External and Internal Rewards

Job satisfaction comes in different forms and affects employees in different ways. Rewards, whether internal or external, play a key role in an employee's job satisfaction. Though internal rewards well up from within the employee himself based on his own actions, external rewards are generated from another source and impact employees in various ways. Motivational dynamics have changed dramatically to reflect new work requirements and changed worker expectations. One of the biggest changes has been the rise in importance of psychic, or intrinsic rewards, and the decline of material or extrinsic rewards.

In the past 30 years many things have changed. Automation and off-shoring have eliminated most of the highly repetitive jobs, while global competition has produced flatter, more responsive organizations that require employees to use judgment and initiative to a much greater extent. Over this same 30-year period, the proportion of workers who say that their work is meaningful, allows them discretion, and makes use of their abilities has more than doubled—from less than one third to about two thirds. In addition, younger workers now come to organizations with different expectations than their parents. Raised during an era of rapid technological change and instant access to data, they respond best to work that is more meaningful, allows them to learn cutting-edge skills, and lets them find their own ways of accomplishing tasks.

Most of the motivational models used today were developed in earlier eras, when work and workers were different. However, these models do not reflect the changes in today’s work dynamics. However, intrinsic rewards have become more important and more prevalent in the workplace today.

Extrinsic Rewards

Extrinsic rewards—usually financial—are the tangible rewards given employees by managers, such as pay raises, bonuses, and benefits. They are called “extrinsic” because they are external to the work itself and other people control their size and whether or not they are granted. In contrast, intrinsic rewards are psychological rewards that employees get from doing meaningful work and performing it well.

Extrinsic rewards played a dominant role in earlier eras, when work was generally more routine and bureaucratic, and when complying with rules and procedures was paramount. This work offered workers few intrinsic rewards, so that extrinsic rewards were often the only motivational tools available to organizations.

Extrinsic rewards remain significant for workers, of course. Pay is an important consideration for most workers in accepting a job, and unfair pay can be a strong de-motivator.

Monetary

Monetary rewards are external and are given to an employee by a representative of the company. Whether it's a paycheck, a bonus, accrued vacation days, a gift card or anything else with a cash value, it is considered monetary. In addition, compensation packages are also considered external monetary rewards. Companies that offer child care, flexible spending accounts, and health insurance and wellness programs provide external rewards to employees. External monetary rewards are tangible and can be assessed a value by the employee.

Non-monetary Rewards

Non-monetary external rewards are equally important factors in employee job satisfaction. The advantages of job security, flexible working hours and opportunities for advancement are extremely valuable to employees. Additionally, simple non-monetary rewards can impact an employee's morale and confidence. Praise from a supervisor, receipt of an employee-of-the-month award or the hanging of a blue ribbon on a work desk all instill a sense of pride and accomplishment. The simple act of a manager thanking an employee while shaking his hand can reap monumental benefits on the work front. An employee who feels a sense of accomplishment carries it to his next assignment.

Intrinsic Rewards

Intrinsic rewards are ones that come from within the employee. For example, an employee might decide to take on a task outside of his normal duties. It might be because he simply sees a need and wants to help the company, he might want a new job skill or he might want to show management that he is capable of increased responsibility. The benefit to this type of internal reward is that it originates within the employee; he has a great deal of personal satisfaction when he accomplishes the task. The downside to intrinsic rewards are that the employee might take on a new challenge to prove himself, but feel taken advantage of if he must continue the extra duties without recognition. If the employee is not promoted, given a raise or a bonus, he might decide to take his new skills to another company where he is recognized for the skills.

The following are descriptions of the four intrinsic rewards and how workers view them:

Sense of meaningfulness: This reward involves the meaningfulness or importance of the purpose you are trying to fulfill. You feel that you have an opportunity to accomplish something of real value—something that matters in the larger scheme of things. You feel that you are on a path that is worth your time and energy, giving you a strong sense of purpose or direction.

Sense of choice: You feel free to choose how to accomplish your work—to use your best judgment to select those work activities that make the most sense to you and to perform them in ways that seem appropriate. You feel ownership of your work, believe in the approach you are taking, and feel responsible for making it work.

