It is inevitable that organisations will go through change at some point, whether it be gowing, shrinking, employees leaving or new management. Stroller (2017) notes that business leaders must guide their employees through periods of change within the organisation, and by doing this the employees will keep motivated. By utilising five key areas through periods of change, you can ultimately understand the needs of your employees, their thought and their concerns – understanding these will be the tool to keeping the staff motivated (Stroller, 2017). The five key areas Stroller has identified are communication (two-way communication and sharing thoughts makes the team feel valued), feedback (real time view of what people are feeling), recognising role models (empowers and engages the team), vision (when the team believe in the goals of the company, this provides them with direction) and leading through change (supporting the team through changes).
Organisational culture is defined as the behaviour patterns of people within an organisation – this includes norms, beliefs, habits, values and vision (Osorno, 2014). It is important to manage the culture in the workplace because if there are any conflicting cultures, this may cause a negative result in both an employees motivation and the organisations success. Osorno (2014) draws particular attention to Daniel Denison’s model which draws links between organisational culture and employee performance, measuring profitability, growth, quality, innovation and employee satisfaction. The model has been used to identify problems within an organisation as the model categorises an organisations culture into found elements – Mission, Adaptability, Involvement and Consistency – answering four key questions about the organisation:
– Mission: do we know where we are going?
– Adaptability: Are we listening to the marketplace?
– Involvement: Are we keeping our employees engaged, aligned and capable?
– Consistency: Do we have the systems, values and processes in place to accomplish?
Osorno (2014) considers a few characteristics of a healthy culture to be diversity, strong communication, low turnover, equal opportunity, employee enthusiasm and fairness and respect. It is useful to use data gathering techniques to establish how an organisation scores in regards to these characteristics.
Calnan (2015) summarises research undertaken by NGA Human Resources which surveyed 1,500 full time workers in London and found that 32% are motivated by non-monetary benefits whereas an astonishing 76% of Londoners say that salary is important when considering a job. Additionally, 50% of the respondents are likely to want a substantial holiday allowance. For the percentages to be this high, it would indicate an importance of quickly identifying whether a company is providing these benefits to employees. It is also important for an employer to engage with employees to find out what motivated them as well as to see if their needs are met.
Harrington (2011) draws attention to what motivates “Generation Y” – an era of empoyees that have grown up surrounded by information technology and rapid technological change. Generation Y enjoy challenging work, a working environment that meets their lifestyle and needs, feedback from management, an urge for new knowledge and a desire for higher pay. With the mixture of these factors, an employee will find they are motivated and as a result be loyal to the organisation.
Sudar et al (2013) suggest that implementing performance management in the workplace will lead to favourable results, such as employee commitment, competence and flexibility. This in turn will lead to quality, productivity and as a result, organisational success – that being undefinable as it requires understanding what each organisation deems as success. Porter et al (2006): cited in Sudar et al (2013) notes that employees who are carefully recruited, trained and developed, appraised and rewarded are mote likely to go the extra mile for their company. To supplement this, Smith (2007) defines Human Resource Management as “The productive recruitment, development and motivation of people at work in order to achieve business objectives and the satisfaction of employees”. Thompson (2017) complements this by stating that employee engagement should be a top priority for managers and that an employee aligned with the company’s goals and values will create around 30% better results for the company.
Motivation and Customer Service go hand in hand and although different things motivate different people and for different reasons, ultimately, the idea is that motivated employees will lead to improved customer service. Gino et al (2017) suggests that to improve customer service, employers must encourage employees to see the benefits their work is giving the customer – this in essence will create a “corporate belongingness”. The article suggests that after a couple of months in a job role, the job role will begin to feel somewhat dissatisfying; it is therefore the employer’s responsibility to ensure organisational productivity and increased employee moral amongst the workforce. Gino et al (2017) conducted a study which looked at two and a half years of transaction data at a Japanese Bank which was analysed by Gino and the University of North Carolina. The data collected was grouped and it analysed employees as per their job role at the company with the aim to collect data from a variety of job roles to make the results more accurate. The results of the data identify that a key factor in increasing worker motivation is leveraging interactions with beneficiaries – this being those who benefit from the work that the employee is doing – in most cases that being the customer. The research supports the idea that if employees come into contact with the customer who is benefiting from their work, the employee will then become more motivated to do their job. The article uses research conducted by Grant (2008) of Wharton School to support the idea of employees being motivated by seeing the benefits of their job role on beneficiaries. Grant’s study was on fundraisers who were trying to secure scholarship donations. The research of the study suggests that the fundraisers felt more motivated when they had contact with the scholarship recipient as the interaction made the fundraisers more attached to the idea of working hard to raise funds to benefit those receiving the scholarship. Gino (2017) makes an interesting point by highlighting the fact that it may be difficult to achieve similar motivation in certain job roles; he uses the role of assembly-line workers where the likeliness that they have much, if any contact with the recipient of their work is unlikely. Gino, Paul Green of HBS and Brad Staats therefore conducted an experiment whereby they asked employees at a tomato processing company to watch a video of how their work positively impacted people; as a result, the company saw an average improvement of 7% in the productivity of the workforce.
