Motivation of Staff for Events

‘An understanding of the motivational process is a prerequisite for event success. This is true when motivating full time, part time or volunteer staff’. 1. Define ‘motivation’ 2. Introduction a. Why is motivation important in events? b. Pulsating organisation structure c. Examples of events d. Set up answers 3. Main body a. Step 1 Full time staff (in service operations chapter) i. Adams equity theory ii. Describe iii. Critique iv. Apply to events b. Step 2 Part-time staff (in Ted Video) i. Intrinsic/extrinsic ii. Ted talk – Dan Punk iii. Critique iv. Apply an example to events . Step 3 volunteerism (academics, theory and readings) i. Discuss ii. Critique iii. Apply example 4. Conclusions 3-4 lines Answer 3: 1. First of all, it is important to know what motivation is. ‘Motivation covers all the reasons which cause a person to act, including negative ones like fear along with the more positive motives, such as money, promotion or recognition’ (Adair, 2006). 2. But why is motivation so important in events? As Bowdin et al (2001) say, ‘the ability to motivate other staff members is a fundamental component of the event manager’s skills.

Without this motivation, paid employees and volunteers can lack the enthusiasm for achieving the organisations goals and delivering quality customer service. ’ So motivation can be seen as crucial success factor of an event, influencing the overall experience of the attendee in terms of service quality. Moreover, as Blichfeldt et al (2013) say, all decisions made by consumers are motivation driven, which means that it’s already important at the total beginning – when a consumer decides to go to an event or not. ) The organisational structure of an event is a pulsating one, means that it starts with a few people working on it, develops itself to an organisation with an increasing number of employees closer to the event itself and starts to decrease this number afterwards again. This pulsating structure makes motivation even more important for event success, since its structure and staff are constantly changing. As result of this pulsating organisational structure, there are different kinds of employees involved in an event, namely divided into full time, part-time staff and volunteers. )

For the purpose of this exam, I will discuss in detail the importance of motivation and the different motivational processes in combination with full time, part time and volunteer staff. Therefore, I will address Adams equity theory as well the difference of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and why money is not always the right solution for motivation. c) To underline these issues in events, I am going to involve a couple of examples in the following discussion amongst others the Glastonbury Festival and Festival by the Sea. a) Let’s begin with the motivation of full time staff. Full time staff is way harder to motivate or better has to be motivated on a different way than part-time or volunteer staff. Since the part-time and volunteer staffs spend less time in their job than full time staff, they have more time to balance their private and office life and get some diversification. With full time staff there is often the risk that they work too much time on the same kind of task, which could result in boredom and less motivation. Furthermore, the climate in the office plays a huge role.

According to Adams (1963) when people feel fairly or advantageously treated they are more likely to be motivated, while when they feel unfairly treated they are highly prone to feelings of disaffection and demotivation. The problem here is, that people like to compare themselves with each other in terms of their inputs and outputs. They measure their own input and output with ratios of referent others. Which means that people are likely to compare their own inputs, that is what they put into their job and their outputs (what they get from their job) with another.

If a person thinks that another one is getting more out its job than him/herself, but is only putting the same into the job, they have a feeling of inequity. The same is happening, when another one is putting less into the job but is still getting the same out it. This inequity will result in people becoming demotivated, dissatisfied, reduce their input and/or seek change or improvement whenever they feel that their inputs are not being fairly rewarded. Hereby, fairness is based on perceived market norms.

While thinking about Adam’s equity theory you need to critically admit, that feelings in general, but especially concerned with equity are subjective to everyone. While one person might feel that everyone is treated equally, another one at his/her position might feel different. That makes it not easier for the management, but it is important not to generalise the feelings of employees to one common feeling, but to critically study their behaviour to be able to recognise and respond to feelings of inequity. Only when problems of inequity are solves quickly, good teamwork is possible and high quality outcome likely.

Behind most events there is an event company standing, organising everything, as for example taking care of customer’s wishes, budget-aims and legal restrictions. Depending on the size of the event company, they have a certain amount of full-time staff working for them and by reflecting the pulsating organisational structure of an event, they can also hire a changing number of part-time staff as well as volunteers in certain situations. So relating back to Adam’s equity theory, motivation can lack if an employee feels not equally treated to his colleagues.

This feeling could be based on differences in payment between two people even when they do the same job, but it may also occur in terms of allocation of tasks. In event related jobs, as also in other jobs, there always some tasks which are more satisfying for the employee than others. So if one employee for example gets the impression that he or she is always getting the worse tasks, it can end soon in demotivation, resulting also in negative team atmosphere and therefore less quality outcome. This problem might occur less often in a good event company, but if it occurs it can bring them into trouble.