Sense of competence: You feel that you are handling your work activities well—that your performance of these activities meets or exceeds your personal standards, and that you are doing good, high-quality work. You feel a sense of satisfaction, pride, or even artistry in how well you handle these activities.

Sense of progress: You are encouraged that your efforts are really accomplishing something. You feel that your work is on track and moving in the right direction. You see convincing signs that things are working out, giving you confidence in the choices you have made and confidence in the future.

Basically, most of today’s workers are asked to self-manage to a significant degree—to use their intelligence and experience to direct their work activities to accomplish important organizational purposes. This is how today’s employees add value—innovating, problem solving and improvising to meet the conditions they encounter to meet customers’ needs.

In turn,the self-management process involves four key steps:   

• Committing to a meaningful purpose
• Choosing the best way of fulfilling that purpose
• Making sure that one is performing work activities competently, and
• Making sure that one is making progress to achieving the purpose.

Each of these steps requires workers to make a judgment—about the meaningfulness of their purpose, the degree of choice they have for doing things the right way, the competence of their performance, and the actual progress being made toward fulfilling the purpose.

These four judgments are the key factors in workers’ assessments of the value and effectiveness of their efforts—and the contribution they are making.

When positive, each of these judgments is accompanied by a positive emotional charge. These positive charges are the intrinsic rewards that employees get from work, ranging in size from quiet satisfaction to an exuberant “Yes!” They are the reinforcements that keep employees actively self-managing and engaged in their work.

External Versus Internal

External rewards are given to employees from the company, bosses or even co-workers. But employees experience internal rewards, as well, though they come from within. The satisfaction of knowing he has completed a project, achieved a goal or simply applied his best effort to his work is internal rewards that contribute to job satisfaction. External rewards enhance an employee's internal rewards as they validate his own assessment of his self-worth. For example, an employee who prides himself on achieving a goal experiences validation when given a bonus check for his efforts.

Suggestions

Bestowing external rewards on employees typically garner appreciation. It is prudent to examine the financial ramifications of an external reward before doling it out. Tax consequences on a monetary reward can dilute the value if not measured beforehand. External rewards can be given to individual employees or to teams. Based on the work environment, give careful consideration to the potential impacts of individual versus team awards. Insulting one team member by rewarding another team member can do more harm than good.

Job Enrichment

Most of us want interesting, challenging jobs where we feel that we can make a real difference to other people's lives. As it is for us, so it is for the people who work with or for us.

So why are so many jobs so boring and monotonous? And what can you do to make the jobs you offer more satisfying? (By reducing recruitment costs, increasing retention of experienced staff and motivating them to perform at a high level; you can have a real impact on the bottom line.)

One of the key factors in good job design is job enrichment, most notably promoted by psychologist Frederick Herzberg in his 1968 article "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” 

This is the practice of enhancing individual jobs to make the responsibilities more rewarding and inspiring for the people who do them.

With job enrichment, you expand the task set that someone performs. You provide more stimulating and interesting work that adds variety and challenge to an employee's daily routine. This increases the depth of the job and allows people to have more control over their work.

Before we look at ways to enrich the jobs in your workplace, we need to have as our foundation a good, fair work environment. If there are fundamental flaws – in the way people are compensated, their working conditions, their supervision, the expectations placed upon them, or the way they're treated – and then those problems should be fixed first. If they are not resolved, any other attempts to increase satisfaction are likely to be sterile.

What is Job Enrichment?

According to Robert N.Ford, Job enrichment means to make jobs which:-

• Have a greater variety.
• Requires higher level of knowledge and skills.
• Give workers more autonomy.
• Give workers more responsibility.
• Give workers opportunities for personal growth, and
• A meaningful work experience.

The meaning of Job enrichment is depicted in the following image or picture.

Features of Job Enrichment

The characteristics or features of job enrichment are:-

Nature of Job: Job enrichment is a vertical expansion of the job. The workers are given jobs, which require higher-level knowledge, skills and responsibilities. Job enrichment improves the quality of the job.

Objective: The objective of Job enrichment is to make the job more lively and challenging. So, the job is a source of motivation for the workers.

Positive Results: Job enrichment gives positive results if the workers are highly skilled. This is because workers are given opportunities to show initiative and innovation while doing their job.