Gino et al (2017) concludes by stating that the need to belong is a fundamental human need, both at work and at home and the studies conducted support the idea that positive responses from beneficiaries of employee’s work served as an important source of motivation by strengthening the workers’ sense of belongingness. The literature is recent which makes it relevant, it also uses other literature and previous studies to back up the theory, as well as the authors conducting and measuring their own final study.
Prosocial motivation is defined as motivation from the desire to benefit other people, as suggested by Grant (2008); this supplements Gino et al’s (2017) research which mentioned employees being motivated by the benefits their work brings to others. As Gino’s (2017) study supported the idea that employees become more motivated after seeing how their work benefits the beneficiary, Grant (2008) expands this idea by suggesting a hypothesis that prosocial motivation enhances persistence, performance and productivity by dedicating the employees work to a cause. Grant (2008) conducts two studies to test his hypothesis; one of which was a study he did on a sample of 58 firefighters using surveys. The study recorded responses from the firefighters and these responses were kept confidential and anonymous to ensure that the responses were reliable and a true reflection of the subjects’ responses. An example of a question asked in the survey includes “why are you motivated to work?”- this was followed by eight possible responses, a mixture of four prosocial responses (e.g “because I want to help others through my work”) and four intrinsic responses (e.g because I enjoy work itself). To supplement his research, Grant (2008) also obtained the number of overtime work that the employees had taken on and used this information in his conclusion of the study. Essentially, the results concluded that there was a positive relationship between prosocial motivation and the amount of overtime that employees worked when intrinsic motivation was high. These results support Grant’s (2008) hypothesis that once employees are motivated, this results in them working overtime, due to the benefits that their work has on their customers.
Most organisations now use online reviews to evaluate the level of their customer service – this is because the customer has an opportunity to express their views on their customer service experience anonymously, meaning that their feedback tends to be more accurate (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010: Bona et al 2016). Bona et al (2016) uses reviews on Trip Advisor to gather the research – they did a content analysis of 919 reviews which were a mixture of satisfied customers and dissatisfied customers and to ensure valid data collection, a random sampling method was used. When looking into this research they looked to identify the reasons of customers being satisfied or dissatisfied; as per the results, it shows that the most frequently found satisfiers were “staff and their attitude” at 8.3%, “location” at 8.5% and “service” at 3.9%. In regards to factors that made people dissatisfied, this included “staff and staff attitude” at 9.2% which was the most mentioned, “management” at 3.1% and “noisiness” at 3.5%.
Hertzberg (1965), cited in Hsiao et al (2016) introduces the idea that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction, while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction. Factors that prevent employees being dissatisfied are labelled as hygiene factors – such as job security, flexibility, working conditions and company policies. The second factor of the two factor theory is motivation factors which lead to employee satisfaction including meaningful work, opportunities to develop and challenging work. As a result of Hertzberg’s research he suggests that motivating staff can be done in a number of ways – these include reducing time spent at work, fringe benefits and increasing wages. Saks (2014) describes a theory of engagement devised by Maslach et al (2001) (:Saks 2014) called job burnout – this is the gap between an employee and six areas of organisational life, including workload, control, rewards and recognition, community, fairness and values. An employees’ engagement is deemed to be higher if an employee has sustainable workload, control, appropriate reward and fairness in the workplace.