Getting Creative With Gamification to Incentivize Your Whole Dealership

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Welcome everybody to your Friday drive bay where we answer your questions. Today we have a question about how do you motivate non revenue creating employees like the office, BDC employees like that. So we're going to answer that and talk about anything else. Christian, my co host here wants to talk about. Say hello, Christian.

How's everybody doing today?

They can't answer you, bro.

I hear them.

A bunch of people are like in their car going oh, I'm great Christian, thanks. Those are people like me that talk to themselves.

I'm in that group.

Talk to yourself. Of course. I was an only child, so as a little kid I would talk to myself a lot.

That's one of my favorite mugs that you got. When was the one that says of course I talk to myself sometimes I need expert advice.

Now I, I like this question coming up because it's not your typical typical question. So get a pen, paper or open notes on your phone and write down this number. This is the hotline. Call in your questions. But it can be relationship advice, preferably sports betting.

Oh yeah, let's talk fantasy football.

Maybe not. Are you playing fantasy football?

No.

Yeah, me neither. We're way too busy for that. But the phone number is 8333-ASK-SDR. SDR stands for Service Drive Revolution. 8333-ASK-STR. That's the hotline. Call in your questions and we will answer them on Friday. So let's go to our first question.

Hi, my name is Zachary. I'm a controller for an automotive group and I recently saw some tips and advice that you put out for revenue generating employees. Right? Incentives, cash splits. Because I have an office and we're not revenue generating. I'm curious if you have anything that could possibly help boost morale motivation for an office staff. We've done things like lunches, we've taken them out for a day of.

Escape rooms, but just trying to keep the motivation going.

You know, routinely. Some of those big events don't always happen regularly. How do we do it? How do we do it weekly? How do we do it monthly? Keeping the office staff, the non revenue generating employees motivated and the morale up. We'd love to hear what advice you have about it.

Great question, Zach. And one little shameless plug here is our BDC training is now up. There's. It's incredible. Mia helped us with it. But the feedback so far is great. It's really fun. It's, it's designed for that demographic, an entry level person that then can become an advisor. But in the BDC training There's product knowledge, you know, it's, it's very thorough and effective and that's on our on demand platform. So if you're not on our, on our platform, it comes with the service advisor, service manager, tech. All of our training, it's like the Netflix of fixed ops training. And then if you're in our coaching group or you are on our on demand, it's, it's uploaded now and you have, you have access to it. But really fun stuff. And so I think oftentimes BDCs could be thought of as non revenue producers.

We've got business office in there too, which I think could help to kind of get us into this whole topic of discussion. So there's something for everybody in our training platform.

Yeah. So I think Zach, that this is a question that the outcome that you desire is not going to be created by one magic pill. It's going to be a few different things. And so we'll kind of go through the things that we've seen work or you know, and at the top of that list is hiring the right people. So oftentimes we come into a business officer scenario where the people are miserable. They, there is real, there's no real culture, there's no kind of ethical moral ground for what is work. Most of the time they're on Facebook trying not to work and nothing is really tracked and there's no expectations. And I'm not saying that that is the situation that you have. It already sounds like you're ahead of the curve just because you're asking this question. But the most important part of having a motivated and driven staff is in the hire. So you want to make sure that you're hiring people that have an internal locus of control, that have a track record of taking on challenges and performance. Right. That's number one.

The second thing is I would do some sort of interactive club with them. So I find that with, with business offices or offices in general that are non revenue producing, having a book club and letting them pick the book. And I would say once a month or every other week, but I find once a month is really the, the right kind of time. And so what you do is you take a book and I would let them pick and recommend books. But you pick the first couple. Now the first couple you can, you know, you can use it as propaganda in the sense. Well, I feel like my team is struggling here so like maybe I want to, I want us to read who Moved My Cheese? Or a good one is the five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni is usually a good book to start a book club. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is another good one for that. So starting a book club and what you do is you get everybody in the room, you say, hey, we're going to start a book club. I bought everybody a copy of this book. I'm going to assign you a chapter or two chapters, you know, depending on how many people you have in the office. And you're going to do a book report on your chapter. And so you're going to have handouts for everybody, at least one page handout, but you're going to explain your chapter to everybody.

