, and the main course; each accompanied by homemade bread. After the main course, we retire to the living room to continue conversing and allowing the previous courses to digest. Finally, the evening is topped off with dessert. This often involves my favorite ingredient – chocolate...perhaps homemade chocolate mousse, cheesecake, traditional steamed English pudding, or molten lava cakes. No one leaves our home hungry.

What really motivates employees to be productive? Is it money? Recognition? Job satisfaction? Benefits? Opportunities? Employees are recognized as the most crucial asset of today’s organizations by both practitioners and academics. Employee satisfaction is stressed as one of the most important drivers of continuous improvement and satisfied customers in most classical total quality management (TQM) literature. But what really motivates employees to be productive in their jobs? Two often mentioned motivators are money and job satisfaction. We hear that better pay motivates employees to be more productive. We also hear that “happy employees are productive employees.”

But is there any truth to these sayings or are they just fictional beliefs? Anyone who has ever taken a course in social science has discovered that common sense beliefs are not always validated by scientific research. In some cases, common sense beliefs are just plain wrong. Take “opposites attract,” for example. This is not true. An overwhelming amount of research indicates that we tend to be attracted to people who are similar to ourselves. Thus, “birds of a feather flock together” is true; but “opposites attract” is false. The only way to know if money and job satisfaction really influence productivity is to look at the results of scientific studies. Let’s begin with what researchers have discovered about money.

Have you ever been in a conversation in which you had to ask someone to repeat information or a question, not because you did not hear the person, but because you simply were not paying attention? Have you ever finished reading a page in a book only to realize that you have no idea what you had just read because your mind had wandered off? In both of these instances we are trying to divide our attention between two tasks and it is just not effective - we are not fully engaged in either task. Such cases remind me of the CEO who was asked how many people work in his company. His reply...”About half of them.”

In today’s difficult economic climate, many corporate executives are looking to cut unnecessary expenses and to avoid wasting resources. Our employees are a very valuable, but also costly, resource. Unfortunately, employees vary widely in their level of engagement in our companies.

Q: What exactly is meant by employee engagement?

A: An employee who is engaged is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, the work that he or she is doing.

Tim Rutledge, author of Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty, describes an engaged employee as one who is committed to, fascinated by, and attracted to the work. When employees are engaged they care about the company’s future and are willing to go beyond the call of duty in order to help their organization exceed. Both practitioners and academics agree that engaged employees are cognitively vigilant and connected to the organization. That all sounds well and good but...

Every human being is unique. Just like no two snowflakes are identical , no two people are alike. Each of us has a multitude of traits. These traits are polygenic (affected by many genes) as well as multifactorial (influenced by many factors). Thus, each of us is a product of the unique combination of genes we inherit from our parents and our unique experiences. In addition, according to epigenetic theory, our genes interact with the environment. This explains why in a set of identical twins, one may develop schizophrenia and the other may not. Let's say a set of identical twins inherited a susceptibility to schizophrenia. In adulthood, one of these twins becomes a police officer in Detroit. The second twin runs a bed and breakfast (B & B) in Vermont. Guess which one is more likely to develop symptoms of schizophrenia? If you guessed the police officer, you are correct. Environmental stress is often a precipitating factor in mental illness. Assuming that working as a police officer in Detroit is much more stressful than running a B & B in Vermont, it is logical to assume that the twin working as a police officer is more likely to develop symptoms of schizophrenia, even though both twins have the same genetic predisposition.

Genome refers to the full set of genes that serve as the instructions to make an individual member of a certain species. For years an international group of scientists working on the Human Genome Project sought to map the human genome. The effort was completed in 2001 but their analysis continues. These researchers have found that humans have about 25,000 genes and that 99% of these are present in other creatures as well.

Just as physical scientists have mapped the human genome, organizational scientists have mapped the genetic code for business growth and success. Genetic codes provide the means by which organisms can grow successfully in their environments. An organism's genetic code is the key to its life and this code is stored in its DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). In a study published in the SA Journal of Human Resource Management, J. H. Vermeulen and colleagues used qualitative and quantitative data to identify a genetic code for business. Vermeulen and his team argue that a genetic business code can be developed and serve as a crucial enabler of business growth and success. Their study revealed that the code is composed of three strands: a Leadership Strand, Organizational Architecture Strand, and an Internal Orientation Strand.

Several years ago my spouse and I built our second new home. It is a process that we greatly enjoy in spite of the fact that it can be more than a little stressful. When building a new home there are a lot of decisions to be made. These decisions include selecting a builder, a floor plan, the type of exterior you want (brick, siding, stucco, for example), selecting your flooring, fixtures, and lighting, and on and on it goes. Some people prefer to buy an existing home because they find this plethora of decisions overwhelming. However, my spouse and I prefer making these decisions ourselves so that we can get exactly what we want and so we can watch our empty lot be transformed into a home.

One of the advantages to building your own home is that you can directly and easily observe the quality going into it. Our first area of concern is the foundation. After our foundation is poured we look at it to assess whether it looks level and is free of any defects. We all know that a good foundation is critical. Without it, the quality of the rest of the construction can be irrelevant. Once we have a good foundation in place, we continue to monitor the construction. We take note of the quality of the materials being used as well as quality of the framing job, plumbing, drywall, etc. Once the construction is completed and the buyers move into the house, the builder's job is finished but the homeowner's job is really just beginning because the house has to be maintained.