How to emotionally invoke employee Seeking System?

The Seeking System (SS) is one of the seven dominant emotional tendencies of the brain of every mammal and probably, the most fascinating one of the seven. The SS is the primary system that is responsible for creating the urge or motivation for our desires and survival. Primarily, SS helps us to nurture our motivation, urge to explore, and desire to understand. It is the first point of trigger for every mammal to reach out in an expectant mode. By activation of the SS, all mammals try to seek positive experiences. The SS is also called the science of motivation. If one can always invoke SS, one will perpetually discover knowledge out of sheer curiosity. The chemical Dopamine, play the pivot role of activating the SS, and is often referred to as the “motivational” or “feel good” chemical of the brain.

Every human has an active SS. Let us take the example of receiving a surprise gift. It is human tendency to open the gift and seek what is inside. The SS invokes the urge and expectation to know what is inside and motivates us to open the gift for understanding. Seeking urges one to look for places where resources are available. Every google search is a seeking system invoked, and we go and find a website that can provide us information to learn or study or discover.

Similarly, in the corporate world, structured ways can be created to invoke the SS in every employee. It can be during one’s day-to-day activities or as part of Learning & Development (L&D) or as part of group introspection or combination of them. Every attempt must invoke the element of surprise or curiosity to invoke the SS in an employee. Hence, it is essential that on the job SS can be created that links up to employee’s behaviour and advocates the right training with the extreme curiosity of looking forward to that. If it is linked to L&D, the curiosity and desire must be inter-locked to employee self-development, and self-motivation environment must be created to seek out. Whichever way we look at it, the Human Resource system must be capable of addressing this SS concept by inter-linking organizational process and results into creating the right curiosity and desire.

We live in a knowledge economy, and a learned employee is a gainful employee. Employers who care for creating the right launchpad for active learning is providing purposeful employment. In the knowledge economy, humans want to thrive in the seeking system permanently for perpetual improvement. In our company, we give utmost importance to invoking the SS. One question which dares and stares at us every year is what is that we have put into our employees by way of they seeking more than what they already tried and have in them. We have been very successful in our approach of self-development, and that is demonstrated in our four years of consecutive Great Place to Work certification.

The core to creating the SS is to have well designed Human Capital Management (HCM) Module with matured Learning & Development Module. HCM must take active and real-life business situations that circles around the employees and convert them as curious Seeking System opportunities for employees. If a customer rates an experience as poor or exceptional in a Retail environment, the whole sequence of operations that led to that rating must be converted into an opportunistic seeking system of improvement and curiosity to engage in discussions for betterment. If every single score can be motivated towards active seeking engagement, we can conclude that a successful SS is present. Primarily, situational learning must be initiated, and a loop must be created to actively invoke the SS to the desires of all motivated employees.

While designing the Retail ViVA, the flagship Retail Management System, we have kept a motivational seeking system as one of the ends and built it with an open architecture system for L&D. Any Seeking System must be flexible and configurable for creating surprise and curiosity. I am sure if Retailers can work towards creating the right environment for invoking the Seeking System, they can enjoy the benefit of motivational workforce desiring to achieve the ultimate success of customer satisfaction.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan