Human motivation: theories, factors, and applications

Human Motivation

Wendy Worker has recently begun working as a customer service representative for Cancer Call Center. Cancer Call Center is a national call center for one of the nation's foremost specialized cancer organizations. One of Cancer Call Center's advertising points is that it is very friendly to cancer survivors and attempts to staff its call center with cancer survivors wherever possible, and provides them with incredible health insurance benefits. Wendy Worker is a 10-year breast cancer survivor, and Cancer Call Center's positive attitude towards cancer survivors was one of the reasons that she sought employment with them. However, Wendy is one of the few cancer survivors to be working in the organization's actual call center, which is predominantly staffed with young recent college graduates. Wendy differs from her coworkers in other ways, as well. Wendy is in her mid-forties, which is approximately twenty years older than the majority of her coworkers. She has recently returned to the workforce after being a stay-at-home mother for twelve years. Prior to making the choice to stay-at-home, Wendy was a supervisor at a similar call center, but she was unable to obtain a supervisor-level position because of the time gap in her resume. Although Wendy is not having any problem learning the material presented in training, she does not appear to be associating with the rest of her training class. Because Cancer Call Center has previously noted its highest turn-over rate with capable employees who fail to socialize in the work environment, its primary concern is motivating Wendy and workers like her, so that they can excel in the work environment.

Cancer Call Center's extensive training program serves multiple purposes. The first purpose is to familiarize its new employees with the different databases and computer applications that they use for their job. The next purpose is to give the employees the skills necessary to deal with cancer-related calls and callers, which are often highly emotional and somewhat volatile. However, the third purpose of the training is to provide each new training class with a feeling of camaraderie, which has helped foster a very friendly work-environment. The friendliness of the work environment has led to a much lower turnover rate than in most customer service call centers. In addition, the call center has a policy of hiring its supervisors and management from its call centers, and it believes that the friendly atmosphere has created a management staff that is more responsive to employee needs.

One way that the management has become responsive to individual employee needs is to engage in the practice of personalized motivation. Part of the orientation process includes distributing "a survey to employees asking them how they would like to be rewarded and recognized." (Sullivan, 2006). Furthermore, Cancer Call Center has gone beyond the basics of personalized motivation, by asking new employees what they enjoyed the most in previous jobs, what they enjoyed the least in previous jobs, how they would like to be managed, and why they quit their last few jobs. (Sullivan, 2006). These questions are aimed at discovering the best way to manage individual employees. Wendy responded to these questions by indicating that stating that she enjoyed having full access to the entire range of solutions at her previous jobs, that she least-liked nitpicking evaluations that concentrated on style over substance, that she prefers a manager who quickly points out mistakes, and that she quit her last job because she had a child. Cancer Call Center was happy to see Wendy's answers, because they appeared to coincide with the management approach taken by Cancer Call Center. For example, all of the call center's customer service representatives were given full authority to resolve customer complaints, which meant that they did not have to resort to a manager to approve customer service issues. Furthermore, Cancer Call Center used a two-level approach to call scoring. The first level involved taped calls and measured how many of the standard call points, for example correct greeting, the customer service representative used. However, the second system involved follow-up calls to customers by an independent agency, and they measured customer satisfaction. In addition, supervisors at the call-center reviewed performance on a weekly basis, giving both positive and negative feedback to the customer service representatives.

Despite Wendy's good fit with the company's policies, she still appeared to have a problem fitting in with her co-workers. Her trainers considered this a major problem because shared values and an environment of support can help ensure that employees are fully engaged in their work. (Mauro, 2002). By examining Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Wendy's trainers were able to understand that, without a sense of belonging, Wendy would not be able to realize her full potential. (Franken, 2007). However, realistically, they realized that it might be difficult, especially initially, for Wendy to bond with her fellow trainees, who were much younger and in different places in their personal lives. Therefore, the trainers decided that Wendy's side-by-side training would be with three call center employees who shared important personal characteristics with Wendy: one was a former stay-at-home mom, another a current breast cancer patient, and the third was an older college graduate making his first foray into the professional workplace.