Chapter Seven. How to get people out of bed

Motivated staff are critical to the success of your store. Hopefully you will have already read the previous chapter on store cultures (the mission and values stuff). If you have, then you are already on the way to enjoying the benefits of having a motivated team around you. In this section, we’re going to get a bit deeper into the nitty gritty of motivation. In particular, I’d like to suggest some practical moves you can make to improve the motivation of your team.

If you’re going to build a great culture in your store, a motivated team is essential. Just to recap, the benefits of a great store culture include cost savings, customer service quality improvements, people pulling together to deliver the company values, better support for your decisions, and a more enjoyable time at work.

The components of motivation

Individuals are motivated by a combination of:

• Financial reward

• Implied sanction

• Self-respect

• Non-financial reward

• Recognition of value contributed

Of course, the importance of each motivating component will be different for different people. Factors such as age, personal circumstances, and social considerations all have an impact. Most of these, with one exception, make for only really subtle changes in your approach. The younger members of your team are often disproportionately motivated by cash. You might think “well, isn’t everyone”—over the next few pages, I’ll show you why that’s not quite true.

Show me the money—financial reward

A common mistake we all make on motivation is to assume that financial rewards are the most important and most motivating thing we can offer. The truth is—and this might be hard to accept because it is counter-intuitive—that money has very little motivating effect beyond a certain point. So long as the wage is fair, anything over that such as special bonuses or massive cash competitions has very little additional impact on employee motivation. People love getting it, sure, but it can even be counterproductive because the payment of large bonuses tends to condition staff to only ever put in extra effort if they can see a wad of cash in it for themselves. Pay too little, however, and money becomes an astonishingly important demotivator.

Those retailers with the most motivated workforces have observed that offering significant cash rewards in exchange for performance improvements has three effects:

• It drives too much focus into short-term revenue generation at the cost of falls in customer service quality.

• It conditions employees to only go beyond the job description when they are offered a cash incentive to do so.

• Bonuses become absorbed quickly into the employee’s general budgets and as such are not remembered over the longer term.

There is a whole filing cabinet full of research that suggests that cash triggers only very short-term satisfaction in the mind of the recipient. It boils down to cash being, by its nature, ephemeral—here today and gone tomorrow. I know you probably still don’t believe me but this effect has been observed time and time again. Money is important but it doesn’t create long-term motivation. You might need just to trust me on this one.

Incidentally, you can measure employee motivation by looking at factors such as employee satisfaction, employee turnover rates, and customer service quality scores.

The stick to your carrot—implied sanction

Implied sanction is the stick to your reward carrot. It is the rulebook. It’s “implied” because you may never have to use it but the team knows you would if pressed. It’s “sanction” because it’s what happens when the list of minimum standards is not met. Implied sanction is a strong motivating factor but one that requires significant skill to manage effectively. It takes a lot of common sense too, and certainly sympathy with the concept of “treat others how you would like them to treat you.”

A sales assistant, for example, needs to know that a drop in customer satisfaction will lead to a serious chat. Furthermore, they must know that the serious chat will generate a set of actions that, if not carried out, will cast serious doubt over their future in the store. That’s the sanction part.

The team needs to know that sanction is possible, but at the same time they must not be working in paralysed fear of that sanction. It’s a tricky balancing act sometimes but much better than the alternative, which is to manage by fear. Management by fear generates lots of problems such as decreases in service quality. Frightened staff don’t work well with customers. Fear can also lead to increased employee turnover and even industrial disputes.

In the 1980s, hard-bastard macho managers dominated retail management. Fear was a powerful motivator then because unemployment hung over pretty much everyone all of the time. Times have changed; there have been retail vacancies going unfilled for some years now. Management by fear is a poor technique, but we must recognize that we’re all human. A lack of sanction for those times when we let standards slip lets us become lazy. To motivate, you must ensure that the team knows you have set standards for a good reason and that you will maintain those standards vigorously.

Successful one-to-ones

When you have to actually use sanction, be quick, be clear, and be fair. Here’s the best format for a one-to-one in which you have to discipline a member of your team:

• 10 minutes to explain the general principles of the situation.

• 5 minutes to very specifically discuss the weakness or failure of the individual.

• 15 minutes to then explain why you have faith in that person’s ability to turn around the situation. This is time to rebuild that person’s belief in themself and their abilities. Make sure you finish the meeting with the person feeling on a high.

