MANAGEMENT SPECIAL.... Asset care: Motivating your front-line workers

Asset care: Motivating your front-line workers

Build the ultimate win-win team by investing in your workers and focusing on driving performance through encouragement

One question that has long plagued organisations is how to improve performance among front-line workers, the people who actually drive customer experience. Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi are co-authors of Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation. They have helped organisations transform their cultures. To show how it works, they conducted a research and found that why people work determines how well they work — that someone’s motive for doing a task determines their performance. Here’s what managers need to keep in mind while motivating their employees:

Focus on learning

Before the pilot, the operating model of the stores the researchers studied was focused on creating emotional and economic pressure to drive performance. District managers would often hear, “You need to get your team to try harder,” or “This is really not what we would expect from your store,” or “Other stores are doing better.” To engage the front line at the retail organisation, they implemented a new operating model focused on optimising play, purpose, and potential while reducing the pressure.

This required four major changes:

Reduce the pressure

To ensure this front line could focus on learning, eliminate high-pressure motivation tactics, including sales commissions, high-pressure conversations, sales-based promotion criteria and public shaming. Leaders should understand that great leadership isn’t about pressuring people to do their work. Rather, it is about inspiring your people to want to do their work well, so they can perform adaptively.

Incorporate a spirit of play

Experimentation fosters curiosity, allows for novelty, and sets the pace of learning — all of which are important components of a healthy working atmosphere.

Create a sense of purpose

To build a genuine sense of purpose and meaning, the employees in the experimenting stores were taught how to connect every product, process, and policy to the benefit and impact they had on customers. They were taught that it was safe to ask questions until they understood.

Manage apprenticeship

While experimentation is focused on learning strategic or process improvements, it is equally important to manage the pace of learning through apprenticeship. In a culture of apprenticeship, people receive high levels of on-thejob coaching by others who are higher in skill. If you focused on skill development, performance problems will be no longer met with blame and defensiveness. Instead, if a colleague was struggling to perform, the immediate focus becomes learning and teaching.

— The New York Times