A Tweet appeared the other day from a rail company proudly proclaiming a steady rise in their employee engagement score, but no mention of any consequence of this. Are customers getting a better experience, has their satisfaction risen, are trains more full, more often and with more delighted customers, are trains more reliable?

What makes business better? At BI WORLDWIDE we're obsessed with this topic - why do some people strive to achieve more than others? Why do businesses spend billions on incentives, yet not get the returns they could? ...

There are rare moments when real world events illustrate perfectly the elements that underpin how we perform as people and how we apply that in business. This morning was one of those moments, a single radio report..

How often are engagement and incentive programmes run that primarily address the top and mid performers?

How many times is the basis of a corporate engagement strategy “one size fits all”?

A lot of time and money spent improving sales and customer service is focused on employees who are deemed “engaged”. Those sitting outside this definition will no doubt attract the label of ‘poor performers’, ‘laggards’, ‘disinterested’ and be viewed as a “cost”.

A recent Gallup survey showed that only 24% of employees are engaged with their organisation and in May a CBI report highlighted how critical employee engagement is in weathering the recession.  The Training Foundation's white paper, authored by David Macleod, of the Macleod Report to Government on Employee Engagement (May 2009), highlights a different approach for managers.

Employee engagement is just one element that contributes to business improvement and has to be assessed in conjunction with employee motivation and performance improvement strategies to really deliver business improvement.

Call centres are typically characterised by the highly repetitive work undertaken by the operators, be it sales or customer service focused, the job is the same day-to-day.  Heavily operational and process driven, staff are there to deliver results.

The initial challenge when delivering a motivation programme to an audience of this nature is to consider their level of engagement, in most cases engagement is very low due to high attrition rates and seasonal workers, more often than not call centre staff are there because they need the income, not because they love their job. In many cases, a period of time spent working in a call centre can be just an interim phase where employees want to get in, do the work, and get out as quickly as possible. The job can therefore become too systematic at the expense of customer service.