Frank Blau
Contributing Writer

What is the key to motivating employees? Can you really get your people to work harder, faster, more efficiently?

Basically, I believe that folks are internally motivated. You can dangle all the carrots you can muster, but a hard worker delivers at one pace – hard. A slowpoke, on the other hand, can be promised all the spiffs you can think of and he or she will deliver at one pace – slow.
So does this mean forget all those sermons on treating your employees will if you want them to deliver? Yes … and no.

To Stay or Not To Stay: You want to keep the good folks, and you want to reward them for high sales, low callbacks and all the other things that make your business run smoother and more profitably. They deserve to make more money if they bring in more money, and if you don’t give them more, they are likely to go job hunting for someone who will.

But I’ve got news for you. Those people don’t work harder or faster as a result of your clever schemes to make them work harder and faster. What they get done in a day is based on their own determination of what is a day’s work. The salary and benefit package you put together will determine whether or not your people stay with you – not how they work.

However, you can improve the efficiency of your staff if you understand “gamesmanship.” Efficiency is basically a measurement of how well people play the game at hand. If your service tech, for example, has enough control over his working environment to hand the situations he runs into in the field, he will create a game where he wins and you win.

If at every turn he is second guessed, or sent out without the proper tools or information, he will make up a new game. It’s called let me see how miserable I can make it for my know-nothing boss!

The key to getting more work out of a hard-working staff, is to get your whole system in control by the people responsible the output. Everything that the dispatcher needs to schedule calls should be in the dispatcher’s control. The customer service rep should have what he or she needs. The service tech must have the skills, tools, backup support, etc., to handle any call. Lacking control, these people will make up deviant games that no amount of carrot dangling can do away with.

“Ours To Reason Why”: As I’ve mentioned, the full throttle working person will give you his best all day long. God bless him and the smart woman who raised him. But what about the one who always seems to be moving at half-speed? Is there no hope of motivating him?

Before you run the underachiever off the premises with a broom, try to find out one thing: Does he see a purpose in his work? I don’t claim to know all the workings of the human mind, but of this I am sure – we all need something to do and a reason to do it.

The poet Tennyson once wrote, “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but do and die,” describing the famous Charge of the Light Brigade. That pretty much describes the military mind of his day, but not anymore. People today, even in the military and most certainly in civilian life, are not inclined to blindly follow orders to charge a machine gun nest. They want to know why they are expected to do so.

It is so easy to assume that our employees can see the reasons why, for instance, we want our phones answered a certain way, or why we ask them to don surgical booties before entering a house. (One of my servicemen thought the booties were to protect his shoes from the customer’s dirty floors!)

You need to make an effort to assure that each employee knows what his job is and why it needs to be done a certain way. In fact, here’s a good test for examining the usefulness of your policies and procedures: simply ask whether you can give a good answer to the question of “why?” you do those things. If you can’t provide a good answer, get rid of them.

Another good exercise is to have employees swap jobs for a day. Try to have a dispatcher spend a day in the field and a field person handling phone calls and the radio mike. This can be invaluable in helping them see the purpose in one another’s jobs.

Make It “Mine”: Get ready now for what I see as the number one motivator of all. It’s called PARTNERSHIP.

Profit sharing and confuses don’t count here. Again, they are great as part of the total compensation package, but not as effective agents of change when it comes to daily behavior. I’m talking about full butt-on-the-line ownership.

I predict that more and more companies will transfer stock ownership to the troops because it works to motivate the employee-owner to work harder, faster, better. They pay attention when it’s their assets and reputation at stake. It is the ultimate empowerment.

A friend of mine, who has a pretty decent compensation package, recently told me that he was getting ready to sell the business. He wanted to give the employees first shot at the sale. As soon as he told them this, their behavior changed virtually overnight. They were always hard workers, but suddenly phone messages were being returned lickety-split. Spare copper fittings were being viewed as inventory rather than garbage. Suggestions for improvement were being proffered left and right.

This just as the result of imagining ownership. An astounding tale, but true, and maybe not so astounding when you really think about it. After all, isn’t this what motivates you?