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Interview: Answering the Right Question
March 06, 2008
Paul Levesque says there’s more to motivation than rewards
By Alex Palmer
Paul Levesque has strong opinions about what motivates employees. Drawing on two decades of experience as an international business consultant, he has developed a clear view about what is effective and what is not for businesses looking to boost worker enthusiasm, building an entire system and vocabulary around his ideas about effective management. And he has some choice words about many corporate incentive programs.
"This is what I see again and again: I ask the executive team, 'What are you investing in motivation?' And they outline for me their nine-year program to invest x billions in incentive programs, and I say, 'How's it working for you?'" says Levesque. "[And they say] 'Not good—here's the chart, here's our morale. It remains bad, our employee turnover remains high. Our turnover costs are sky-high and it hasn't really changed.' And yet they dare not stop doing that because it's all they know how to do, and if they stop they feel it will be even worse."
In Motivation (Entrepreneur Press, 2007), Levesque’s fifth book, he warns against illconceived merchandise and travel incentives. He describes how they can easily turn into "cynicism intensifiers" that are likely to get workers focused on winning prizes instead of delivering their best performance.
So why is Incentive interviewing someone critical of the industry? According to Levesque, it's not that incentives in and of themselves don't work, it's that companies use them to answer a question that employees aren't really asking.
"I don't believe that employees have the burning question in the back of their minds of 'What's in it for me?'" says Levesque.
"The question in the back of the minds of employees is 'Why should I care?' It sounds like it's the same question. It’s not."
As Levesque sees it, incentives breed cynicism when they are offered as buy-offs for employees to do work that offers little other value to them, when they are meant to appeal to self-interest and not much else. Levesque says that employees are motivated less by a paycheck or material rewards than they are by a sense of higher purpose and relevance in the work they do. It's not that rewards don't have a place in a well-designed incentive program, he says, it's that the rewards won't be successful if they are not part of a well-designed, complementary recognition program.
Much of this sense of higher purpose customers and clients (more on that in a minute), but some of it also comes in the form of recognition from management. To be effective, these moments of recognition and the rewards should include a few key attributes, according to Levesque: They must reflect effort on the part of management (no one-size-fits-all, mechanized thank-yous); they should be based directly on feedback received from customers and clients, even though they may be celebrated within the company (what Levesque calls the "Internal/External Meld"; he mentions screening videos of client testimonials at awards ceremonies as an example); and the recognition event or reward should be tied to a "hero story" or empowering narrative of an employee doing outstanding work that can be retold in workplace newsletters or meetings.
The key is relevance and authenticity in the rewards and recognition, that they "make the good work [the employees] are already doing even better," as Levesque puts it. He's certainly not alone in emphasizing these points about incentives, considering that many incentive companies have incorporated these issues into the planning of programs, and some are offering 'how to recognize' training for managers and incorporating customer feedback into incentive award ceremonies.
"I say to managers, 'Get creative. You're asking your employees to get creative about ways to delight customers,'" says Levesque. "[Managers should also] get creative about tying in rewards and incentives so that it has maximum motivational effect. So that other employees, who might be envious of a trip to Orlando or Honolulu, will be much more envious of the red carpet treatment of being on stage and receiving the attention for pleasing customers and being congratulated for improving customers' lives.'"
The more workers feel they matter, the more motivated they will be to work harder and engage themselves more deeply in their work. This is a point Levesque returns to consistently in his work with clients and in his writing, a concept he first began formulating during a trip to Walt Disney World several decades ago. Witnessing the effort the company and its workers dedicated to creating a full-scale experience for visitors got him asking what exactly it was that could create such a dynamic.
"I wanted to understand the mechanics for keeping a group of employees fired up and enthusiastic about delivering wow-factor customer experiences. My personal research began then, and in a sense has never stopped," says Levesque.
From this initial interest, he moved fullsteam into the corporate training industry, working as a trainer throughout the mid-80s, and in 1988 became the first full-time consultant for Achieve Group (a provider of leadership development and training programs that is today part of Tampa, Fla.-based Achieve Global). His position as lead instructor at Achieve's Service Quality Academy allowed him to put his ideas into action, working with around 350 international corporate clients over the years, planning and implementing initiatives to improve their corporate culture.
