Everyone hates a queue, your employees too!

We have achieved tremendous traction in making our employees _____________ (fill in the blanks)

While a CEO might use adjectives like satisfaction, happiness, a delighted HR member may fill in this sentence with words like career movement, training and so on. I go a third direction.

I will fill it in with the word "wait". Yes, we have achieved tremendous traction in making our employees wait. And this wait is antagonising, very long, and stressful, with no figurative feeling.

Promotions & tenure are (wo)man made:

Some genius invented "promotions", few centuries ago. It worked. Someone came along and tagged "tenure" to it. It worked wonders. People joined job factories, spent a few years and got promoted. People continued with their work for few more years and got promoted, again. 

To change this cycle, buy some more time and to make it appear a tad more scientific, something happened over last few decades. We created metrics, found KPIs, created OKRs and automated everything. 

And now we have tenure, metrics, KPI, OKR, automation and promotions. We just bought some more time from our employees. Most importantly, we succeeded in making employees wait. Yes, be it a start-up or established org, every employee is made to wait.

The science of waiting:

Not just employees, everyone hates waiting. Researches state that the experience of standing in a queue is more painful than the wait time in itself. None of us like to stand in queues, right?

While most of us constantly ignore ("I don't have time for this) on enrolling in any sky rewards, we loathe it when someone breezes past through a blue/gold/platinum-dedicated line. Happens in organisations when employees get to see "fast tracked" talent moving up the ladder, pretty fast. You may argue that's not the case but perception matters. Just talk to anyone who is not from a premium college and you will get at least 3 truck loads of feedback.

Let's say a good guy (?!) cuts the line in a movie queue and gets his ticket. We feel cheated, as if the concept of fairness has gone out the window. How many of us have grudgingly seen some of our colleagues get "out of turn" promotions simply because they are "top-talent"? All the trust and fairness built over years on the org goes for a toss. What do employees do? Unsurprisingly, the resumé gets updated on a job portal for the next best fair job.

When you are the first few in a very long queue, we tend to feel that we deserve a better a treatment, for no other reason than we came first. This applies to early joiners in a company. There is an obvious sense of entitlement and more often than not, it gets breached.

The Disney way!

Let’s take a moment to look at what Disney does to handle this. What do they do differently than others? How do they get people to stay in line for hours for a show just few minutes long? Well, they understand psychology. Engagement happens while you are in a line. Giant sized cartoon characters; reflections, short games and many more take your pain out of this waiting time. Most importantly, studies show that Disney under-promises & over-delivers. Yes, they say that wait time is 60 minutes while it's actually 45. We feel extremely thrilled when our wait time gets reduced, and they make good use of that.

Daniel Kahneman is a prominent figure that talks about people’s experiences in lines. He states that people generally get demoralized over a period of time but have a positive response to each forward movement within the queue. People undergo a dual response here.

He also adds that the way we remember a line is heavily influenced by how the experience ends.

Let me try and draw a corollary to the above research findings. I feel, when employees are made to wait for promotions (annual affairs), they get demoralised. As and when the tenure clock comes closer to the mega extravagant performance appraisal time, employees start experiencing positivity. And in the end, when either the promotion gets denied or worse, no increments materialize, employees experience massive emotional nosedives. 

Another bit of research points out that unanticipated waits are worse than expected waits. Setting expectations well in advance with clarity on the process can definitely help calm the nerves.

Do I have an answer to this problem? No.

Did I understand the problem? Yes.

Do we need to think along these lines some more? Oh yes.

A suggestion:

Here is a question I recommend you to ask in the next management meeting.

What is our 'wait' time?