INTRODUCTION

The PeerPlus system of communication and motivation was not developed in a business school classroom. It has it's roots in the real world of business.

David Allen and Hal Hassenfelt who were already successful business owners, founded PeerPlus when they realized that the following experience as told by Hal would be valuable to other business owners and leaders who face the same issues.

"In 1983, I was a front-line manager with twenty employees. I was ready to quit because of the stress caused by the people-related problems. I had tried the management and motivational techniques that I had learned in business school as well as those I had learned in the business world as a manager and small business owner over some ten years. I had tried all the tactics: raises, prizes, games, active listening, assertiveness, coaching, counseling and stroking. The net result was that the employees did not buy in when they had problems.

"Just before I was going to call it quits, I read a passage in a book by Dean Smith, coach at the University of North Carolina, Basketball Multiple Offense and Defense. It talked about the peer pressure concept — that peer pressure is far more effective in building team morale than motivation created by fear, reward, or any other means. So, I decided to try out the idea on my employees. I asked them to evaluate each other on three criteria: dependability, performance and attitude. The results were startling.

"I learned that some employees I had thought were excellent were viewed as "needing improvement" by the workgroup. One employee who had been impervious to my attempts to stimulate productivity (she simply did not believe she needed to improve) exhibited renewed energy and increased productivity within two weeks of the peer review. I discovered that it was the peer feedback that caused the change. Workgroup stress levels decreased dramatically because the peer feedback gave employees the chance to communicate in a regular, non-threatening way."

As a result of this beginning, Hal Hassenfelt and David Allen combined forces with a team of organizational Specialists that included Bill Cushnie, Ronne Jacobs, Larry Connaster and Jack Brantley to develop what has become PeerPlus.com.