Motivating Frontline Staff

How did you motivate front line staff to have that focus on the customer?

In Push Doctor, Treatwell and Just Eat, you just need to have a whole ball of energy. You’ve got to make it fun and you’ve got to make it competitive. If you strip it completely back, everybody loves to work on missions, targets, KPIs and so on. Everyone, at all the companies that I’ve worked for, know what the mission is. They know what they need to achieve. As an individual, how do you support hitting those targets? Also, a lot of people like to be competitive and competitive environments are also great. So whether there will be some rewards or just a league table, all that stuff really helped in creating that.

But I think, more importantly, when you’re sitting there and you’re saying to a group of people, we’re driving change; we’re making this happens and it happens one call at a time, one order at a time, it really resonates well. But you do need strong leaders, strong shift managers, to just really get the team up and that’s really important, I think, in making it a success.

Did you have league tables for sales?

Oh, yes. That was probably the most competitive one, actually. It was interesting, when you did it globally, because you would see the global sales league or the global operations league and that competition was brilliant. We always started off locally, so every single function had some sort of league table, particularly sales and operations, because those were the easiest ones to do. You could say, this person made the most sign ins per month and that was a simple one. This is the group that made the largest number of calls, received the most calls. It depended what you did, but creating that league table and then that recognition. I’d always talk to the CEO and say that it had to come from him. So and so won this, special mention. It does go a very long way. Local competition was brilliant, but the moment it hits international competition, especially the bigger markets, where it was very much, hey, we’re showing the new markets how it’s done. The little markets always sit there and think, we want to show we’re just as big as the UK or whichever the biggest market is in the company. We did a number of things like that. It was a lot of fun.