Appropriate ways to motivate your employees

I was recently reading an interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, (he was the CEO of Disney, ousted by family members I seem to recall and is the ‘K’ in the DreamWorks SKG film company – the ‘S’ is Steven Spielberg and ‘G’ is David Geffen if you were wondering!), where the interviewer asks him to comment on his legendry work ethic and what he expects of others who work for him. His reply: ‘If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday’. That made me ask myself the question, ‘How does that relate to what we at Grass Roots promote in the performance improvement industry?’

Not very well, I think. Quite apart from the work-life balance concept, in our world we work with employers to develop programs that positively improve behavior and drive performance by motivating and recognizing their employees. There is still a school of thought out there that says, ‘they’re paid a salary to come to work so why should I do anything else?’, although I’m pleased to say we see less and less of that attitude. That said, with the popularity of programs such as The Apprentice that relies on the ‘You’re Fired!’ approach, we may not have come as far as I would have hoped.

I always think that when setting objectives for employees during their working lives, there are three properties we need to strive for. They are what I call The Three A’s – Aspiration, Achievability and Appropriateness.

With aspiration, we need to set goals and objectives that employees feel they want to achieve. I see many contact centers introduce programs that focus on productivity – how many calls you handle in an hour, what your wrap up time is, how much CRM data did you capture from the customer. There’s nothing wrong with those objectives as they will reflect the business drivers but let’s be honest, working in a contact center can be a pretty thankless existence. If that’s all you’re measured on, it’s no wonder the staff turnover rates in the contact center industry are so high. Why not focus on delighting customers, making customers feel they have been treated well or their questions answered fully. Then the customers thank our workers, they will feel good about themselves and proud of their roles. They will aspire to delight more and more and productivity will probably exceed the objectives we set earlier.

On achievability, I have to tell you the story about the founder of a mobile phone retailer client we worked for a few years ago. This guy was a self made billionaire and at heart he was a pure salesman. His turnover of staff in sales was catastrophic, exceeding 100%. Theoretically he was losing and replacing his entire salesforce every year – he employed over 6000 sales staff! He wanted us to tell him why so we took a look at the way he ran the business. Once a year he would hold a conference for all his sales staff – he would walk onto the stage in a cloud of puffing dry ice, flanked by two heavies. In each arm he held a glass brief case which was hand cuffed to his wrists and clearly containing dollar bills. He would hold the cases in the air and proudly announce, ‘There’s a million dollars in these cases. Do well and you could earn this next year’. The crowd would roar in appreciation.

I asked his HR guy some questions. How many of the 6000 salesforce earned a million dollars last year? One. How many earned half a million? None. How many earned a quarter of a million? One. And so we went on. The reality was that the vast majority of the 6000 took home less than $20,000 a year. What he was presenting to them was not far off promising they would win the lottery. This was just one of his unfortunate management styles. Needless to say, it was totally unachievable and sales personnel left his company in their droves.

Finally, appropriateness and I think this is where Mr. Katzenberg comes in. If you present your employees with something that is inappropriate, they will not be motivated. I’m sure he was being a bit tongue in cheek with his ‘Saturday, Sunday’ routine but these people do exist. Look out for them! As for the mobile phone billionaire, he sold the business and last I heard he was floating around the world on his yacht.

Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 2:16 pm

Category(ies): General, Incentive

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