Direction and Control: Job enrichment encourages self-discipline. It does not believe in external direction and control.

Advantages of Job Enrichment

The importance or merits or advantages of job enrichment are:-

• Job enrichment is useful to both the workers and the organization.
• The worker gets achievement, recognition and self-actualization.
• The worker gets a sense of belonging to the organization.
• The worker finds the job meaningful.
• Job enrichment reduces absenteeism, labor-turnover and grievances.
• It motivates the workers to give best performance.

Designing Jobs that Motivate

Hackman and Oldham identified five factors of job design that typically contribute to people's enjoyment of a job:

Skill Variety – Increasing the number of skills that individuals use while performing work.

Task Identity – Enabling people to perform a job from start to finish.

Task Significance – Providing work that has a direct impact on the organization or its stakeholders.

Autonomy – Increasing the degree of decision making, and the freedom to choose how and when work is done.

Feedback – Increasing the amount of recognition for doing a job well, and communicate the results of people's work.

Job enrichment addresses these factors by enhancing the job's core dimensions and increasing people's sense of fulfillment.

Job Enrichment Options

The central focus of job enrichment is giving people more control over their work (lack of control is a key cause of stress, and therefore of unhappiness.) Where possible, allow them to take on tasks that are typically done by supervisors. This means that they have more influence over planning, executing, and evaluating the jobs they do.

In enriched jobs, people complete activities with increased freedom, independence, and responsibility. They also receive plenty of feedback, so that they can assess and correct their own performance.

Here are some strategies you can use to enrich jobs in your workplace:

Rotate Jobs – Give people the opportunity to use a variety of skills, and perform different kinds of work. The most common way to do this is through job rotation. Move your workers through a variety of jobs that allow them to see different parts of the organization learn different skills and acquire different experiences. This can be very motivating, especially for people in jobs that are very repetitive or that focus on only one or two skills.

Combine Tasks – Combine work activities to provide a more challenging and complex work assignment. This can significantly increase "task identity" because people see a job through from start to finish. This allows workers to use a wide variety of skills, which can make the work seem more meaningful and important. For example, you can convert an assembly line process, in which each person does one task, into a process in which one person assembles a whole unit. You can apply this model wherever you have people or groups that typically perform only one part of an overall process. Consider expanding their roles to give them responsibility for the entire process, or for a bigger part of that process.

These forms of job enrichment can be tricky because they may provide increased motivation at the expense of decreased productivity. When you have new people performing tasks, you may have to deal with issues of training, efficiency, and performance. You must carefully weigh the benefits against the costs.

Identify Project-Focused Work Units – Break your typical functional lines and form project-focused units. For example, rather than having all of your marketing people in one department, with supervisors directing who works on which project, you could split the department into specialized project units – specific storyboard creators, copywriters, and designers could all work together for one client or one campaign. Allowing employees to build client relationships is an excellent way to increase autonomy, task identity, and feedback.

Create Autonomous Work Teams – This is job enrichment at the group level. Set a goal for a team, and make team members free to determine work assignments, schedules, rest breaks, evaluation parameters, and the like. You may even give them influence over choosing their own team members. With this method, you'll significantly cut back on supervisory positions, and people will gain leadership and management skills.

Implement Participative Management – Allow team members to participate in decision making and get involved in strategic planning. This is an excellent way to communicate to members of your team that their input is important. It can work in any organization – from a very small company, with an owner/boss who's used to dictating everything, to a large company with a huge hierarchy. When people realize that what they say is valued and makes a difference, they'll likely be motivated.

Redistribute Power and Authority – Redistribute control and grant more authority to workers for making job-related decisions. As supervisors delegate more authority and responsibility, team members' autonomy, accountability, and task identity will increase.

Increase Employee-Directed Feedback – Make sure that people know how well, or poorly, they're performing their jobs. The more control you can give them for evaluating and monitoring their own performance, the more enriched their jobs will be. Rather than have your quality control department go around and point out mistakes, consider giving each team responsibility for their own quality control. Workers will receive immediate feedback, and they'll learn to solve problems, take initiative, and make decisions.

Job enrichment provides many opportunities for people's development. You'll give them lots of opportunity to participate in how their work gets done, and they'll most-likely enjoy an increased sense of personal responsibility for their tasks.