These experiences informed Levesque's first book, The Wow Factory: Creating a Customer Focus Revolution in Your Business (Irwin, 1995), where he laid out the structure of the "Customer Focus Process" in which customer service fuels employee motivation and vice versa. As he's gone on to become a senior consultant at Boston-based Novations Group Inc. and has founded his own company (Customer Focus Breakthrough, based in California), and is currently consulting in both capacities, Levesque has built further upon this fundamental idea, that employees are motivated by a sense of purpose, which can best be generated through recognition for delivering great service to the client or customer.
 "If we set up our internal processes, our internal systems, our procedures, all of our business mechanisms in ways that are focused on delighting customers, it gives employees the opportunity to shine as heroes in the eyes of those customers," says Levesque. "I personally have never seen anywhere on the planet a business that was highly motivated where customer service levels weren't also sky-high. I have never seen one in absence of the other. They are always together. The one feeds the other."
By way of example, Levesque tells the story of a small pharmacy. An employee he calls "Terry" is encouraged by his manager to come up with ways to enhance the customer experience at the store. Terry suggests putting a bench out front for elderly customers to rest on. The manager puts the bench out front and it is greatly appreciated by the customers, so the manager honors Terry's contribution by putting a sign up by the bench that reads "Terry's Bench" and forwards the words of appreciation back to Terry, ensuring that he is recognized for his idea. The customers are pleased, and the employee is recognized by their appreciation and feels motivated to innovate further ways to please them. This is what Levesque calls a "flashpoint culture," which he has seen move businesses from high turnover rates and low profits to vibrant successes with strong loyalty from both clients and workers.
"There is a deep-seated, human need to help others, to do something useful and necessary in the world," says Levesque. "That's not just sort of a whim that some people have. Many of the people who have devoted their lives to studying the psychology of human motivation conclude without hesitation and without equivocation that that is built right into our genetic makeup."
Though Levesque most often draws from his own experiences to support his concepts of employee motivation, he has also found much support for his ideas from the worlds of psychology and sociology. Such resources as Abraham Maslow's oftcited hierarchy of human needs as well as a clutch of recent studies that indicate humans are happier and healthier when focused on helping others show that people are more motivated by a sense of a job well done than material self-interest.
Neurological researchers have found in recent studies that giving to others, by donating money or performing altruistic deeds, activates the same reward center in the brain as pleasurable activities like eating or experiencing a pleasant touch. In these psychologists' views, selflessness benefits the giver as well as the recipient. Levesque sees the same pleasure process at work in motivated employees who are energized by seeing their work appreciated; they are less likely, he contends, to be motivated by material rewards than by the simple act of helping a customer.
"The assumption management was making is 'The reason [employees] don't deliver a good customer experience is because they're not motivated,'" says Levesque. "The converse is true: The organization did not empower them or make it easy for them to deliver a positive customer experience, and that has a profoundly de-motivating effect."
The successful businesses are those that give their employees the freedom to do their job brilliantly, that maximize the natural motivation offered by a job well done as much as the extra boost that formal recognition and rewards provide. According to Levesque, managers must continually answer the question of "why should I care?" for employees, using customer feedback as well as recognition and rewards to help workers see how valuable their work is, in turn giving them the enthusiasm to work even harder.
"You thought the reason you wanted to improve customer service was to improve profitability or to get more repeat business, or more customer loyalty. You will get all those things, but there's an even more fundamental reason for doing it: It captures the minds, hearts and spirits of your workers. It gives them something meaningful to do," says Levesque. "Will that change a culture? It will, it has, it does, it almost can't fail."
Even if companies embrace flashpoint cultures, there will inevitably be those workers who don't see where their effort matters. Go to Incentive's podcast page to hear Paul Levesque tell the story of one such employee and what it took to turn him around at www.incentivemag.com/podcasts.
Be sure to check out Paul Levesque's weekly column and podcast feature, "Culture Shift," on incentivemag.com.
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