Introduction

If you manage a home service business, you know how important it is to keep your employees motivated and engaged. Home service technicians and tradespeople tend to have a strong sense of intrinsic motivation—that is, they’re proud of their work and don’t need others to tell them what to do. But they might lack a way to obtain extrinsic motivation—receiving approval from others to stay engaged and encouraged in their line of work.

Technicians spend large parts of their day working in the field—away from the office, and frequently by themselves. This is why it’s crucial for them to receive support from their colleagues and managers. Extrinsic motivation carries a host of benefits: it boosts self-confidence, encourages social interaction and connection with others, and can even reduce performance anxiety by providing tangible rewards for achieving specific goals.

In this article, we’ll go over several ways you can encourage extrinsic motivation among your home service team by highlighting their performance.

1. Internal Recognition

Building your team’s internal culture is the first and most important step to creating a true powerhouse of excellent service. Contests and leaderboards on data dashboards encourage your team to not only improve their performance through gamified competition, but they also allow you to display and publicly recognize your employees for their hard work.

In Plecto, you can use fun contest themes such as Jungle Race, Race in Space, or Mountain Climb to bring fun to your office while giving your employees the ability to prove themselves. Completing IRL jobs advances you to the next level of the contest. Leaderboards will display how many tasks individuals have completed in a given time period, with the option of the first-place finisher to receive a real-life prize! (More about that in a minute.)

2. External Recognition

Internal recognition is critical for teambuilding, but external recognition gives your employees a true chance to shine. To bring much-needed attention to your high performers, consider giving them a social media spotlight on your Instagram or LinkedIn account, or mentioning them and their work in your monthly email newsletter (both of these with their consent, of course). You can also provide them the opportunity to have visibility within your industry—giving them a slot at a local or national trade fair, for example, to share their knowledge and expertise and network with others.

3. Customer-Focused Spotlights

Connecting your technicians and customers? It’s nothing short of critical in the home service world. Positive reviews about a technician can not only make that employee’s day, but they help build relationships and increase trust between your company and its customers. To facilitate this relationship-building at the HQ, you can display CS feedback KPIs (such as Latest Received Rating Comment) on digital dashboards, so everyone is aware of how their work influences customer satisfaction. You can also commend the employee with the most positive feedback ratings at the end of the month with a special reward or prize.

4. Tangible Rewards

This is an idea that everyone is bound to love, and with good reason. Real-life rewards are indeed powerfully motivating, as working towards an exciting gift is the definition of an extrinsic motivator. There’s no shortage of great ideas of things to provide to your employees, whether a gift card to the movies, a date night for two, or a ticket to a major sporting event.

Plecto offers a couple of really fun incentives for obtaining IRL prizes: the Reward Store and the Spinning Wheel. The Reward Store is exactly as it sounds—recieve a virtual token for completing a task or a job well done, and spend your accumulated tokens on an IRL prize. Meanwhile, the Spinning Wheel provides a way to encourage camaraderie throughout your teams. Spin the wheel of fortune—there’s no telling what reward you might receive!

5. Career Growth Opportunities

Learning is something that lasts a lifetime—if you obtain knowledge, it can’t be taken away. With that in mind, providing your employees with additional opportunities for career growth and development is an excellent way to reward them for their work while retaining their loyalty.

One of the best ways to do so is by offering them additional training and certifications in their field, or setting them up in the appropriate educational path to pursue these goals. Another way is to provide them the opportunity to coach younger or newer employees, allowing them to pass on their knowledge to the next generation while building up their own coaching skills.

6. Real-Time Acknowledgement

Finally, real-time acknowledgement is among the simplest yet most effective extrinsic motivators we’ve listed here. All it takes is a simple gesture of appreciation, and you’ve made someone’s day while encouraging them further in their good work. Once again, Plecto dashboards are perfect for this scenario. Real-time acknowledgement can occur with instant recognition via Badges and Notifications on dashboards across your office. Tying it back in with the “tangible rewards” category, you can even provide personalized notes to employees, or coffee or lunch delivered straight to their jobsite.

Conclusion

As you’ve read this article, you’ve probably been able to tell that digital dashboards and their features—KPI tracking, notifications and badges, contests and leaderboards, and reward collections—can play a leading role in keeping your employees engaged and motivated. Because dashboards offer real-time recognition and encourage community engagement, your workers won’t have to rely solely on their own “internal compass” to stay motivated in an office that uses dashboard software.

Plecto is a perfect choice for home service companies looking to level up their data reporting and employee engagement game. Whether you choose to use Plecto’s real-time or dynamic dashboards, both offer the opportunity for a culture of encouragement and success to take root in your company. Give Plecto a free two-week try today!