How the Four Drive Theory Works Within an Incentive Program

“Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices” published in 2002 by Professor Lawrence and Dean Nohria of Harvard Business School discusses how 4 biological drives can effect employee behavior on the job.  Here we take a look at how these drives might be incorporated into incentive programs to drive performance.

The Drive to Acquire Stuff & Status
 

Incentive programs typically use a variety of non-cash awards that employees can earn for achieving certain objectives.  The well designed program will allow the winners to accumulate awards from the initial phases thru completion.  The employees are acquiring personal and luxury items they wouldn’t typically buy for themselves, including trips, deluxe merchandise, gift cards to special places etc. 

The Drive to Bond

Often they are on teams working together and aspiring to reach a higher status. As the program goes on you can see employees discovering all sorts of ways to enjoy the fruits of their labors together. By sharing rewards with family and friends, they are increasing their status in the eyes of their peers.

The Drive to Create

Programs can be anchored with a focus on connecting achievement with individual passions and pursuits. People desire to creatively contribute to something bigger than themselves and can satisfy the desire for purpose and meaning.

The Drive to Defend

The program is standardized, making it a fair and equitable motivator influencing human behavior. The earning rules are clear, and employees are willing to cooperate with one another to achieve results and foster teamwork.

The Customer / Employee Experience Link in Service Centers

We find all the recent attention given to the importance of linking a satisfied customer and an engaged employee to be quite startling. Why?  Well because for as long as we can remember didn’t we all just know that when we have pleasant, happy and engaged employees helping the customer that a positive customer experience followed?  “The customer was always right” was the model which exhorted the service staff to give high priority to customer satisfaction.  We traded where we were given the kind of service that pleased us; we usually avoided places where the experience was less than desirable.  Don’t we still do that?

I guess not.  Now it would seem that marketers are just waking up to the critical role that employees play in business.  Certainly the advent of the non-human connection built into the digital age has something to do with it.  We can literally stay in our own small cubical world, doing almost everything we need to do to live, and never interact with another human being unless it’s a call center employee we finally get to after going through three robots.

In a recent article from CMSWire.com, the author Phil Britt found that companies feel that a motivated and fully equipped workforce may have been critical to the customer experience in the past, but that employee engagement and enablement was at the bottom of their priority list, not the top. 

It is so easy today to let all the bells and whistles of the latest “app” or platform do all the work.  The sale is conducted from start to finish and you never connect with the customer.  In a customer contact center where constant turnover can be a major challenge, a positive, talented and engaged employee is much more likely to have a positive impact on the customer.  In many instances  your customers often prefer self-serve options for convenience, but this can also help with employee engagement by allowing your contact employees the time to focus on more challenging and value added customer interactions.

Recognition awards have long been a part of call center strategies to increase employee engagement. They work, they always have.  In most companies call center positions are entry level, fairly low salary or hourly positions where a small recognition award can be very meaningful.  These employees are usually the first contact point between the company and customer.  Every one of us has had the experience of dealing with these hard working employees.  And we know immediately which ones of them are engaged and which are not, which are tired and just going through the motions and which sincerely want to help.  Recognition, respect and meaningful thanks for good performance will go a long way in maintaining and even improving their engagement and corresponding customer satisfaction.

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