Week 11 - Paul Merrill

Compassion International and Employee Motivation

I had the privilege of interviewing Mark Tatum, the Internet Marketing Program Manager for Compassion International, a charity that helps improve the lives of children around the world who are in poverty. I based my interview questions around the reading, "Employee Motivation, A Powerful New Model."

Q: What are some of the techniques Compassion uses to motivate its employees?

A: Because Compassion is a non-profit and has a really clear corporate goal, which is to release children from poverty, in Jesus' name. That's one of the main ways. We continually see what the results are in how we make a difference. Every week we have a big meeting featuring someone from the field. This week we had a group of students who had graduated form our child sponsorship program. Compassion helps them get through college. They'll give their own personal experiences of how Compassion has changed their lives. We can see videos or stories about how Compassion is making a difference in over a million kids' lives. When I first came, I was surprised at how much time they spent talking about our successes as a company.

Q: How does Compassion create as feeling of corporate culture?

A: I would have a hard time saying what the corporate culture is, beyond what I described as everyone working toward a goal. We have an internal website called The Source and daily emails with stories about what's happening within Compassion. We have events throughout the year as employees, such as getting together to play games outdoors. They encourage doing things together and sharing our successes and our challenges. They continually communicate about our history. It's not them telling us what we should be thinking but them telling us what's happening around the world.

Q: Is there a direct connection between job performance and financial reward?

A: There is not a bonus system or a commission system in place for anyone who's an employee. Of course there's normal job performance kinds of things, so if you're a natural or proven leader, you're given more responsibility. The only way to be rewarded is through getting job promotions and more responsibility at work.

Q: How does management help employees to feel like they are cared for?

A: They have several different specific programs that they do, such as yearly reviews, where we meet with our managers to go over our goals for each fiscal year. We have a couple of scheduled reviews throughout the year, where we talk about our progress toward those goals. For the last few years, we've participated in the Gallup Workplace Survey - the Great Workplace Award. We were one of the few companies in the US to win it this year. They have a series of questions that Gallup asks anonymously of employees each year, to gauge how people feel about an organization and if they understand the purpose. They split it up among departments to follow up on how we can improve.

Q: Is Compassion transparent in how they communicate about work-related issues?

A: Yes. An example is the Gallup survey. Everybody gets to see how each department answers. Compassion is more transparent than any other place I've been, and I've probably been with 11 or 12 different organizations. As far as the problems we're facing - a budget hurtle, an income hurtle, they're fairly transparent as a company.

Conclusions: Compassion must be a great place to work! They scored high on fulfilling each of the four areas that Nohria and Groysberg (2008) identified as being important drives that motivate employees: the needs to acquire, bond, comprehend and defend. Compassion's highest area of performance seems to be in fulfilling the need of an employee to comprehend the organization's purpose and lesser so, the individual's role within the organization. Their communication of information relating to the cause the organization exists for is excellent.

Reference

Nohria, N., Groysberg, B., & Lee, L. E. (2008, July-August). Employee motivation: A powerful new model. Harvard Business Review, 220-227.