MBA1224 Do Small Incentives Help Motivate Your Team?

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Hey O welcome to the $1 RMBA show, the business podcast you can't get enough of with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn do small incentives help motivate your team? Employee of the Month Staff Parties Gifts increments Do these things actually work? And if they do, why? That's what we get into in today's lesson. When you're running a business with a team of people, it's important that you keep people on top of their game to keep them motivated, but also to recognize their efforts. If you're a growing small business, you may not have a whole bunch of cash laying around to do this. You might need to do this on a budget. But does it still work if these incentives are small? Well, that's what we're going to discuss in today's episode. Rewarding Performance Whether it's employee of the month or rewarding the team for reaching a milestone, do these things make a difference? I put it to the test in my own team and share my results in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode is all about small incentives. Things that don't cost your company an.

Arm and a leg.

We're not talking about raises. We're not talking about company retreats. You know, that's going to cost hundreds and thousands of dollars. I'm talking about small tokens of appreciation to motivate your team. I wanted to know if this really would work, if it really would motivate my own team. So about six months ago, I put it to the test. I implemented some incentives for our customer service team at Webinar Ninja, our software company. So right off the bat, you don't have to try this out across your whole company. You can take one department and try this out and see if it works. And that's what I did. I. I started with one incentive, one reward, and then we did a second one when we started to see results for the first. Let me break it down. Our customer service team has a goal for every month, and it's to hit a 95% or higher customer satisfaction rating. That means 95% of customers that rate their experience were wowed. They say it was excellent. Now, from that 5% that's remaining, some of them might say it was okay or even satisfactory. So it's quite challenging to get 95 of your customers that give you a rating to say this was amazing, amazing service. So the first incentive was a team incentive. We said, as a team, if we hit 95 or above, we're going to throw a virtual pizza party. Now, we run a remote team. That means all our teammates are working from their own home office. Well, how do you run a virtual pizza party? Well, we give them the money to buy pizza for themselves, and we all have pizza together, virtually either on a call or we all take pictures and share. It's really fun. And I was actually quite surprised how fun it was when we first started doing this. But the point here is that as a team, they work together so they can get to that goal, so they can reach that goal every month, so they can have their pizza party. If they don't reach that, then, you guessed it, no pizza party. But they learn from the mistake, they learn from what they can improve, and they keep on trucking. Luckily, since we've implemented this, we've hit the milestone every month. So that's proof, number one, that this actually works. It actually gives people a common goal. Number two, it also created some sort of camaraderie amongst the team, sharing pictures and sharing what kind of pizzas we all like. But most Importantly, what I think it did, it recognized hard work. Everybody's working hard to hit those milestones, to give great customer service. And a small thing like a virtual pizza party that's going to cost our company a couple hundred bucks, raised our standard and really had a great effect on our teamwork. Now, for you, your company, your incentive could be completely different. But this is what we decided to do. Pizza. So when we saw this really, really working, we said, let's take this to the next level. Let's see if this would work if we had individual incentives or individual rewards or recognition. And that's when we started doing agent of the month. So the customer service agent that had the highest customer satisfaction rating at the end of the month would get an additional special prize. Our surprise. Very simple. A gift certificate to a selection of stores that the whole team frequents. It's not really about the prize. It's really about the recognition. That's what I learned through this experiment. I mean, it's great to have a special surprise at the end of the month, but it's also the fanfare and the congrats that that employee gets across the team. Everybody's congratulating them at the end of the month and cheering them on. It's also the healthy, friendly competition between teammates. You got employee of the month last month. Maybe I can one up you and get it this month. Maybe I can defend my title and repeat and become back to back employee of the month, or in our case, agent of the month. And what we found is that this was incredible. The agents that won IT were getting 100% customer service satisfaction. That means every customer that gave a review of the service they got said it was above and beyond amazing. And we're talking about a lot of reviews. We're talking about like 50 to 60 reviews every month. And each one of them was 100%. Not only were they getting these 100% scores, but their hundred percent score was raising the team score for the first incentive. So not only were we hitting 95, we're hitting 96 and 97 month after month. And yes, our customer service was great. And we have great agents and great training and a great manager. But when you're really doing well and you want to take things to the next level, you got to try something different. And that's what we did. And it took us to that next level. So I'm here to report that these incentives, these small incentives that cost your company very little money really work. And again, it's the recognition, it's the camaraderie. It's the friendly competition that really comes into play here and makes all the difference.

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Your homework today. Give this a shot. Implement some sort of small incentive in your team. In one of your teams, inside your team, you don't even have to spend that much money. A hundred dollars, fifty dollars, a gift certificate and you can say upfront, we're going to be piloting this program. We're going to try it out, see if it works. So there's no promises that this will be here forever. And my advice, just be transparent. We're just trying to find ways to recognize people to take things to the next level and give you a small gift, a token of gratitude for for your hard work. I like the idea of starting with a group incentive and then trying the individual one. That really worked out for us. And if it works out for you, let me know. Hit us up with a rating or review on itunes. I'd love to read. How did this experiment go for you? That's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Business is all about experimenting, trying things out. Sometimes it's going to work, sometimes it's not. Sometimes going to just fail miserably. But sometimes you have to do the wrong thing in business to know what the right thing is. The right thing for your business can be totally different for another business. So don't be afraid to experiment and try things out and even fail sometimes. That's how we get better. All right, I'll check you in Tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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