There is no denying that service activities involve a lot of demanding work on a daily basis. This can make the employees run ragged. For that reason, motivation becomes essential and necessary for the purpose of providing top-notch service. The primary objective of motivation is to have a positive impact on the employees in such a manner that they WANT and become more willing to work effectively.
Unfortunately, a lot of individuals assume that money is the most significant motive. However, this is not true. Now, I’m not saying money is bad, or one should not earn it. In fact, I advocate and back the top specialists to earn decent money. After all, we live in a materialistic world, and undeniably, the best is the best. It is for this reason that I am a huge supporter and adherent of employees getting high wages when they are earned. Also, if we are able to afford it, I would never mind paying a good and the highest salary in the industry.
With that being said, we are right now discussing a different type of motivation. Why is that so? Adina Brunetti is sharing her experience:
“Well, a few years back, we at Adina Creative Food carried out an experiment in our restaurants. In that experiment, we considerably raised the salaries of our employees. A waiter working at our restaurant started to earn better than the manager working at the restaurant of our competitor. I took this decision to raise the salaries on purpose, even though I already knew its final outcome. The question is, why did we raise the salaries? A lot of my colleagues were certain that this move of ours would help us deliver the best service because now the employees would work harder and we would receive many applications for the job.
But then, what happened next? Well, the series of events that took place were exactly what I expected. Sadly, the employees did not put in more effort or work harder. In contrast to this, the staff became more inefficient and started to have a slack attitude towards their work. For this reason, we had to bid adieu to most of them. Later on, after a period of six months, we decided to put an end to our experiment and opted to work with the most challenging yet also most effective kind of motivation. I’m talking about non-material motivation. A kind of motivation that pushes for relationships and achievements.
Let’s discuss a bit about how our brain functions. You all may know that our brain has got two hemispheres. The right hemisphere is responsible for hobbies, predispositions, feelings, and emotions. In comparison, the left hemisphere deals with a literal understanding of words, language, speech, mathematical ability, and logic. Our right hemisphere is known to be emotions, whereas our left is referred to as logical or rational. But, most people do not know that both of our hemispheres do not operate simultaneously. This is certainly a fact, and you can find its scientific backing as well.
You may be wondering as to why am I discussing all this. Well, allow me to explain it to you. Consider what we discussed before. Now, answer, which hemisphere, left or right, would deal with numbers on the payroll? It would certainly be the left one as it is responsible for mathematical abilities.
When we present a particular motivation system, we basically rely on achievement. We take into account motivation, not for ordinary results, but for remarkable achievements; we aren’t talking about attaining the standards; however, we are talking about personally adding up something to our work from our very own selves. For that, the first basic thing that we need to understand comprehensively is that achievement is essentially illogical.
Consider a classic Hollywood movie where usually cop acts like a one-man army and saves the day by defeating a massive terrorist group. As we always watch them standing on the flying airplane’s wing, striving hard to stop the timer of a nuclear bomb, and then successfully bites the wire of that bomb at the last moment. The next scene shows the cop bleeding and lying in the ambulance with the doctor providing him with first aid and journalists asking him various questions. One of them then says, “You are our hero!” and he simply replies: “That’s just my job.”
No matter if you have seen such movies on the big screen or not, you will certainly agree with the point that we usually do not pay much heed to our achievements and realize them. Even if we do, we often don’t discuss them much. And, in case we discuss these, we do not make a fuss or turn our achievements into a regular thing.
Scientists carrying out research on motivation have discovered a significant fact. According to that, if a particular behavior is not punished or rewarded, eventually it would fall flat. Undoubtedly, people stop doing work that does not have any motivation attached.
Do you know about the highest award in ancient Rome? It is a wreath, which is exactly the same that crowned Caesar’s head in all of the images he had. A lot of people may know about this thing; however, only a few of the individuals know what it has been made of. No, it did not involve gold, silver, or bronze. Not even laurel. It was just woven using herbs, and this exact wreath was served as the highest award in ancient Rome. It was awarded to the individuals who saved the lives of their fellow countrymen by risking their own lives. Well, the main idea behind telling you all this is to make you realize that he did not risk his life just to get money, gold, or a house. All he wanted was a life membership in the Senate and a standing ovation from their people. He wanted the senators and consuls in the Senate to stand up and applaud for him and pay tribute to his heroism. He wanted his achievements to be recognized.
We got a lot of such examples from our ordinary employees. But as far as the management level is concerned, we saw nothing.
Well, what does this indicate? It is quite simple. Organizations usually do not track or record these achievements, and those individuals who do these, as a rule, do not tend to get recognition for that. The maximum that a prominent or well-known person can receive is an award from the leadership. This also does not happen much often.
We need to develop an ideology of sincere service if we want our employees to put in hard work and efforts for the sake of client satisfaction. The first step from where it all starts is recognition.
Service standards, as we mentioned before, do not tend to work because they come from the very top towards the bottom, and people “below” usually do not share in them. A similar type of issue occurs with the corporate culture as well; it is often inculcated from above. The kind of environment tends to permeate and spread the complete organization in almost every direction.”
A lot of companies and organizations spend huge sums of money just for the purpose of developing a code and various rules, regulations, norms, and values with the assistance of contributors. At the same time, one of the most important tasks of outside consultants is to gather the internal stories, cooperate and communicate with the employees — conveyors of those similar values — and carry each and everything In conjunction, permeating and generalizing the literary brilliance. Even though excessive gloss is not required, it is always better and effective to tell stories in a lively, familiar, and profound language.