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Motivating the Sales Employee, one President’s thoughts…

I’m sure you all remember back in school when we studied the hierarchy of needs. It described the order in which we meet our needs in order to be fulfilled. It starts with basic needs, such as food and shelter and safety, and goes all the way up to self actualization, or the process of discovering oneself. People have different concepts for need, but this one is my favorite because of its simplicity.

I believe that this can directly and indirectly be applied to our workplace. We have an issue in our workplace currently according to our management audits. It appears that the ‘basic need’ of safety in this company is not being met, meaning that our policies are not creating an environment where our staffers feel that their job is safe and secure. Because of this uncertainty, they are unable to achieve job satisfaction/self esteem related to working here.

There are a few different reasons why this is so, and they all feed into our corporate culture, creating an undercurrent of uncertainty. First, I believe that we need to look at our recruiting and hiring process again and refine it. We should be looking for people with self-esteem who are positive and competitive. When we hire people that are not competitive and have low self esteem, our policies tend to set them up for failure. Negative people tend to cause problems in a team environment. We have become much stronger in our hiring process over the years, however we still have some work to do on both our staffing plans and our recruiting plan.

The first leg of the hiring process is actually the staffing plan. We need a well thought out plan for who we need to have employed at each level in our company. It isn’t written down currently, but it should be. An easy format for this plan would be a wire diagram of the ideal staff. Then, overlay that with a wire diagram of our ideal staff and look for differences in the two diagrams. Then, create actions to bring the two diagrams closer together.

The second leg of the hiring process is the recruitment phase. Where are we finding our applicants? Are we being deliberate enough to find the right people? Should our pay be different to attract a higher caliber of employee? We should be at the colleges mostly looking for young talent.

Third, how does the actual hiring process work, from the applications through the screening and testing processes, to the interviews, and the hire? This needs to be audited and then reviewed. I believe we could be missing two steps in the screening process where others are involved. First, our Training Manager needs to be involved in the initial screening process. Then, in the end when the potential hire group is selected, the supervisors that are in charge need to have their say.

Once we have determined that we have the right people working for us, we need to address some more areas within our culture that could use revamping. The first of those is the Low Performance Policy. Currently, we have a policy that ensures that our people meet certain sales averages in order to stay employed. If our employees fall below a $3 per person sales average for six weeks in a row, they are terminated. The current culture and verbage from our management is “keep your PPA up or you will be fired.” Not only is that a failing of our policy, but of corporate as well for allowing our DM’s to adopt that kind of attitude toward the policy. A more effective way to implement this would be to use coaching sessions instead of write-ups, and learning instead of discipline.

Since we have learned this lesson through negative motivation, we need to make a change. There has got to be a way to still hold our employees accountable for great performance without the undercurrent of fear. We have recently had conversations about leveling off their pay to a regular hourly rate, and then bonus them per hour based on their actual PPA’s as individuals and as store teams. What we thought we could do was to bonus them only when they hit their quota, and then not bonus them when they are not hitting their quotas. We could still evaluate and dismiss people who do poorly, but it wouldn’t be as threatening as having a six week policy in place that punishes in writing and is always part of our culture. The tricky part of motivation is that our employees can always quit and get other jobs. With that in mind, we not only need to continue to recruit properly, but we need to give them an environment to work in that gives them a feeling of belonging and community, as well as security.

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