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Every year the incentives industry generates a revenue stream of more than $27 billion – and growing. Across the world, call centers are investing record amounts of money into incentives aimed specifically at retaining agents. This is a typical response, especially considering that the average turnover rate in the industry is roughly 20-40%.

Recently, theCallCenterLearningCenterconducted a study to find out what managers felt were the top motivators that directly impacted job performance and loyalty. Surprisingly, the beliefs held by management were not directly correlated to the beliefs held by the agents themselves. Managers felt that “if we don’t have an incentive program, agents will not be motivated to perform at their best.” Agents, on the other hand, felt that “there are more important things than incentive programs that make me want to do a great job.” The key takeaway here is that if employees don’t value the actual incentive, they won’t be motivated to improve their performance in pursuit of it.

Sometimes Incentives Demotivate

What’s interesting is that agents did not even include “incentives” in their top five responses about most motivating job factors. The results suggest that the most important factors of employee happiness were managements’ “positive leadership skills” and “one-on-one relationships” with employees.

This trend isn’t completely indicative of incentives being unimportant in the call center workplace. When you look at the flipside of the study, in the top five demotivating factors about agents’ jobs, one of the factors listed was “irrelevant incentives.” This shows that it’s not incentives that are unimportant; it’s that most managers don’t know how to choose and implement a meaningful or relevant incentive program that will inspire their workforce. Surveyed agents revealed that “irrelevant incentives” can be anything that doesn’t speak to the participants likes. These can be things like donuts for people on diets; sports tickets for non-sports fans; or an employee of the year award for an office whose average length of service is 9 months. These rewards would probably leave the recipients scratching their heads, wondering why they should even care about doing good work if this is what they can expect from their employer.

The call center agents and managers seem to be experiencing some sort of disconnect here. Many managers don’t seem to realize that their diverse staff of call center agents all probably value different things. The call center managers and supervisors surveyed ranked “incentives” as their number one factor for motivating and inspiring loyalty and retention in their workplace. Remember the agents surveyed did not rank “incentives” in their top 5 motivating factors. While agents ranked “irrelevant incentives” in their top five demotivators, managers and supervisors ranked “no incentives” as one of the top 5 demotivators. Managers think no incentives is worse than bad, irrelevant incentives; the employees feel differently.

These responses clearly display an alarming trend and gap that’s growing between agents and managers and supervisors regarding what’s important in the motivational arena. Managers think they’re creating a motivating workplace, when they’re actually demotivating and driving people away. This ends up costing companies exponentially more money in the long-term as well as sub par productivity and service, all due to lack of motivation.