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Culture Shift: The Best-Kept Secret in Business
March 11, 2008
Does motivation simply come down to the "What's-in-it-for-me?" syndrome and finding the right incentive prize to answer that question? After all, that's the one question in the back of every apathetic employee's mind, right? Turns out, the answer to all of the above is no.
By Paul Levesque
In my early years as a management consultant I believed superior customer service created an unbeatable competitive advantage—THE ultimate success factor for any business. But the logical question I kept running into was, "How do I get all my workers to feel the same way?"
The truth is that I didn't have an entirely satisfactory answer for that one back then, and—from what I could tell from the existing literature at the time—no one did. I suppose I felt I'd done all I could. At least, that was how I looked at it until I stubbed my toe.
The First Breakthrough
During one hotel stay, I was startled out of a deep sleep by a wake-up call I did not request. Since I was now awake anyway, I decided to get my day started. I reached for the beside lamp: The bulb blew when I turned it on. As I made my way across the dark room, I smartly (or perhaps not so smartly) cracked my toe against the leg of a desk.
My first reaction was to feel I'd just been a victim of dreadful customer service. But then I thought: If an unwanted wake-up call hadn't disturbed me, would I have later described its absence as an example of good service? If the bedside bulb had worked, would I have immediately leapt to my feet thinking, "Wow, great customer service?"
It wasn't so much that customer service was lacking at this hotel—the staff, in fact, had been uniformly friendly and helpful. What was lacking was customer focus: management systems and processes that revolve around the total customer experience (Unwanted wake-up calls, for example, meant there was no built-in system for cancelling such requests when new guests checked in). It's a cultural issue, rather than a behavioral one.
All I did was stub my toe in the dark but sometimes that's all it takes. And breakthrough No. 1 was a biggie.
The Motivation Factor
The second breakthrough proved to be even greater. Some years later, when working with civic volunteers on a city's lakefront beautification project, I became fascinated by the willingness of volunteers to pour all of their talent and hard work into an objective they believed in—and for little or no pay! This was my first real brush with the so-called "helper's high," the sense of euphoria and satisfaction people feel when they're part of something that makes things better for others.
The more I listened to what drove and excited these volunteers, the more I realized I was hearing the exact same thing I'd often heard from employees in highly customer-focused businesses. Staff in these types of workplaces report experiencing a kind of "helper's high" from their shared efforts to help customers solve problems or enjoy a memorable experience—an objective they believed in and cared about. But, unlike volunteers, they were actually getting paid to be part of it.
The Best-Kept Secret in Business
I had actually stumbled upon the missing piece of the puzzle—and the best-kept secret in business. For ages, employers have believed the big unspoken question in every employee's mind is, "What's in it for me?" Many incentive programs exist purely to provide tangible—even if only temporary—answers to that very question. But the real question in most employees' minds is, "Why should I care?"
This is a very different question, and it calls for a very different answer.
Making customer delight the primary organizational objective accomplishes much more than "just" retaining existing customers and attracting new ones. What it accomplishes within the organization at the cultural level may be even more important. It unites workers at all levels behind a single collective purpose they can care about and believe in.
This was the answer we all had been looking for back in the day. A cultural shift of 180-degrees (from a predominantly internal focus on profit and self-interest, to a predominantly external focus on helping customers or the community) will always be one of the most powerful, effective and enduring ways to get a workforce motivated—and keep them that way.
 Is superior customer service THE unsurpassable competitive advantage for any business? Not when its derailing your incentive efforts. Listen to Paul Levesque's podcast this week at www.incentivemag.com/podcasts to discover how a 180-degree culture shift may be all that your company needs to give those seemingly apathetic employees a lasting motivation high.
Incentive online "Culture Shift" columnist Paul Levesque is an author, seminar leader and public speaker with two decades' experience as an international business consultant specializing in the connection between employee motivation and customer satisfaction. He is a senior consultant with Boston-based Novations Inc., and is also founder and CEO of Customer Focus Breakthroughs Inc.
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