Introduction
Entrepreneurs start businesses with a view to make profit. Profits do not happen by themselves except through a process that executes relevant business functions. The place of the employee or staff is essential towards the achievement of the business goals and objectives.
This places the question of staff motivation as key to the fulfillment of business objectives. The relationship between motivation and performance is crucial.
Staff motivation has to do with the provision of a pleasant working environment for the workers. It involves the creation of relevant work ethics, clarification of responsibilities and documentation of effective performance appraisal and rewarding system.
A company will not be able to achieve desired results without motivated staff. Business owners must ensure that employees derive meaning from the work they do. This will guarantee their commitment and excellence in performance. The success of the company depends more or less on the passion and concentration of workers. Staff motivation is the key to business excellence (Bruce and Pepitone, 1999). The store must invest in motivation.
Purpose does not exist in most of today’s business enterprises. One of the reasons why staff become demoralized has to do with lack of clarity for the purpose within the business. The store cashier has a vital role of ensuring that the customers of the store get satisfied. This means that the cashier must undertake such tasks and activities that ensure excellent customer service and satisfaction. They must also perform those tasks with the utmost excellence. The incentive program should include clarity of work purposes.
The incentive program details the activities involved in the fulfillment of work tasks. The purposes for which those tasks become undertaken must be clarified. Purpose will help workers in making the right choices about work activities and find meaning in what they do.
The external needs of the cashiers should be met as a means of providing a pleasant working environment. The program should work around dealing with external uncertainties surrounding customer satisfaction – dealing with customer moods, tastes and preferences (Thomas, 2009). The other components to be considered include – creation of a high performance culture environment and rewarding outstanding implementation and performance.
The incentive program should address critical work issues – staff satisfaction with job assignment, recognition, management support and understanding. The components of the incentive program should be integrated within the human resource training module. It should be entrenched in the employee team building program. The business monitoring and evaluation matrices should reflect the adopted components of the incentive program.
Excellent feedback mechanism systems should be developed to allow continuous interaction between the employees and the human resource managers and business owners. All the components of the individual incentive program can be adopted for implementation at the corporation or store level. The other store or group incentives include developing a model for corporation wide staff motivation.
The store managers should also refine the store’s core values. The store values should focus the cashiers and other employees towards the store purpose. The same store incentives should be channeled creatively through the store managers and during employees team building activities. The store wide incentives should be entrenched within the store policies and implemented by the managers using a relevant store wide structure.
Conclusion
The priority of store owners should be to develop incentives that motivate the staff. This will result in excellent staff performance and customer satisfaction.
References
Bruce, A., & Pepitone, J.S. (1999). Motivating Employees. New York: The McGraw – Hill Companies, Inc.
Thomas, K. W. (2009). Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee Engagement. California: Berrett – Koehler Publishers, Inc.