In one of my classes in the first year of university we talked a bit about the importance of motivation in the workforce not only in terms of lowering the labor turnover but also in terms of satisfying the costumers and making them loyal to the firm. However, I had never experienced the importance of employee motivation in real life myself until this winter break.
It was the third of January in Greece and I had just met my friend Lisa who I had not seen for a long time. As we were walking outside a Starbucks storeshesaid “Let’s get in to say hi to Sara.” Sara was the Starbucks barista. Not being a great fun of coffee myself it was the first time I entered a Starbucks store after three months and I looked at the barista’s behaviour from a different perspective. She was friendly, welcome and seemed to really know Lisa, who she of course called by her first name. Before learning about motivation factors I thought that Sara’s behaviour was her personal character, but I then understood it was all about Starbucks motivating her to behave in such a manner.
I then made a research and found out thatStarbucks does, indeed, give great emphasis on the quality of services and the motivation of employees. The idea is that people need to be highly valued, trained, motivated and financially rewarded in order to perform in a way that would satisfy the costumers and make them loyal to the firm.
Based on the equity theory employees in the workforce should feel that they are working in a friendly, lively and enthusiastic environment, without a sense of status within the organisation. Starbucks tries to achieve that by calling their employees “partners” and by making the distinction between the managers and the employees as small as possible. As I later found out Sara was the manager of this particular store but she was wearing the same cloths and worked in the same fashion as the rest of the employees so costumers could not make a distinction.
Starbucks tries to motivate employees both intrinsingly and extrensingly. Employees get trained not only in how to make coffee but also in how to treat and deal with costumers. Gaining knowledge and being able to perform their job well is a basic intrinsic motivation. In addition, Starbucks provides performance-related payment so the more employees contribute to the business, the more they get paid, which motivates employees to work more to gain more money.
Lisa goes to this Starbucks store at least three times a week to say hi to Lisa and Starbucks gains money because of that. Lisa would then tell her friends, including myself, that Starbucks is a good place to get their coffee from, and Starbucks will gain more money because of that. So through this event I realised through a real life example that motivating employees creates loyal, satisfied costumers who then bring more costumers through word of mouth.
