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Be Smart about Pay
Chapter 12 of the Call Centre Motivation Workbook
Overview
Britain is a call centre country. That means an estimated 2% of the workforce is employed in call centres. This results in fierce competition for the best quality staff and most, especially at agent level, are attracted by wage rates.
The problem we face is that top rates of pay may encourage people to join us but the secret of using pay rates goes deeper than the joining salary and we must use pay creatively to retain staff and keep them motivated.
However, money talks.
So to attract the best people, make sure you're paying at least the going rate for the job in your locality, and maybe a little more. It is a big turn-off for telephone staff to find that the call centre across the street is offering £1000 a year more for the same job. And as soon as one of your staff leaves because of money, motivation will drop and you risk further defections.
Paying the best rate means you can attract the best staff and create a culture of being the preferred choice of employer by agents in your town. The starting point for working out how much to pay is to do some research.
Research
Whatever your current pay levels, it is worth, at least once every three months, researching what other local employers are paying for the same types of work. The easiest ways to do this are as follows:
- Read the local papers.
- Phone friendly employment agencies.
- Search the internet.
- Ask your local Chamber of Commerce.
It is important to ensure that you are comparing like with like. For example, one company may pay £5.50 per hour with no benefits while another may pay £5.00 with a canteen.
Industries perceived as more glamorous by staff (such as travel or music) may pay less, so you need to take a view about the relative value of your package.
Using Basic Salary For Motivation
If we assume that we need to be as good as or better payers than other local organisations, we need to gently market the fact internally, to let staff know that they are the best staff, earning the best pay in town.
It is worth noting that a high basic is usually more motivational than other aspects of the package, such as pensions, bonuses etc.
Commission As A Motivational Tool
We should define commission as a payment earned by the agent for a single, specific, measurable task. Commission is a great way to motivate people and to keep them motivated in the long term, but it can also be a turn-off.
It becomes a turn-off when certain agents enjoy factors that make commissions easier to earn than their colleagues, such as when they have the best accounts. Commission also becomes a turn-off when it is too low to be meaningful or too hard or impossible to earn, such as when market conditions suddenly change.
Another demotivator with commissions is when you are running multiple schemes that result in different commission rates for different products. Such schemes become confusing for agents and lead to errors in payment because they are hard to administer.
It is also essential to ensure that, if you have different teams working on different products, commission levels are balanced in order to allow everyone - if successful - to earn the similar amounts.
So what should we do to ensure that our commissions are motivational?
- With the buy-in of your staff, be prepared to change commission schemes on a monthly basis to allow you to be flexible and respond to internal and external conditions. Always give everyone sufficient notice of changes.
- Keep it simple.
- Don't change the rules halfway through a period or campaign. If someone pulls trees up by the roots, that's what you wanted.
- Balance your commission budget to ensure all teams have a fair chance to earn.
There is a lot of value in creating remuneration systems where staff can be rewarded for both individual and team achievement.
Managed carefully as a motivational tool, this is a great way to keep motivation high and has the added benefit of building teams.
Bonuses For Motivation
We often pay individual or group bonuses against longer term goals or as a means of locking staff in.
Bonuses can be defined as lump sums that people expect to earn against the achievement of some goal.
We treat them differently from incentives because they are expected even though their value may vary.
Bonuses tend to motivate the over-25's more than their younger colleagues. This may be because they take a longer view.
If your call centre is staffed with very young people, try to pay out bonuses on a monthly basis as they find it difficult to stay motivated longer than this. An alternative is to provide them with a monthly outlook statement as their future bonus builds.
The Package As A Motivator
When you are building your pay structure, think carefully about what will motivate your staff. As we will see later when we look at Maslow's pyramid, we need to think carefully about the best way to use pay as a motivator according to the needs of the group.
If you have a predominantly young team, you may be wasting money by paying for a pension plan. The money may be better used as commission or bonus payments.
The nature of call centre work at agent level is to take a shorter term view, and while pensions, healthcare and other elements of the package are valuable, staff will be more motivated by the thickness of their pay packet.
Using Pay Rises Creatively For Motivation
When it comes to pay rise time, a great way to motivate people is to not give everything away in one go.
We've become used to having annual wage reviews and staff love it when they're told about the large increase they'll be getting.
But we've found that they love hearing about any increase, not just the big ones.
So, depending on how much you're going to raise pay, why not split the rise into two or three instalments, so that you can award two or three pay rises in the course of the year?
That's 3 opportunities to excite your staff!
Weekly Versus Monthly Pay
Nowadays, most people are paid monthly, however there is an argument for weekly pay at agent level. We've experimented with both and we've found as a motivator, weekly pay works better from an agent's perspective.
This is because good weeks result in high pay while poor weeks are quickly forgotten, so management has more time to rebuild morale. The down side of weekly pay is the increased admin and the effect on cash flow. None the less, we've found the motivation and employee retention benefits outweigh these points.
