Coaxing a great performance from your employees requires you to get quite a few things right. Here are five:
1. Proper hiring (the better term is selection)
2. Great training and a well thought out program of reinforcement throughout the year
3. A sense of organizational purpose that is made clear throughout the organization
4. Clear service standards that provide guidelines to your employees for situations guaranteed to come up
5 . Proper technology that supports, streamlines, and extends the reach of their work
But none of this will take you where you want to go without one more ingredient: employee autonomy.
Heres the central law of employee motivation.
Employees who are selected, oriented, and reinforced properly, and who are surrounded by peers of the same caliber, will thrive when given significant autonomy. Otherwise, theyll wither.
There are dozens of studies to support this, inside and outside of business life. (You may prefer the term empowerment to autonomy. Thats fine. I think autonomy is the better word because its scarier, more blunt. And if what Im talking about here doesnt make an old-style autocrat at least a little nervous, then Im not getting the point across.)
The case for autonomy: just look in the mirror
The case for giving employees autonomy in how to carry out their work has been backed up for half a century by psychological and management research. It may surprise you just how strong the case isuntil you look in the mirror and think about what you would require to do great work face to face with customers every day.
First off, people need a reason to wake up in the morningand they pay me is hardly the ideal alarm clock. Think about it this way: Lets assume an employer pays approximately the same wage as competing employers do. But the employer also prescribes exactly how the job should be done, when it should be done, and where it should be done. Does this employers approximately-the-same-as-everyone-elses wage really carry the day in this situation?
Unlikely. An employee with half a brain (and, by and large, thats the minimum cranial content to look for in an employee) will sprint to any employer offering more freedom, freedom that includes:
Flexibility in when the job gets done (dont tell me that parents who need to work an unconventional schedule are lesser workers; it just aint true).
Even more important, flexibility in how the job gets done: both on a day-to-day basis and in having a part in designing the overall structure of the work activities. This is an ethical imperative. If you dont involve people in designing the jobs to which they devote their waking hours, youre using employees as mere tools, for their labor. Even though youre paying them, this kind of using of people is unconscionable.
Its impossible to micromanage 5,000 customer touchpoints
A company needs the ability to respond to the unpredictable, ever changing, intensely individual, nuanced desires of customers.
Consider this statistic from Cornells Center for Hospitality Research: There are an estimated five thousand customer/employee touch points every day in a moderate-sized hotel. There may be fewer touch points in your business, or, heaven help you, there may be more. To handle each of those touch points correctly requires an exceeding amount of psychological and intellectual flexibility, which will be hindered when employees know that management puts primary value on conformity.
Dont talk about empowerment, then reward conformity
While many companies speak of employee empowerment, they tend to compensate and allocate pats on the back differently:
Did an employee make the numbers this month (even if he had to finesse the books by pushing bad events to next month)?
Did he get everythingsortashipped on time (even if it means he didnt take that extra minute to verify a shipping address and save the customer a lot of grief )?
Did the employee get customers off the phone in the call center on time (even though lingering longer could have led to a greater potential bond with the company)?
You want customer relations to be on the shoulders of your employees. But as long as youre defining every little thing, and rewarding/punishing based on seemingly arbitrary and thus, inevitably, gamed criteria, you wont get them to carry that responsibility.
Their viewpoint will soon resemble the jaded flight attendants attitude on a big, legacy carrier who told me not long ago, The more emphatically Management comes up with new is to dot and ts for me to cross, the less seriously I take them. I know these rules will be gone within the year, and a new group of regs will take their place.
ARTICLE SOURCE http://bit.ly/OW1ARS : This factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that can be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.