Boosting morale and motivation by fostering purpose and ownership

Affected Users:

  • Cake Decorators

Team members were not motivated or engaged by company financials and sales performance. Working in a production space, the financial and sales impacts were too far removed from the daily operations of the cake team to be motivators. These behind the scenes creators of the products were not the ones actually making the sale to the customer, thus the disconnect. This resulted in a lack of genuine interest in the overall company sales goals, and a reluctance to rally behind hitting financial targets. Attrition rates were high, as employees lacked a sense of direct impact on these numbers.

Exploration:

I investigated what employees enjoyed and disliked about their jobs, daily pain points, and things they wanted to improve. What made them want to work here in the first place? What makes them stay? Why might they want to seek another position elsewhere? The whole team was involved to collaboratively identify problems that we wanted to solve, that would be engaging and able to be directly affected by the team. What did it look like to tackle these individually and track the results?

Implementation:

We created a non-financial department goal to set and track for each quarter, a ‘Mini Game,’ aiming to solve or improve a problem in the department. Each had established metrics to track progress, and a set timeline to do so. Team members could also attribute fun and relevant themes to the objective for added enthusiasm and engagement. At the conclusion, we evaluate the outcomes and celebrate the successes. The aim was to build an emphasis on continuous, collaborative problem solving to keep day to day production pain points low.

Results:

These goals alleviated ‘financial focus fatigue,’ and fostered team engagement to support the initiatives that they helped create. Employees were much more apt to be enthusiastic about Mini Games that they had ownership of and see them through, as opposed to a supervisor delegating improvements. Despite the fact that the goals in these instances weren’t directly financially driven, they did inherently foster sales growth by improving performances in other areas, lessening employee turnover and training costs, etc.