You can probably see a lot of the 1-minute manager in that process, and that’s fine. This is the practical way for retailers to do the same thing. Over the years, a number of store managers have recommended variations on this method to me, but I’d like to specifically credit Umesh Vadodaria for this version.

Treat me like a grown-up—self-respect

The default position for the majority of workers is to do the best job we can. If you create the right conditions, most people will work hard to deliver a good result. What stands behind that reality is self-respect. I’ve already talked about how the best teams are built on respect, and self-respect is a crucial component of that. It’s what makes people feel like it’s worth making the effort.

The opposite is also true: Put individuals into situations where they are robbed of their self-respect and they will react accordingly. People will steal and treat customers with contempt, and why not? If you take away somebody’s self-respect, how can you ever expect that person to in turn respect your customers?

Without getting horribly political, I’d like to ask you to take a look at what poverty and unemployment do to communities. Take away jobs, put people in shoddy housing they don’t own or ever could, then crime, drugs, and malcontent flourish. The truth is that if I don’t respect myself, I’m not going to respect you. You can do such a lot as a store manager to encourage self-respect to grow among the members of your team.

Share information

Tell the team the confidential stuff: state of the cash flow, company health, costs, losses, and profits. Show that you trust them with such sensitive numbers. Yes, some of it will find its way to your competitors, but the losses will be vastly outweighed by the benefits.

Delegate power

Allow team members to make decisions for themselves, especially on discounts and customer service issues. Give people the confidence to make these decisions by ensuring that you have a good set of practical and sensible guidelines in place. Good procedures help people to make good decisions.

Delegate responsibility

Make members of the team responsible for the performance of specific departments. Responsibility is a powerful source of self-respect especially when combined with a variable such as profitability or sales revenue.

Encourage training

Make sure everyone who wants it has access to all of the training opportunities available. Make a habit of promoting manufacturer-sponsored training and seminars too. These are often of a high quality and they make a welcome break from the usual company formats. You are saying to the team members who go on these courses “I value you and I want to give you access to skills you’ll find useful.”

Share the good jobs

Make members of the team responsible for specific tasks, especially those “cushy” jobs managers sometimes keep for themselves.

Dive in

If you expect the team to polish and dust, do it yourself too; show that it is not a job that’s “beneath you.”

Listen to both sides

When a customer complains, listen to both sides of the issue. Don’t blame the salesperson in front of the customer; you are responsible for service quality, so you make the apology. Then go talk with the salesperson and if there really is an issue, give them an opportunity to suggest ways in which to solve it.

Don’t wash your dirty linen in public (even if you run a dry cleaner’s)

Never embarrass or dress-down a colleague in public. I once observed a frustrated manager in Sainsbury’s having a go at a cleaner in front of customers. This cleaner had been skipping work, but that didn’t matter; the manager ended up looking like a bully. That reflected badly on the shop.

Consider the rulebook

Is there anything really daft in the rulebook that just forces people to do stupid things? If there is, then get rid of it.

Let others do the talking

Give everybody who wants to a chance to run team meetings. Encourage staff to present ideas at these meetings too. Go with the three-slide rule to prevent meetings becoming too competitive or boring: one to set-up the “what it is,” one to explain the “how it is,” and a final slide to summarize “why it is.”

Listen

Shut up and listen to what people are telling you before you go making up your mind. Ask questions and allow people to give you the whole story. People respond better when they feel they are being listened to.

Encourage every opportunity for feedback

Get and give feedback on ideas, interviews, worries, suggestions, and concerns. Do this in an honest, active way. Take things on board. If the answer to an idea or issue is “yes,” then get on and do it. If the answer is “don’t know,” go find out what you need to know. If the answer is “no,” explain why. Offering a shrug and a “because it just is” is never acceptable. Always do these things within a short time frame.

Build people back up

If you have ever have to pull somebody up, discipline them, or criticize their performance, then always build that person back up again afterwards. Leave people on a high—if instead you send them back onto the shop floor feeling poorly about themselves, that will show.

Don’t badmouth people

Every time you say “so and so is an idiot” in front of your team, you send a negative message about your attitude to colleagues. Negative talk infects your team—just don’t do it!

Recognize contribution

Learn to give specific praise as well as specific criticism. This is really very hard to do at first but is the most powerful motivating force of them all. Recognition is free and makes a real difference. By giving recognition, you are giving person X a reason to feel that “getting out of bed and coming to work today was worth it.” The keys to recognition are to be specific, to do it as soon as you think about it, and to do it little and often.