Implementing a Job Enrichment Program

Step One – Find out where people are dissatisfied with their current work assignments. There's little point to enriching jobs and changing the work environment if you're enriching the wrong jobs and making the wrong changes. Like any motivation initiative, determine what your people want before you begin.

Surveys are a good means of doing this. Don't make the mistake of presuming that you know what people want: Go to the source – and use that information to build your enrichment options.

Step Two – Consider which job enrichment options you can provide. You don't need to drastically redesign your entire work process. The way that you design the enriched jobs must strike a balance between operational need and job satisfaction. If significant changes are needed, consider establishing a "job enrichment task force" – perhaps use a cross-section of employees, and give them responsibility for deciding which enrichment options make the most sense.

Step Three – Design and communicate your program. If you're making significant changes, let people know what you're doing and why. Work with your managers to create an enriching work environment that includes lots of employee participation and recognition. Remember to monitor your efforts, and regularly evaluate the effectiveness of what you're providing.

Key Points:

Job enrichment is a fundamental part of attracting, motivating, and retaining talented people, particularly where work is repetitive or boring. To do it well, you need a great match between the way your jobs are designed and the skills and interests of the employees working for you.

When our work assignments reflect a good level of skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, members of our team are likely be much more content, and much less stressed. Enriched jobs lead to more satisfied and motivated workers.

Our responsibility is to figure out which combination of enrichment options will lead to increased performance and productivity.

Corporate Culture – A way of life

'If you get the culture right, most of the other things will take care of itself ’

     

A culture is the values and practices shared by the members of the group. Company Culture, therefore, is the shared values and practices of the company's employees.

Company culture is important because it can make or break your company. Companies with an adaptive culture that is aligned to their business goals routinely outperform their competitors. Some studies report the difference at 200% or more. To achieve results like this for your organization, you have to figure out what your culture is, decide what it should be, and move everyone toward the desired culture.

Company cultures evolve and they change over time. As employee leave the company and replacements are hired the company culture will change. If it is a strong culture, it may not change much. However, since each new employee brings their own values and practices to the group the culture will change, at least a little. As the company matures from a start up to a more established company, the company culture will change. As the environment in which the company operates (the laws, regulations, business climate, etc.) changes, the company culture will also change.

These changes may be positive, or they may not. The changes in company culture may be intended, but often they are unintended. They may be major changes or minor ones. The company culture will change and it is important to be aware of the changes.

Assess the Company Culture

There are many ways to assess your company culture. There are consultants who will do it for you, for a fee. The easiest way to assess your company's culture is to look around. How do the employees act; what do they do? Look for common behaviors and visible symbols.

Listen. Listen to your employees, your suppliers, and your customers. Pay attention to what is written about your company, in print and online. These will also give you clues as to what your company's culture really is.

The Four Components of Every Organization

Organizations are comprised of four major components: physical (the visible aspects of the organization), infrastructure (the systems and processes for directing and managing work), behavioral (the daily actions and reactions of employees), and cultural (the underlying assumptions, values, beliefs and norms that shape daily behavior). While implementing change at the "higher" levels is possible, as the following graphic suggests, the durability of the change is short-lived without change at the underlying cultural level.

Determine the Desired Company Culture

‘People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices’

                                                                                                                                                                                     ~ Alfie Kohn

Before you can change the company culture, you have to decide what you want the company culture to look like in the future. Different companies in different industries will have different cultures. Look at what kind of a culture will work best for your organization in its desired future state. Review your mission, vision and values and make sure the company culture you are designing supports them.

Here are some characteristics of company cultures that others have used successfully. Decide which work for your company and implement them.

·     Mission clarity

·     Employee commitment

·     Fully empowered employees

·     High integrity workplace

·     Strong trust relationships

·     Highly effective leadership

·     Effective systems and processes

·     Performance-based compensation and reward programs

·     Customer-focused

·     Effective 360-degree communications

·     Commitment to learning and skill development

·     Emphasis on recruiting and retaining outstanding employees

·     High degree of adaptability

·     High accountability standards

·     Demonstrated support for innovation

Align the Company Culture

   You need to align your company culture with your strategic goals
if it isn't already.

