Have you ever gone out for a cup of coffee and encountered a less-than-friendly waiter? That’s pretty much like asking have you every had a glass of water… of course the answer is YES! It seems difficult for waiting staff, or anybody in the service industry to actually practice service. Ow, well, hang on, maybe that’s a tiny little bit overstated… Customer service is difficult for, generalising, a large part of the temporary, part-time staff in the service industry. And just to make sure, with service industry I mean to include any company or personal selling a service, not just the hospitality industry.

Here is the issue: people employed on a part-time, temporary basis are not as intertwined with company culture as permanent employees, and, as for every company and industry out there, that means less affinity with the product. This is often the result of the temporary relationship these people have with the product they are producing, and companies don’t see the need to invest in extensive training and product knowledge. This might seem like a fair approach when you produce a standardized, tangible product, and little affinity is needed for the temporary part-time employee to be able to do his or her job.

The service industry however is different. The product produced is the service in question. If you run a hotel, your product is a comfortable night sleep in the appropriate level of luxury and service. If you run a school, your product is high quality lessons students can learn from. A below-par service equals a faulty product. And below-par service is often the result of little or no product affinity. The question every service industry manager therefore should ask themselves is: How can I inspire my temporary part-time worker to deliver a high quality product?

The answer unfortunately is not straight forward, because firstly it depends on the personality of the temporary part-time worker. If your employee is intrinsicly motivated to do his or her job to the best of his or her ability, the manager is in luck. The only thing that needs to be done is to provide adequate support to the employee and give the employee the resources he or she needs and they will provide the joy with which they do their job.

It gets harder when you have to deal with people that are not intrinsically motivated to do the best job the can. Extrinsicly motivated people will demand some form of reward in return for their best effort. The first thing that comes to mind is money, generally a great motivator for people to do their job. In the service industry however we do not just want people to do their job, we want them to do their best job possible. This after all has a direct impact on the quality of our product. So besides offering the remuneration, we will need to find out what makes people tick. This is complicated by the boundary I set earlier: temporarily employed part-time staff.

One of the most important extrinsic motivators for this particular group of people employed in a service-providing job is to have the a minimum level of service that is acceptable to whoever consumes the service. This baseline should consist of a few non-negotiable standards. We need to be very clear about those standard and about the fact that they are non-negotiable. As I mentioned earlier, product affinity is about knowing what the product is based on, and training should therefore not be taken lightly. Training is also a good time to clearly lay out your non-negotiables. Lastly there should be reprocussions for failing to meet a non-negotiable standard.

With that basic framework in place even temporary part-time staff will be able to help your service business excell. Intrinsicly motivated workers will meet and exceed the standards you have set for them because they strive to do the best they can. Extrinsicly motivated employees will, if anything, be motivated by the fear of the concequences of not meeting the set standards. What your set of non-negotiable standards looks like depends on your business and you will have to determine those based on your own values.