And at the end of our meeting, of our book club meeting, it will be like, everybody read the book, but you really were only responsible for one chapter. Now should you be inspired by your chapter to read the rest of the book? Great. But that's encouraged. But you don't have to just. But you need handouts for everybody. And you, you know, by the end of your book report, everybody should understand the spirit and the lessons in that chapter. Right?

Yeah. It's a great. The overarching thing there is that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Yeah. And also you're dependent on. It's a subconscious team exercise where the team is dependent on each other. And believe it or not, you're going to see the people that struggle doing the book report are usually the same people that struggle in the office playing well as a team and contributing.

It's funny.

So, like say, for example, the people that are late to a meeting, in, in a sense, people that are late, they're saying that they don't care about everybody else.

It's the truth. Like if you, if, if your people, peers are there on time to have a meeting and you show up late, your actions are saying that I cared more about myself and being disorganized or whatever I am than I did the team. Same thing with somebody who shows up in their book report isn't done, or they didn't read their chapter, whatever. There's commonalities there. And so then you can use that as a, as a lesson to everybody also and point out those commonalities and, and talk about how we need to be a team, we need to respect each other's time. If everybody else is putting the effort, you got to ask yourself, why aren't you putting in the effort? So there, there's some fun little things that you will notice by doing a team activity where People have to do a little extra, and they have to come to the table with. With their, Their product. Right. And then the people that really enthusiastically do it, their book reports three pages that, you know, they. They can't wait to present it, and they're really excited, and their presentation makes everybody else want to read the book.

That's the kind of people we want to hire. So there's commonalities between an exercise like this and their actual function inside of. Of the workplace and inside of a team. So don't let that be lost on you when you do it. But you buy them all lunch when you do it. You know, you should be able to do it in an hour. And.

It'S fun. It's a cool, cool thing.

It's definitely better than the trust fall.

What's the trust fall?

Where everyone closes their eyes and the team catches them. They fall off a bridge or something like that.

Yeah, I like that a lot better.

I also. You threw me for a little bit of a loop when you said. You said the five. I literally thought you were going to say instead of the five dysfunctions of a team, the five love languages, which I was really going to be confused about. But I like that you went with the dysfunctions of a team instead, because.

I don't know how I know that the book the Five Love Languages is a gimmick and it's total bs. Yeah, total bs. It's something. I mean, I know people love horoscopes and whatever.

But I know it is because my love language isn't even on there.

Yeah.

My love language is Leave me alone.

My love language is dinner.

Yeah, that's my.

And that's not one of them. It's like acts of whatever. No, dinner. That's my love language. Feed me.

Beautiful.

Then the. The other thing I would think about, Zach, is you want. You can manufacture a contest. So oftentimes we will think we will think of gamification or a contest, that it has to have a direct.

Monetary outcome or a direct outcome, but it doesn't. And sometimes, like with service advisors, if your games every day are the same in the same outcome, they can get kind of boring. So it's fun to mix it up and just play like a smile game where if you get a customer smiling or laughing at their vehicle when you're doing the walk around, that counts as a mark on the board and you get to play whatever the game is that day. You can switch things up. So in a business office setting, there's ways to. To manufacture something that Requires the whole, you know, the whole team to do it. So things that I've, that I've done with business offices before is, you know, if they're on a 10 day financial statement, if they can close the financial statement in three.

And if they can close it in two even. And I, I've had business offices where they, they can close the financial statement. I don't know, a day and a half. The only thing really holding it up is payroll. And maybe DMV in every state's a little bit different with dmv, but they will figure out how to do it. And I've even got to the point where they're, they're, you know, you don't want to do this, but they're guesstimating the payroll until the very last second and then putting in the real ones. Yeah, but if you create some sort of contest where it takes everybody to do it but each department, right. Like dmv, payroll, whatever it is, manufactures some sort of contest where they win some sort of prize and you know, lunches are good, those sort of things. You could do a pinata and put cash in a pinata. So you can put candy and cash in a pinata and let them. If I think you said you did rage rooms or whatever, same sort of thing, a pinata rooms. Oh, do the rage room too.