• Develop a specific action plan that can leverage the good things in your current culture and correct the unaligned areas.        Brainstorm improvements in your formal policies and daily practices.
• Develop models of the desired actions and behaviors.
• Communicate the new culture to all employees and then
• Implement actions that new culture is adopted by everyone.

Only a company culture that is aligned with your goals, one that helps you anticipate and adapt to change, will help you achieve superior performance over the long run. 

As it is rightly said by a business guru –

‘Profitability, growth, quality and exceeding customer expectations, these are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.’

Strategies for Changing an Organization's Culture

In the article "Connecting Culture to Organizational Change" (Human Resources Magazine, March 1996, pp. 84-90), T. Galpin suggests that because changing the basic assumptions and beliefs of the underlying cultural is very difficult, the best approach for influencing specific aspects of a culture that you want to change involves targeting only those components that are most critical for implementing and sustaining the changes that concern you.

Galpin suggests targeting one or more of the following cultural components that will help bring about the change that you seek:

• Rules and policies
• Goals and measurements
• Customs and norms
• Training
• Ceremonies and events
• Management behaviors
• Rewards and recognition
• Communications
• Physical environment
• Organizational structure

In the end as future managers we should be the change we want to see in our company’s culture. 

To all the future managers I would like to say ‘True leaders live their values everywhere, not just in the workplace.’

Understanding Taylorism and Early Management Theory

How did current management theories develop?

People have been managing work for hundreds of years, and we can trace formal management ideas to the 1700s. But the most significant developments in management theory emerged in the 20th century. We owe much of our understanding of managerial practices to the many theorists of this period, who tried to understand how best to conduct business.

Historical Perspective

One of the earliest of these theorists was Frederick Winslow Taylor. He started the Scientific Management movement, and he and his associates were the first people to study the work process scientifically. They studied how work was performed, and they looked at how this affected worker productivity. Taylor's philosophy focused on the belief that making people work as hard as they could was not as efficient as optimizing the way the work was done.

In 1909, Taylor published "The Principles of Scientific Management." In this, he proposed that by optimizing and simplifying jobs, productivity would increase. He also advanced the idea that workers and managers needed to cooperate with one another. This was very different from the way work was typically done in businesses beforehand. A factory manager at that time had very little contact with the workers, and he left them on their own to produce the necessary product. There was no standardization, and a worker's main motivation was often continued employment, so there was no incentive to work as quickly or as efficiently as possible.

Taylor believed that all workers were motivated by money, so he promoted the idea of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." In other words, if a worker didn't achieve enough in a day, he didn't deserve to be paid as much as another worker who was highly productive.

With a background in mechanical engineering, Taylor was very interested in efficiency. While advancing his career at a U.S. steel manufacturer, he designed workplace experiments to determine optimal performance levels. In one, he experimented with shovel design until he had a design that would allow workers to shovel for several hours straight. With bricklayers, he experimented with the various motions required and developed an efficient way to lay bricks. And he applied the scientific method to study the optimal way to do any type of workplace task. As such, he found that by calculating the time needed for the various elements of a task, he could develop the "best" way to complete that task.

These "time and motion" studies also led Taylor to conclude that certain people could work more efficiently than others. These were the people whom managers should seek to hire where possible. Therefore, selecting the right people for the job was another important part of workplace efficiency. Taking what he learned from these workplace experiments, Taylor developed four principles of scientific management. These principles are also known simply as "Taylorism".

Four Principles of Scientific Management

Taylor's four principles are as follows:

1. Replace working by "rule of thumb," or simple habit and common sense, and instead use the scientific method to study work and determine the most efficient way to perform specific tasks.
2. Rather than simply assign workers to just any job, match workers to their jobs based on capability and motivation, and train them to work at maximum efficiency.
3. Monitor worker performance, and provide instructions and supervision to ensure that they're using the most efficient ways of working.
4. Allocate the work between managers and workers so that the managers spend their time planning and training, allowing the workers to perform their tasks efficiently.

Critiques of Taylorism

Taylorism promotes the idea that there is "one right way" to do something. As such, it is at odds with current approaches such as Continuous Improvement initiatives and other tools like them. These promote individual responsibility, and seek to push decision making through all levels of the organization.

