Phil was the manager of a call centre. The centre occupied two open-plan offices where nearly 100 men and women worked. They were divided into teams of eight huddled together at clusters of workstations. Each team had a supervisor whose job it was, in addition to making their own quota of calls, to keep up morale and spur staff on to even greater heights.

The environment was frenzied and target-driven. There was a constant hubbub as people spoke, with artificial cheerfulness, into their mouthpieces. The walls were plastered with posters tracking performance against targets. There were targets for the number of calls made and the value of the orders secured. Each week a winning team and runner-up were declared and rewarded with air miles. A staff notice board advertised flats to let or share, items for sale, a dog that was looking for a good home and some kittens too.

Something the notices didn’t show, however, was the high turnover of staff and the rising absenteeism and sickness rates. Not a week passed without a number of employees ringing in sick and/or handing in their notice. Informal leaving parties at the pub next door provided a steady and lucrative revenue stream for the landlord! Recruiting and inducting new staff was as constant an activity as painting the Firth of Forth Bridge.

Phil was very keen to improve retention rates. Indeed, his boss at head office had made it clear that this was an absolute priority. Constantly having to replace staff pushed up overheads to the detriment of the all-important bottom line. If the so-called burnout problem could be solved, Phil knew he would considerably enhance his reputation with his superiors. His call centre might even become a case study; a model of how to achieve high productivity and high morale, rather than one being achieved at the expense of the other.

So, Phil started to investigate the field of motivation at work.

He quickly discovered Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggesting that workers were motivated to satisfy needs at different levels. Then he read about the work of Elton Mayo at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was fascinated to read about Mayo’s investigations into the effects of fatigue and monotony on productivity. He could immediately see strong parallels with the problems he was wrestling with at the call centre. He chuckled aloud when he discovered that the answer was to keep changing things. He began to work out how he could achieve his own ‘Hawthorne Effect’ by experimenting with certain variables. He could alter the configuration of the furniture, provide more breaks, shorten working hours, experiment with different chairs, intensify the lighting, paint the walls a different colour, turn the heating down, then turn it up again. The possibilities were endless.

However, his plans were soon confounded when he read about the work of Frederick Herzberg and his descriptions of motivators and hygiene factors. He now saw that the variables he wanted to change would merely be tinkering with ‘hygiene’ and have no lasting impact. He unhesitatingly accepted Herzberg’s theory that there were two separate continuums – one that took people from a neutral state up to being motivated and the other that took people from a neutral state down into dissatisfaction.

Phil suddenly saw the world in a different way. Everything fell into two categories; either they were motivating factors or they were hygiene factors.

Fired up by his new found paradigm, Phil wrote a paper for his boss recommending that the way to improve the morale of call-centre staff was to focus on the motivating factors. The key, he enthused, was to find ways to enrich the work itself. He listed the main challenges.

How to give staff:

• a greater sense of achievement;
• more recognition;
• increased responsibility;
• room for advancement;
• opportunities for development.

He also advised that it would largely be a waste of time to invest much effort in improving the hygiene factors since the effects would only be temporary and, at best, people would be raised to a neutral state where they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, i.e. not motivated.

Phil’s boss read the paper carefully but reached a different conclusion. He decided that, by its very nature, call-centre work left little room for manoeuvre when it came to improving the motivators. The answer was to focus on the so-called hygiene factors and to manipulate them so that employees would become discontented about things it would be relatively easy to fix. Management needed to compile a list of things they wanted people to grumble about, then to go through the motions of heeding the complaints and to score brownie points when the deliberate mistake was put right. The food in the canteen was, he decided, a good place to start.

Phil’s boss became utterly convinced that manipulating hygiene factors was the way to go. He told Phil that he was surprised other companies weren’t using Herzberg’s research in this way. Or perhaps they were, but keeping quiet about it?

Phil, appalled at the unashamed cynicism of his boss, handed in his notice – thereby adding to the attrition rates.