How to Motivate Employees to Solve Your Problems | The Profit Roadmap

Published on December 4, 2017

Martha Woodward owns Dusting Divas, a successful cleaning company in Oklahoma, and she's the co-founder of Quality Driven Software, a software company borne of her cleaning company's need for employee-specific data.

She found very quickly in her cleaning business that the best way to solve problems was to turn those problems into incentivized challenges for her employees.

Why the Ultimate Employee Motivator will Work for Your Service Business

Employees work to earn money to provide for themselves, their families, and their hobbies. Unlike you, they don't necessarily have an interest in your business' long-term health and prosperity.

Unless...

You show them that they do. Martha frequently says, "What do they want, what do I need." That's the heart of how she motivates her employees.

What do employees want? Benefits - additional pay, vacation time, sick time, etc.

What do you need? Increased quality, reliability, professionalism, etc.

Martha finds ways to counter problems in the business with challenges that reward employees for addressing those problems. This takes the conversation about problems and turns it on its head. Instead of an adversarial conversation (e.g. "You need to fix this or you're gone."), you approach the team as a coach with a challenge AND a reward for rising to meet the challenge.

By marrying what they want and what you need, you can defeat any problem in your business. Employees will "buy in" to the program or they'll weed themselves out.

Want More of Martha's Wisdom? The QDS 2018 Conference is the Place to Find It

Quality Driven Software is having their annual conference in sunny San Diego, California (stay classy, San Diego) on February 2-3, 2018. You can still get tickets AND discounted hotel rates if you act now.

The conference will also feature Mike Callahan, who spoke at SA4, Garrett Matthews (future guest on The Profit Roadmap), and our own Jonathan Pototschnik.

LIVE (at the time) from SA4

This episode is part of our podcast series recorded from the BluePay lounge at SA4 Next. If you missed out on the conference, boy, did you miss out. Never worry, reader. Patrick wrote a FULL recap of the conference, just for you.

We have many more exciting episodes straight from SA4 coming up!


"Summon the Rawk" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Owen

Cody is a copywriter with Service Autopilot. He was writing before he could read, dictating stories to his mom. Of late, he distills business principles and practices learned from his ever-increasing trove of books and his year with SA Support into digestible blog posts designed to provide maximum value to service industry business owners.
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