Yeah, the thing where you get to beat up old computers and stuff like.

That, that's really fun to do. And so manufacture some sort of contest. That can be a lesson also. Like everybody shows up on time or, you know, whatever it is, but just make up a reason to have a, have a contest. The other thing is to have a daily shift meeting.

So if you want the environment to have that pop, that enthusiasm, that kind of intensity, that, you know, charisma to the environment like that. It's fun and a little bit on that edge. People are paying attention. The most effective way to do that is to have a shift meeting. And I find like a lot of times with business offices, people are all kind of coming in at a different time. They're, they're to themselves, like having everybody be there like 15 minutes early playing music, having a little fun and just talking about what's going on today will, will force you as a leader to kind of have an agenda and talk about what's going on today. And not just talking about it the last week of the month when you're trying to close the financials or you know, payroll or whatever it is we're doing, but talking about what's coming up, what's going on, that sort of thing. So a shift meeting is very effective as a propaganda tool, as. As a, you know, way to unite everybody, but a way to create enthusiasm throughout the day, that everybody's there on time. They're all starting with the same, you know, fun atmosphere and keep those meetings light, keep it. Keep it fun.

That's good.

And then, you know, you can profile people, that sort of thing. And also, like, you can use those shift meetings to share things from other departments, right? So let's say the sales department got a letter or a good review on Google. You can talk about in that. In that meeting, right? Like, Christian will come up with our results for our coaching clients. Then in our sales meeting, we will read those. Sometimes if Christian's out of town, he'll make a video just talking about, hey, we went into this dealership, and this is what their numbers were. And in a week, their numbers were this. And we have this client, and their net is up that much. And he talks about what's going on. And then our sales. On our sales meetings, they. They're like, wow, we really believe in what we're selling because we're really getting results for clients. We're not just selling, you know, a theory or an idea. So, you know, taking things from other departments and sharing that good news, or even having somebody come to the shift meeting from service, or, you know, you could profile somebody from every department once a week, those sort of things. But a shift meeting is. Is a great catalyst to propaganda and information and controlling the narrative.

Yep. Yeah, you hit. I had two. But I feel like your shift meeting really kind of encompasses a couple of those things. One is employee recognition, which doesn't have to necessarily be monetary rewards, but just some sort of, like, a reward for outstanding, outstanding work and behavior. And then the second thing we would be some level of personalization. One of the things I think is sad is, like, when you go upstairs and you get into the office and every cubicle looks the same and everything like that. I would imagine that as an employee, it would be easy to just become kind of a number at that point. Like, oh, you're just one of the office people. So I think that there's some level of personalization I was just kind of thinking about. You can almost gamify, like, modifications to the offices based on, like, okay, so if you get this, you get this kind of. It's almost like a badge system, right? Like, you get the reward, and you're like, oh, oh, I get to do my office looks like this because I hit this level. So I was just thinking maybe that that kind of gamification based on performance and stuff like that.

But you know what? One that I don't like, but it's pretty popular that they do in business offices a lot is the Biggest Loser contest where they'll have like a weight loss contest. I've never been a fan of it.

So backhanded in my opinion.

Yeah.

Like there's a lot going on there.

Yeah.

You know who doesn't have weight problems?

Who?

Skeletons. You know what else I've noticed? Skeletons.

What if they're big boned?

Even so they're not heavy. But you notice that skeletons are always calm. You ever wonder why?

Why?

Because they have no skin to get under.

Wow. One, two, punch. Yeah, that's pretty good.

Yeah. I think that the Biggest Loser thing can be fun for the people doing it and then, you know, some of the people will go work out together and that's a good bonding thing. But it does also isolate other people that don't want.

What if you're just already healthy or happily unhealthy?

Yeah. What if I just want to be big like it is what it is. Funny, but great question, Zach. Thank you so much. Remember, phone number is 8333-Ask-STR.

It'd be funny if people type per gunta.

Have a great weekend, everybody, and we'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 Ask SDR and we'll answer your question. Question on the show. That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.