On Staff Motivation

In his book smart retail Richard Hammond comments on staff motivation as below;

Individuals are motivated by a combination of:

. Financial reward

. Implied sanction

. Self-respect

. Non-financial reward

. Recognition of value contributed

Although for all retailers financial reward is the low hanging fruit in hard times it has important drawbacks too;

Money can be a demotivator rather than motivator,  (fairness of the mechanism)

It drives too much focus into short-term revenue generation at the cost of falls in customer service quality.

It conditions employees to only go beyond the job description when they are offered a cash incentive to do so.

Bonuses become absorbed quickly into the employee’s general budgets and as such are not remembered over the longer term

From my experience non financial rewards generally even worse than financial ones;

When the management decides to offer a reward such as a holiday for two, (general misbelief is that the bigger the reward is, the  more motivated the staff are) the competition dates become longer in order to have a better roi due to the cost of the reward. However in these types of competitions after a week, the sales people who understand that they have no chance to win leave the challenge and the competition will become more of a demotivator for the most of the employees and few will pursue to the last day.