The idea here is that workers are given as much autonomy as practically possible, so that they can use the most appropriate approaches for the situation at hand. What's more, front line workers need to show this sort of flexibility in a rapidly-changing environment. Rigid, rules-driven organizations really struggle to adapt in these situations.

Teamwork is another area where pure Taylorism is in opposition to current practice. Essentially, Taylorism breaks tasks down into tiny steps, and focuses on how each person can do his or her specific series of steps best. Modern methodologies prefer to examine work systems more holistically in order to evaluate efficiency and maximize productivity. The extreme specialization that Taylorism promotes is contrary to modern ideals of how to provide a motivating and satisfying workplace.

Where Taylorism separates manual from mental work, modern productivity enhancement practices seek to incorporate worker's ideas, experience and knowledge into best practice. Scientific management in its pure form focuses too much on the mechanics, and fails to value the people side of work, whereby motivation and workplace satisfaction are key elements in an efficient and productive organization.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

‘Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right'

                                                                                                                -Henry Ford

The Pygmalion Effect helps you think about how your expectations of other people can influence or motivate their performance. It argues that by setting and communicating high performance expectations, you can motivate better performance from the people you lead and manage.

The effect was originally studied in context of teachers' expectations of their students: Students who are expected to perform well usually do so. Those students of whom teachers have lower expectations will generally perform less well. However, this approach has clear application in the corporate world.

This effect is named after George Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion", which is the basis of the film and stage musical "My Fair Lady". Shaw summarizes the effect by character Professor Higgins' observation that:

"...the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated."

We touch the lives of others in ways we often never know. People sometimes come into our personal world for fleeting moments and can leave us forever changed. We have more power to create or to destroy than we can imagine. We can leave things or individuals better or worse than we found them. A look, a word, a gesture has tremendous impact and frequently we blither along through our existence unaware of the mighty power that our communication wields.

Here is a real life example:

During my school days until high school I was an average student. I never studied hard enough to come first or even in top five since this was not expected from me by my teachers, I was always expected to be the shy kid who is an average ranker. However, in class eight my Hindi teacher Panth Miss understood that I am shy because of my low self-confidence and encouraged me a lot to study more. She used to praise me in front of the entire class to boost my confidence and boost it did, making me an all-rounder. The image I had of myself and that others had of me after this had a drastic change. She is one woman whom I look up to till date.

The Pygmalion effect is also used by Dr. Mandi to encourage us to write more blogs.

The corollary of the Pygmalion effect is the Golem effect, in which low expectations lead to a decrease in performance. The Pygmalion effect and the Golem effect are forms of self-fulfilling prophecy, and, in this respect, people will internalize their positive labels, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly. Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regard to education and social class.

Understanding the Theory

As a manager or supervisor, our aim is to get the best performance from the people who work for us. If we have high expectations of a member of our team, this can reinforce our efforts. On the other hand, if we convey lower expectations of an individual, this can undermine our efforts to improve his or her performance.

Without knowing it, we may show low expectations by delegating less challenging and interesting work. We may pay less attention to team members' performance and give them less support and praise. In return, the team member may feel undervalued and untrusted, and his or her confidence may be undermined. And so our lower expectations, albeit unconsciously communicated, can demotivate the team member, creating the exact opposite effect of the performance improvement that you want.

                                                     Aim High

More than this, the effect of low expectations can create a vicious circle – we expect less, we get less, we lower your expectations and further demotivate, and so on.

                                               

The good news is that the opposite is also true. By setting and communicating higher expectations, we can motivate team members and create a virtuous circle leading to continuously improving performance.

Using the Theory

So what should we do to harness the Pygmalion effect?

Things you can do are for example:

• Encourage your employees to set innovative goals

• Praise creative efforts, even if they weren't successful

• Stress the importance of the sharing of ideas among colleagues

• Be creative yourself – serve as a role model

• ‘Stand up’ for your employees innovative efforts

• Take pride in your employee’s achievements

• Publicly recognize innovative work

• Reward creativity properly

An important caveat to note is that you should always back up your Pygmalion inspired expectations, otherwise they may backfire. If you just expect employees to be creative without at the same time backing them with resources (for example time and materials), they will disbelieve your good intentions.

The end result of Pygmalion effect in organizations is: