Using a data-driven approach to understand employee motivation

Rise Against Hunger, an international humanitarian organization, is growing a global movement to end hunger by empowering communities, nourishing lives and responding to emergencies. With locations across the U.S. and five international offices, the organization provides immediate nourishment for those facing hunger today and implements sustainable solutions that will lift entire communities for years to come. Rise Against Hunger has facilitated volunteer meal packaging of more than 540 million meals to be distributed to countries around the world.

Although they have a highly skilled sales team that works on securing donors for their fundraising projects, the organization experienced low motivation amongst its sales associates when it came to driving their overall fundraising efforts. 

The team started looking at different options to help incentivize their sales force, which included  designing an incentive program. However, they were faced with the dilemma of measuring its ROI—how did they know their investment was going to pay off or even if it was the right solution in the first place?

“Our team developed the incentive plan to drive higher fundraising, which prompted me to question whether the individuals we have in those positions would actually be motivated by it,” says Amy Lewis, Chief People Officer at Rise Against Hunger. “If they don’t have the intrinsic motivations that would support the incentive program, it seems our efforts to develop and launch a program would fail. How can we know whether it’s worth the time and effort to develop?” 

Rise Against Hunger implements sustainable solutions that lift entire communities for years to come.

Data to the Rescue

Amy has always been deeply interested in better understanding what motivates people, especially the ways in which we are all motivated differently, and has been carrying out research in this area to help the organization improve employee engagement and retention. She wanted to take an objective approach towards the incentive program by relying on data to predict ROI and outcome instead of past experience or gut feeling. 

This is when she discovered Attuned.

“The Attuned Intrinsic Motivator assessment gave us the data we needed to understand if our people have the motivators that would indicate if the program would drive those desired behaviors,” she says.  

They ran the test internally and discovered that there was a significant gap between the team’s key motivations and the motivators the incentive program was built around. The results conveyed that the teams were primarily motivated by ‘Altruism’, followed by ‘Security’ and ‘Status’. This confirmed that, although the incentive program may increase some of their fundraising efforts, it was not likely to drive the results they were seeking because the program itself was designed around ‘Financial Needs’.

As a result, the team decided not to proceed with the incentive program and to explore other alternatives instead.

A few additional attributes of the software that were immensely helpful to the team was its ease of use—a crucial component when rolling out new initiatives—and the level of insight that the dashboard provided. Team leads appreciated the visual and easy-to-digest nature of the dashboards and found setting up teams on the back-end incredibly valuable as they were able to see and compare team motivations and gaps, and adjust their communication and motivation strategies accordingly. 

“Any organization looking to drive employee engagement could benefit from this tool,” says Amy. “Attuned is an amazing tool for any organization that requires cross-functional collaboration or who are looking for ways to better engage their teams at all levels. This is also a strong tool that can be used to help resolve organizations who are seemingly higher in employee dissatisfaction, as a way to help understand and improve communications between all levels of the organization.”

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