Why site vs site 'match play' is the best format for retail and hospitality sales incentives
Frontline teams are hard to motivate, which is a huge challenge in physical retail and hospitality, where customer success is dependent on service employees creating ‘magic’ at the time and point of each sale.
What drives motivation at work?
Authors Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi advise that “why people work determines how well they work — that someone’s motive for doing a task determines their performance. If a person’s motive is play (for example, excitement from novelty, curiosity, experimentation), purpose (the work matters), and potential (they are improved by the work), then their total motivation and performance increase.”
We have found that setting up live social competitions between site teams is a great way of enhancing McGregor and Doshi’s positive motives for work performance. Turning team KPIs into a live scoreboard introduces the ‘sense of play’ and winning or losing as a team gives the individual contributor a ‘sense of purpose’.
The motivating power of competitive sports
Whilst Yapster is the first technology platform in the world to introduce ‘sports style’ team gamification to frontline customer service KPIs, similar innovations in other sales-oriented sectors have yielded similarly spectacular results because of their motivating impact.
According to this Harvard Business Review case study, David Schwall, a director who heads up inside sales at Clayton Homes in the US successfully turned his sales teams’ work into a fantasy sports competition and generated a 200% uplift in productivity as a result. Schwall believes it was the ‘team’ dynamic which drove engagement and performance.
“Sales became more of a team effort. Before the fantasy football experiment, the sales reps had focused almost exclusively on their own tasks and outcomes. But when they created the imaginary teams, they began to reap many of the benefits associated with teams without actually engaging in interdependent work. Reps coached each other on how to do their tasks better; they celebrated each other’s rankings; and they held each other accountable. Commitment to the team score prevented a free-rider effect — individuals didn’t stop trying when they hit their own personal targets. They felt bad if they were dragging down the team and sought advice from teammates who excelled where they needed help.”
We see the exact same happen when we run KPI games within retail and hospitality organisations at Yapster. The strongest customer service staff often step up and coach their less confident team mates to deliver better performance for the team.
It’s all about winning ‘as a team’
Business leaders talk often about ‘teamwork’, but in our experience that phrase is regularly misused in retail and hospitality organisations. We see a lot of people working together, but few truly performing as a team.
In the book ‘Wisdom of Teams’, authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith set out to “discover what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best, and what top management can do to enhance their effectiveness”. And what they ultimately found was a distinction between ‘teams’ and ‘working groups’ - with teams winning or losing together and working groups working side by side but performing independently.
This is a crucial distinction because, as we’ve seen above, winning or losing within a collective endeavour gives individuals a sense of purpose (i.e. “I’m here to help my team”) which drives authentic motivation and, in turn, performance.
Bringing it all together within Yapster with KPI Games
We can configure Yapster to allow pairs of sites to compete on any KPI which can be delivered to us nightly - from customer satisfaction scores to ‘upsell’ conversion rates measured within EPOS data. In all cases, once a game starts running each site becomes a ‘team’ (as defined above), with all participating employees affecting their site’s score with each transaction they complete.
Suddenly, offering that extra round of drinks in hospitality or introducing a perfectly matching accessory in retail isn’t about making the boss’s business plan. It’s about furthering a collective purpose - contributing to a local team’s score and earning bragging rights.
So, next time you’re planning a sales campaign and/or culture affirming initiative, why not give Yapster Sales Games a try.
