OK - I'll come clean - I don't like incentive schemes.  Instinctively, I feel that they make so many negative and patronising assumptions about people - principally that unless we give them something material, they won't make an effort.  I see incentives as a substitute for good management and an admission that your people aren't intrinsically motivated. In a world where a ‘Theory Y' management approach has long been recognised as more effective and enlightened, it seems to me to be based firmly on ‘Theory X' assumptions.

As you read this article, you'll probably think ‘so what's new?  What constantly amazes me is that although we all know this stuff, we're still not using it. People like Maslow, Herzberg and McGregor gave us some pretty useful insights into motivation many decades ago. So I make no apologies if you think you've heard all this before.  My question is: why are we still so bad at motivating people?  Why do contact centres still have such high levels of sickness and attrition? And why do the behaviours we hear when we pick up the phone to a contact centre still so often make us cringe?

During my 10 years as a consultant, I've come across some interesting effects of incentive schemes: an agent in a travel company who logged multiple insurance policies to each client family to get extra ‘per policy' payments; an advisor who had a ‘stable' of seasonal staff (who didn't get incentives) transferring customers to him so he could get paid for cross-selling additional policies; an outsourcer whose advisors would pick up the phone and immediately cut customers off in order to hit their service level targets; team leaders who inflated agents' quality scores so they and the staff member achieved performance bonuses...the list goes on and on.  Attempt to motivate with money and some people will (sadly) find a way to play the system.  I'm not claiming that incentives never produce good results - what's particularly interesting to me is that the people you most value or want to reward are often not the ones who benefit from and are motivated by these schemes.   Indeed, many very good people are demotivated when they see a small number of colleagues, who give poor service to customers and who only make an effort if they're incentivised to do so, being paid extra.

Perhaps before we start trying to decide what approach will work best, we should ask ourselves who we are trying to motivate?  My answer would be ‘everyone'.  In an ideal world, everyone who's on the payroll would come into work every day looking forward to the task ahead and wanting to do the best job they possibly could.  Of course, in the real world, people don't feel like that every day, so our challenge is to create an environment where we give ourselves the best possible chance of that happening.

You don't have to throw money at it.  Of course, rewards should be fair, but my preference would be to make sure that your salary and grading system is rewarding consistent, long-term effort and skills rather than to use short-term ‘carrots' to get people to perform.  

Fundamentally, people should:

• Understand what's expected of them
• Be recognised and rewarded fairly for what they do
• Get honest and frequent feedback, coaching and encouragement
• Feel trusted, valued and supported
• Be respected as individuals and treated as such

Motivating people requires time, careful thought and skilled individual performance management.  It is possible to impact motivation at every stage of an agent's ‘lifecycle':

Recruitment - make sure that you choose people who are really suited to the job - and know exactly what will be required of them. However desperate the situation is, resist the temptation to appoint in haste and to fill roles with sub-standard candidates or people who should be doing something quite different.

Training - give people all the tools to do the job - and time to learn and regularly refresh their knowledge.  This builds the agent's confidence in you, the company and their own ability to perform to the required standard. Rushed or poor induction training creates a first impression that you'll have trouble recovering from. Make sure your trainers and mentors give a positive impression of your organisation - a disillusioned trainer or ‘role model' is a short-cut to demotivated staff.

Performance measurement - use well thought-out, balanced measures that recognise individual agents' strengths as well as the areas they still need to work on. Ensure you include ‘soft' measures - interpersonal skills and behaviours - as well as ‘hard' measures - process, compliance and outputs such as sales figures. Make sure your measures are applied consistently and are seen to be fair. Hold regular alignment sessions between team leaders and managers. Encourage agents to get involved in designing their own measures - and don't keep moving the goalposts.

Call listening and assessment - agents need to be able to listen to their own calls - simply getting feedback from a team leader is no substitute for hearing yourself as your customers hear you.  Encourage agents to assess their own calls. In call coaching sessions, encourage them to pick good calls as well as ones where they need help.  That way it won't feel that you're always looking to find fault.

Coaching - in a call centre environment, great coaching is the key to long-term motivation. The team leader or manager needs to understand each agent individually and tailor their approach to fit. In an environment where it's easy to feel like ‘just another bum on a seat', this is especially important.  However, because of operational pressures, many team leaders still report that they get little time for coaching and that there's so much pressure to attain service levels with tight resources that planned coaching sessions get cancelled.  Yet it's been shown time and time gain that regular coaching improves performance and motivation and reduces staff attrition rates.

A great coach will set individual goals - we have a tendency to set universal targets or ‘pass marks'.  This might motivate the people who are just below the target - but it encourages people above that to ‘plateau' -  and new starters or people who are struggling lower down the rankings are more likely to be demotivated by what they see as an impossible expectation.  Make goals personal - if Fred's career ambition is to become a nurse, look at the skills  he needs and show how improving his communication and rapport building skills on the phone will help him towards that objective.

Celebrating success - again, because there are never enough hours in a day, managers still spend more time pointing out what they've done wrong than telling people about what's gone well.  It's no wonder that agents sometimes feel that we're never satisfied.  Tell people - and others - when they've done something noteworthy.  But make sure it's genuine.  Setting ‘praise targets' or ‘motivation hours' for managers (I once heard a senior manager telling people to praise 10 employees a month!) will be seen as cynical and formulaic.

Using talent - getting front-line staff involved in the running of the centre helps to counteract the feeling of lack of control that is often reported by contact centre agents.  Peer coaching and appointing subject experts are opportunities to use people's individual talents, as well as involving people in planning shifts, managing holidays and breaks, organising events and deciding on layout, décor and staff facilities.

Talking to leavers - sounds odd, but exit interviews are a great key to motivation. If someone leaves you feeling positive, you've done a great job.  Equally, as most people feel they have nothing to lose by being honest at this stage, use what they tell you to get some genuine feedback of your own, and to sort out any obvious demotivators for those that remain.