A lot of work goes into building a high-performing team. It’s easy to find sound-bite advice about how to motivate your employees and improve contact center employee engagement, but it’s important to begin with the right foundations.

Herzberg’s Motivator-Hygiene Theory says that employees need two different types of factors to motivate them – and one won’t work without the other. The first is a reduction in frustrating factors that create dissatisfaction (Herzberg called these “hygiene factors”), while the second is an increase in motivating factors that create satisfaction (Herzberg called these “enrichment factors”). Herzberg’s theory has also been called the two-factor theory.

Surprisingly, Herzberg found that reducing dissatisfaction did not automatically increase satisfaction. The two groups of factors are independent of each other and both have to be optimised to create motivation. So, increasing enrichment factors without addressing frustrating hygiene factors won’t increase motivation. Likewise fixing the hygiene factors without increasing the enrichment factors won’t increase motivation either.

You can read more about Herzberg’s theory here.

So, to get the basics right, first you need to remove frustration relating to the hygiene factors: company policies, supervision, relationships with leaders and peers, work conditions, salary, status and security.

Next you need to optimise the enrichment factors: achievement, recognition, the work, responsibility, advancement and growth.

YakTrak has talked about most of these factors before, such as getting the right tools, processes and systems in place. We’ve also discussed the importance of leadership and developing a culture of learning.

Meaningful work comes through an understanding of the organisation’s strategic goals and how what you do at an individual level contributes to that. Regular coaching and goal setting can help to develop this understanding. Regular check-ins can also help to build a sense of achievement, recognition and positive supervision.

Call centre employee engagement and motivation can be particularly tricky because the work can sometimes feel repetitive. If team members are worried about their skills and whether they are equipped to do a good job, stress levels can rise and motivation decreases. You can read a list of employee engagement ideas for call centers that help strengthen recognition, achievement and teamwork while also developing key skills, written by YakTrak’s co-founder, Brad.

So to boost contact center employee satisfaction, make sure you have covered off on your hygiene factors and enrichment factors. Here’s a quick activity you can undertake right now to get started:

1. Take a moment to list one or two hygiene factors you could improve.
2. Take a moment to list each of your team members and consider the factors that may help them to improve motivation. These could be individual or team based.
3. Create a quick action plan listing the things within your control that you could improve to improve both factors.
4. Remember, you don’t have to change all at once. Pick one per week and work on it over time.

YakTrak can help you improve call centre employee engagement by providing a platform that keeps your teams talking to each other and tracking their goals.

YakTrak can:

• bring all development activity, forms and documentation into the one place for oversight over employee performance
• provide powerful real-time reporting into the learning and development conversations leadership are having with their team every day
• set up an operating rhythm and build it in the daily routine so that coaching becomes a habit
• easily create and track individual and team goals
• encourage regular development conversations so your frontline knows what they need to do and have the support they need to succeed
• give staff responsibility and visibility over their own development program
• create workflows that mitigate conduct risk and remediate breaches with coaching.

To learn more about what YakTrak can do to help you motivate and engage your people, get in touch today.