Since such companies bear a lot of responsibility, it’s important to solve these problems quick. Especially in an industry where stress, busy work times and overtime occur often, money cannot be the only motivator cause an event job is not always the best paid job. Employees need to bring a certain amount of passion to be satisfied by the work they do. So employers, in this case, e. g. chief of event company need to make sure that they understand what motivates their employees to be able to guarantee the best possible outcome to their customers and therefore a successful event. b) To motivate someone, you can choose between intrinsic, means internal motivators or extrinsic, external motivators. While an internal motivator could be for example joy, the most common external motivator is money. As Dan Pink at Ted Talks (2009) described, external motivators are commonly used, but not always effective. Actually, these motivators could harm instead of help. He defined this phenomenon with the candle problem, which was created in 1945. The experimenter brings the test persons in a room and provides them with a box of matches, a box of thumbtacks and a candle.

They now have the task to fix the lit candle on a wall in a way so that the candle wax won’t drip onto the table below. Because of functional fixedness, most of them don’t realize that they could put the candle in the box and attach the box to the wall – they only see the box there for the thumbtacks. To motivate the candidates, the experimenter told them that he would measure the time they need to solve the problem. Thereby he said to one group that would use them to create an average rate of how long people need for this task. The second group he offered a reward.

So he offered $5 for everyone in the top fastest 25% and $20 for the fastest of everyone. Since this rewards system is widely used in our economy, we would expect to see the second group as solving the task faster than the first, based on the offered reward and extrinsic motivation. But instead it took them in average 3. 5 minutes longer than the first group. We use the system of when you do this, you will get that – but in a lot of tasks this system will nor work or even harm the result. To shorten this, extrinsic motivators are good for task with an obvious solution, cause it’s simple.

But intrinsic motivators will help to motivate for cognitive task, where we really have to think, while extrinsic motivators would harm here. Extrinsic motivators make us focus on the reward we would receive instead of concentrating all our attention on the solving of the problem. So with this in mind, it’s important to critically classify what we want from our staff and decide if the extrinsic or intrinsic motivation would help here best. Even when the extrinsic motivation is often the easiest one, we have to make sure that it will not harm the outcome. That’s why critically questioning for each individual situation is really important.

Lets take the Festival by the Sea as an example. At this festival there are only two full-time employees and a 15-member board of directors, all of whom are volunteers. Sure, there is further event staff during the year, especially close to, during and shortly after the event, but still, these employees don’t work there just because of extrinsic motivation. In terms of volunteers, there is not even such extrinsic motivator as for example money. As mentioned above, the extrinsic motivation might be often the easiest one, but it’s not always the best or most efficient motivation.

In terms of Festival by the Sea, one of the full time employees also admitted ‘that the emotional rewards attached to such important cultural community event made it all worthwhile for her personally’ (IVEY ‘Festival by the Sea-case study’, 2006). 3c) Motivation in volunteerism is different to motivation of full or part-time staff. But before going into to details it’s important to define volunteerism for the following purpose. ‘Volunteers are those who enlist their services to an organisation of their own free will, and without expecting remuneration’ (Getz 1997).

Event when there are no specific differences between normal volunteers and those who work at an event, Getz (1997) proposes that there might be some unique event volunteer traits. These include that volunteers tend to be enthusiastic about the specific event and therefore motivate themselves. But nonetheless they can lack experience and need training. Also special in terms of events is, that volunteers only receive short-term responsibilities, while normal volunteers often bind themselves for a long time to the organisation.

In event terms, the social or networking element and opportunities therefore are important for volunteers, too. And their skills vary, so that some might be more artistically and some technically creative. But the most important point about event volunteers is the above-mentioned offering of free service and no expectation of remuneration. That makes is harder for event managers in terms of using different means of motivation (intrinsic/extrinsic). The question they have to ask is how to motivate someone effectively without paying their services with money?

Let’s therefore have a look at the Glastonbury Festival. The organisers of this festival hire each time approximately 1,300 volunteers to work at the event. Even when volunteers in theory won’t get something in return, Glastonbury is giving them a full ticket for the festival at which they have to work three 8 hours shifts. This ticket is used to motivate the volunteers and to give them an aim to work for. Cause the risks of volunteers, also at Glastonbury Festival is, that they don’t have a real motivation to work for which could result in a lack of service quality, or volunteers not working properly.

Therefore it’s important to critically consider if volunteers are the best possible option for you event or not. They bear a higher risk, cause of no or less extrinsic motivation but therefore have the advantage of intrinsic motivation, which could be a better motivator than everything else. They go to this event, cause they have a passion and special interest in it. They are aware of, if it’s right communicated, how hard the work is and much power it will cost them.

But they are deciding to do it nonetheless which shows how much power their intrinsic motivation has. However, each event manager should consider what other motivators he could use to ensure that volunteers work properly. Cos intrinsic motivators are hard to control or measure and barely can be guaranteed during the whole festival from the event manager. 4) Concluding with the impression that everyone has its individual motivators that work the best for him or her, and that money or in general extrinsic motivation is widely used but not always the right choice.

Rather think critically about the status of your staff (full, part-time or volunteer), your expectations of them, the tasks they have to solve and try to understand what the best motivators for them personally are. Every human is different and is craving for different things. Someone who is looking for some acknowledgement might be better attended with it than with a bonus. So critically consider all these points, which will lead to help you understand the motivation process, thereby it’s impact on success, so that you will be able to make the right choice.