3 Staff Motivation Challenges & How to Combat Them
Anytime you enter a retail store or dine at a restaurant, we bet you have some very definite expectations, one of which is to have a pleasant interaction with the staff. And as the world’s most successful brands know, in order to meet that expectation they need to provide both staff training and staff motivation to make that happen.
Employees, regardless of the products or services they provide, are the ones setting the tone for their company and brand. They are the ones on the front lines interacting with customers each and every day. And when employees are fully engaged and satisfied with their job, it shows. They become passionate advocates who positively affect the customer experience. The reverse is also true: When employees are not satisfied, they become liabilities to your brand.
The question is, then, “What is the critical element to helping employees engage in their work?” It’s called motivation, and you can’t have engagement without it.
Areas of Staff Motivation to Keep in Mind
Staff motivation can be a huge challenge for even the best location managers. With so much to manage during every operating hour, a manager’s ability to inspire and motivate employees is limited—but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Managers can greatly improve staff motivation by keeping these three areas in mind:
1. Focus: Ensure that employees are focusing on the right things to drive a positive customer experience.
2. Communication: Make sure communication is grounded in the customer experience.
3. Visibility: Keep the customer experience front and center in employee’s minds.
4 Strategies to Drive Staff Motivation for Location Managers
Location managers can master these key areas by implementing some simple and effective strategies in order to drive staff motivation in order to deliver a continued exceptional customer experience:
Strategy #1: Be Generous With Praise
It’s one of the easiest things you can give, not to mention it has a phenomenal cost-to-impact ratio. Praise every improvement you see in your team members, both in one-on-one situations and in front of their peers.
Strategy #2: Make Your Ideas Theirs
Don’t tell your staff what to do. Instead, consult with them in a way that helps them arrive at correct conclusions on their own. For example, ask, “What do you think about trying this?”
Strategy #3: Don’t Criticize or Correct
No one enjoys hearing that they did something wrong. Try an indirect approach to get people to improve, learn from their mistakes, and fix them. Ask, “What will you do differently if that situation arises again? Why?”
Strategy #4: Recognize and Reward
Give a shout out to top performing employees. Run contests or internal games with a simple incentive and keep track of results in an area that everyone can see. You can also leverage Pearl-Plaza’s Moments, a motivational tool that helps everyone from frontline staff to executives to gain insight into real-time customer feedback, understand the role they play in the customer experience, and take action to improve experiences.
When you display Moment’s in the workplace, you can showcase location-specific feedback, allowing employees to see the state of the experience at their location. That means that when employees are called out by customers for the awesome work they do, they will see it, and so will their team members! This level of recognition gives staff members a direct view into their big-picture impact on the customers and the business, which creates additional motivation to perform in their role.
How Moments Helps Encourage Motivation from Frontline Staff to Executives
Moments empowers users to socialize and share customer and employee feedback, gain insights, and quickly take action to drive experience improvement while fostering a customer-first business approach. Here are just a few of the benefits:
Increased Visibility: Deliver high transparency to anyone from frontline staff to location managers, all the way up to executives on incoming customer and employee feedback through a curated data feed of comments published through filtered saved views tailored to users.
Instant Insights: Access experience feedback analytics that provide clarity into customer sentiment, themes and trends, NPS score, and more.
Organizational Engagement: Quickly distribute and socialize customer feedback and get the organization engaged with your customer experience program with an intuitive mobile application.
Improvement from Individual Verbatims: Armed with the right data, users can quickly share feedback with others, create a case for comments that need following up on, add a comment to a collection of similar feedback, and promote experience improvement by rewarding employees for positive feedback.
Case Management: Easily create a case for an experience(s) requiring followup through an integrated case platform. Users can track experiences and respond to feedback through the Moments mobile application and respond to feedback, and mark a case complete or invalid. Plus, users can view actions taken on any given experience for a historical record.
Digital Signage: Showcase filtered experience feedback views on a monitor or television to create a more customer-centric culture within an office environment (we even have Moment’s on display in every common space at Pearl-Plaza HQ!)
If you take care of your staff and implement the above strategies, you’ll be well on your way to providing a great work environment. In turn, your locations and overall brand will continue to deliver an exceptional customer experience and benefit from return visits, active brand advocacy and loyalty, and, ultimately, an increase in revenue. And isn’t that what every business is looking for?