Celebrate success

Absolutely essential to the strength of the team is making time, and plenty of it, to celebrate success. I don’t mean the embarrassing forced stuff such as ringing a bell every time somebody makes a sale. Celebrating success means saying “well done” to people. It means making a small fuss of good things in the daily team meetings. It means going off for a pizza or a beer together. Toasting a hard-won target feels great. It feels even better if you’ve talked one of your suppliers into paying for the beer.

People need to know that the effort they’ve put into achieving something had a point to it. Celebrating success is one critical way in which you can do that. It says “I’m proud of us, we took on a challenge, and we beat it together.” I cannot stress enough that you will gain many times more benefit from putting aside a proper budget for doing this.

Be ready to admit your own mistakes

If you get it wrong, be honest about it and move on: “Okay, I got this wrong, now how can you help me to do this right next time?”

Put the customer at the center

Show your people that you respect them by showing them that you’re all working together for the same boss: the customer. It is the customer that we really work for. They are the ones who pay our wages. Teams need to have focus and in retail the customer is the best target for that focus. Everything you do must be built around the notion of helping customers to leave the store with a smile on their face.

Let’s have a laugh now—using non-financial rewards

“Non-financial rewards” is just a name for the fun stuff. They can include all sorts of things such as extra days off, gift certificates, freebies, and holidays. Now there is a really, really, fine line here between exciting and tacky. It’s so easy to make rewards embarrassing. Worse, lots of retailers go for the big dramatic holiday-type incentives where only one person can win anything significant. Maybe the best-performing store manager gets to go to Bermuda for a vacation. I’ve often worked with clients, employing thousands of people, who have insisted on running these demotivating incentive structures. They launch huge incentive programs worth big money but concentrated into maybe only five major prizes. Fantastic for the lucky five but really all this succeeds in doing is turning off the thousands who are pretty sure they won’t win. Worse, out of the 200 who think they are in with a chance, 195 high-achievers are left feeling positively demotivated when they don’t win that holiday.

When it comes to all motivating rewards, including cash bonuses, recognition, and non-cash bonuses, little and often is best. In this case, “little” because that means you can spread the budget much further and in doing so touch far more people. “Often” because it keeps things fresh and gives you lots of opportunities to boost performance without incentive programs going stale.

It’s how you use the little non-financial rewards that’s critical. As either an owner of an independent or as a chain-store manager, you have lots of freedom to do what you think will work best. Buddy-up with the manufacturer’s reps. Let them do some training at your store one evening and suggest they give the expense account a workout by taking the team for a pizza afterwards. I’m always pleasantly pleased by how consistent manufacturer’s reps are in this regard. They always say “yes” eventually.

As an owner of a store, you should be doing these things anyway, out of your own pocket. Incidentally, building in an ideas session before you eat is a good way of recouping the cost. I understand too that running a little meeting like this before eating has a positive effect on how you later have to account for the expense tax-wise, but check with your accountant in case I’ve got that wrong.

The wrong way to use non-cash rewards is to over-hype the reward or to use inappropriate rewards. So, for example, offering to give someone a CD for doing 200% of their target is an insult to you both. Wrong too would be to make a shy person stand on a chair to receive a commemorative “Top Guy” plaque. Use your best judgement and knowledge of the individual—what works for one might well turn off another.

Buy the team a gift each at Christmas but hand-write a thank-you note on each package. It reminds people that they are important to you. Always generously mark people’s birthdays, weddings, and new babies. Preferably do so out of your own pocket rather than via a staff pitch-in.

Try to include your employee’s partners on social invites. Partners have a massive influence on your people and on their view of you. A career in retail features strange and challenging hours that take people away from their families. Don’t make that worse by extending this exclusion to the team’s social occasions. Getting partners involved in idea generation can be very effective too.

Shopping is fun; we should all remember that.

Source: Koworld

Great non-cash incentives produced out of almost nothing

A good tip is to save any freebies you receive as a manager and pass them on to the team rather than keep them for yourself. Some managers save up these goodies to use in one go. Others dish them out right away. Either way, you must ensure that you don’t fall into either of the following traps:

1. Only ever giving stuff to the loudest members of the team because they are the ones you notice.

2. Showing favoritism to a person who the team could, conceivably, suspect you of having more than a professional interest in.

