What’s the secret sauce of engagement?
It’s a common question with a deceptively simple answer: science.
Yes, really. Science.
Motivation is a phenomenon rooted in psychology, and some very intelligent people have spent decades decoding what makes us want to do stuff.
The investment of all that human capital has payed off. It turns out that the secret sauce is a lackluster secret, though, because the key ingredient is something pretty intuitive: wanting to matter.
New York Times columnist David Brooks put it best: “There is no income level at which people are not desperate for meaning.”
Is calling “meaning” the end-all-be-all of human motivation simplifying things a bit? Absolutely. There are other facets to motivation: we could get into choice architecture, habituating positive performance by stimulating the basal ganglia, and employing variable reward theory, but we like to think the dry stuff is better kept on the production end.
So — meaning. Why is meaning important? And how can an app facilitate it?
A day, or a shift, is a series of moments. At its core, MomentSnap is designed to trace and highlight the meaningful moments that make up each day — and that would otherwise fall through the cracks. When moments of achievement go unrecognized, they are seemingly stripped of importance; when they are acknowledged, they become a source of pride and motivation, because it’s clear that they mean something. This is how a job transcends the unpleasant connotation of work and becomes a duty.
The problem is that one GM and a team of managers only have so many eyes and ears. How can you celebrate something if you’re not aware that it’s happened?
MomentSnap simultaneously acts as a bridge across that disconnect and a venue for that celebration. It absorbs raw data that’s usually relegated into spreadsheets and charts — guest satisfaction scores, guest comments, data from a POS system — and synthesizes it into performance metrics in the palm of employees’ hands. MomentSnap automatically tracks a slew of statistics and awards badges based on success: things like service streaks, reaching certain point thresholds, and consistently ranking at the top in the leaderboard. Built-in recognition.
But that’s just the icing on the cake. With our dashboard tool, the management chain — from the shift leader to the COO — can track individual progress on a local up to a national level, and choose to recognize a moment at any time, organically.
Work is meaningful, but all too often that meaning is obscured. MomentSnap shines a light on achievement for all to see.