How to Unlock Every Psychological Advantage in Your Team

Benefits. The magical word that employees love and quite a few employers cringe at. More magical or cringy is how powerful benefits become to negotiating for qualified talent. If the idea of increasing your benefits makes you cringe, give me the chance to change your mind. Most of us are taught to think of benefits as material contributions used to increase employee retention or are used as a tool to lure new talent to your company. I would argue that only thinking about them as a competitive hiring advantage strips them of their potential to unlock the full productivity of your team. While I’m arguing, I’m going to also claim that benefits just can’t be viewed purely as material benefits, but also through creating psychological benefits as well.

From the beginning of humanity hundreds of thousands of years ago, people have always sought ways to give themselves an advantage in our age old quest for survival. Surrounded by dangerous environments, predators, diseases and natural disasters, humans learned that staying together made them safer and more likely to get their basic needs for food, water and shelter met. By working in collaboration, we would get our needs met and then work to keep those around us alive. By keeping those around us alive, it made our existence easier and safer. Our evolutionary goals became keep ourselves alive and then keep those around us alive. Over hundreds of thousands of years, this cycle of give and take became rooted in psyche and informs many of the decisions we make today. This is the foundational principle behind the “us” vs “them” thinking that informs many of our interactions in modern day. Our tribe comprised of those who kept us safe and fed and the enemy became those who were trying to take our safety away or destroy our ability to meet our needs. 

This core set of needs wasn’t fully understood till, when in 1943, Abraham Maslow improved our thinking by publishing his hierarchy of needs. These needs, in order from basic to advanced are Physiological, Safety, Connection, Esteem and finally Self-actualization. This set of core needs, when met to a high degree, allows us to enter a state of higher level functioning which is where we tend to not only do our best thinking, but our best work. If we used the power of material and psychological benefits to help people achieve a sense of self actualization, not only they will want to stay but they will stay and do the best work of their lives. On the flip side, who can really dedicate full focus on doing good work when stressed about living. When your family, health, safety or belonging is threatened, you can’t focus on being as productive as possible. Helping staff reach a state of self-actualization will boost company morale, productivity, engagement, satisfaction and just about every other positive stat there is. 

Here is the kicker, people are always trying to get these core needs met and if they can’t do it in your work environment, then they will always be looking for the next tribe that helps them meet these needs. They would not only be looking for a job that meets these needs but in many cases, will position your company as the enemy on their way out. With that said, let’s dive in.

Physiological 

The first is pretty simple. We require food, water, sleep, sex, and shelter. This one requires very little explanation although if you can’t pay someone enough to eat, sleep and procreate in peace, then you need to seriously take a hard look at your pay. As staff grow and become more competent, having low pay will guarantee they will always be looking for a way out. If you can’t pay your staff higher wages, at least implementing some form of bonus structures or pay increases based on productivity will help them meet this need. 

Examples: Good pay, bonus structures, company lunch programs, housing allowance.

Safety

Maslow called this “Security, Order, and Stability”. This means offering your staff a safe and stable work environment. To go the extra mile, you can give them some tools to form a healthy living environment. Health benefits is the easy answer but going out of your way to provide things like access to gym memberships and wellness programs will go a long way to help people feel stability. Safety doesn’t just apply to physical safety by psychological safety. Because of the nature of triggers, trauma and behaviors, you can’t always solve psychological safety but you can provide some benefits, like counseling, to help your staff when they are having difficult times. 

Examples: Health benefits, wellness benefits, Gym memberships, safety programs, counseling, etc.

Love and Belonging

This is our need for familial and social belonging. While you can’t necessarily make your staff be best friends, you can provide a socially healthy work environment. This means that toxic leaders or staff that destroy trust need to be addressed. If you have a company with little trust or a leader who only covers themselves, your staff are going to be performing way under their potential. The way they navigate and share their work will be predicated on office politics and social fears, not the merits of their work. While you may not see this as a traditional benefit, it absolutely is when it relates to meeting our core needs and giving us a productive advantage.

This also isn’t just about receiving affection but giving people the opportunity to share their compassionate side. Giving your team the room to have fun together and use company time to connect on things other than work. Allowing people to connect socially in low pressure environments  will supercharge the efficiency of their communication when it’s crunch time.

You can also provide room for your staff to be active in their families and give ample freedom around important family events. 

Examples: A socially healthy workplace, let me emphasize again that trust is a massive benefit, extra time for family, parental leave, staff time to do something fun with each other, team bonding.

Esteem 

Aaaah the good old fashioned need for recognition. This one is very often talked about in leadership circles but sometimes not fully understood. Yes, recognizing good work is absolutely key but I think we can challenge ourselves to take this one a bit deeper. We have a deep desire to see our ideas and creations fully manifested. This looks like actually giving staff clear ownership over their area of the company, complete with room to make mistakes. It means defining non-negotiable failures and coaching after they run into negotiable failures. The best thing you can do is clearly define what they own and set goals that push them to learn and achieve more than what they think they are capable of. 

From here, you need to give them all the tools they need to master something. Humans have an incredible drive to learn more and become more competent in their field. Competency in a skill is what pushes us into our next phase of self-actualization. Giving your staff room to grow and master their skills (or new ones) doesn’t just benefit the job at hand but it unlocks a psychological barrier of expression and confidence. This is the confidence needed to bring their best to the table. While many see training as a tool to grow staff skill, it’s also a tool to grow staff idea articulation and confidence.  

Examples: defining what they own, training/learning, work recognition, clear goals, coaching, speaking/presentation training, Tuition reimbursement

Self Actualization

Getting your staff to this spot should be one of your biggest goals as a leader. This is when you tap into untethered creativity and thinking. Not only that, a team that has reached this point, has the ability to collaborate and achieve the seemingly impossible. Self actualization requires a high level of autonomy. To boil actualization down to its essence, that means your staff are doing really good work for the benefit of others. This is where the magic of all these benefits connect back to our primitive desire to help our tribe survive. As a leader, your main job at this point is to get out of the way and resource your team to go above and beyond their goals. By allowing them to do good work, it means helping them connect their competency with articulation and action. Give them space to express their ideas creativity and resource the action required to make those ideas and creativity become something real. 

If you can’t build upward mobility, build outward mobility by allowing them to apply their talents to other teams or people, or by helping other departments overcome their issues. This means connecting your staff back to how their work benefits others. Whether this is an altruistic mission, a highly beneficial product or allowing the benefits of their work to benefit the team at large. Maybe one of their bonuses for completing an important task can be a reward for the team or company at large.

Examples: Autonomy, Telecommuting options, team based bonuses, leadership of ideas or people, Mission/Vision, 

The beautiful part about quite a few of these benefits is they don’t require massive investments of cash, in some cases, it’s a change of company philosophy. I like to come back to one of the root definitions of benefits: an advantage. Every advantage you give your staff to win the game of survival, they will return with loyalty, dedication and highly profitable work.