Here are two ways of avoiding these freebie pitfalls and at the same time bringing some fun to the proceedings.

Team ballot

Say you’ve been lucky enough to find yourself with four bottles of champagne, two boxes of Belgian chocolates, and a stack of good promotional T-shirts. It happens! Over a week you have the team agree to nominate a colleague each for a thank you. All they have to do is write down the other person’s name and a line on why they should be thanked. The key to participation is that anyone who doesn’t make a nomination is disqualified from winning a prize themself.

Then you all pile down to the bar after close-of-business one evening. Get a round in, then read out the “thank-you” notes. Everyone who has been nominated gets to choose a random envelope. Try to make sure that everyone who should have been nominated has been nominated. Inside each envelope is a note telling them which of the freebies they’ve earned.

This is effective because the team sees that you could have held on to all the stuff yourself but preferred them to have it—people love that, they really do. Asking them to select worthy recipients gets people focused on their place in the team too. Team ballots are not heavy affairs but they really do work—aim to run one every six months or every quarter at a minimum.

Balloon day

This method of giving away all your freebies can be hilarious, great fun, nicely competitive, and very motivating. On one of your busiest days you fill your office with balloons. Each balloon contains confetti and a little envelope that has the name of a prize in it. To spice things up a little, I usually throw in some envelopes with fivers in them and some with a token for something silly like a coffee in them. Then you draw up a big chart with the names of all your team on it.

Now you need to set a challenge. Challenges can include such things as:

• To sell a specific item

• To gain an “excellent” score on a customer service questionnaire (do this as an exit survey, having someone stand at the door with a clipboard gathering answers)

• Selling add-ons, scoring a point for every transaction that includes a legitimate add-on (“legitimate” meaning the add-on was actually something that the customer will have been glad to have been sold)

Each time a person completes a unit of the challenge, they earn a “pop.”

You can also award random “free pops” to members of the team, especially to anyone who isn’t actively involved in selling. Do this whenever you observe a positive behavior. Those positive behaviors could include such things as solving a customer complaint or helping out a colleague. Each time a person earns a “pop,” they get a token. These tokens are sticky and you can encourage people to stick them on the poster as the day goes on.

At the end of the day, after the punters have gone home, everyone gathers outside your office. Maybe you open some refreshments to help get the team revved up for the popping to commence. Starting with the person who has earned most “pops,” you let each person into the room to pop the number of balloons they’ve earned during the day. Then they get to keep whatever falls out of the balloons.

I’ve run this one many times and it always gets everybody going. It’s nice too if you can make the balloon day coincide with a team night out afterwards too. There are lots of variations on this theme such as having the prizes in lockers or in a sandbox and so on. I’m sure you can think up some yourselves too.

Recognition and motivation

Each of the motivating factors we’ve gone through here does in itself also have a recognition component. Giving out prizes is recognition, trusting somebody to make decisions is recognition, and bonuses are also a form of recognition.

Team meetings

In the previous pages, you’ll have seen how important communication, team-building, recognition, respect, and trust are. One of the most useful opportunities to make things happen in these areas is your daily team meeting.

Yeah, I said “daily” team meeting.

I recommend you hold a 5- to 15-minute team meeting every single day. You don’t have to do this but all the best retailers do. It’s hard to build a team spirit if the team never gets to stop to spend a few minutes focusing together. Equally, what better way is there to swap ideas, to jump onto opportunities, and to share responsibilities?

Daily team meetings are the missing ingredient in many an otherwise great store manager’s repertoire. Grab your store schedule now and write five headings into tomorrow’s date and run a meeting around those five things. Some of the items worth covering in team meetings include:

• Customer service issues and how these were solved

• Forthcoming events

• Promotions

• New products just in

• Bargains identified

• Review competitor activity

• Review new best-practice ideas identified

• Discuss incentive schemes

• Review any challenges

• Introduce new employees

• Review targets and performance

• Celebrate success

• Recognition

• Consider improvement ideas—even if you can only do this one, it will have been worth having the meeting—the next section talks you through how to find loads of these ...

Please do this daily—I don’t mean to nag, and I know shifts and part-timers and such mean you’ll need to juggle a bit, but the effect is hugely positive. You’re a leader, yeah? You can only be that if you set down plans, review those plans, and keep everyone up to date with what’s going on and what’s expected of them.