I want to create an exciting, motivational bulletin board for my CSRs but am coming up short on ideas as to what to do with it. It sits right outside the CSR department and is just screaming for attention! Any ideas?

How about bringing it inside the department?

Beyond that, I'm at a loss. Not knowing your environment, your culture, your people, your work product. But I will say this, for what it's worth: I've yet to have a bulletin board motivate me. (But, a well-deserved kudos, pat on the back, "you earned your keep today big time"....recognition!!! That motivates me.)

But...I'm a curmudgeon, so there you go. Plus I despise 'successories.' You know those stupid things I'm talking about? Pictures of eagles soaring, with captions that say "You can soar as high as your heart flies."

Gimmee a break. Maybe I'm too old, too jaded...but I'd much rather have a cold, hard dose of reality. Like a photo of a raccoon smooshed on the road, with lots of raccoon babies smooshed right along side, and the caption says "Momma ain't always right."

Well, we're kind of moving past bulletin boards and on to online forums such as email, webcast, narrowcast, and intranet sites. We're incorporating multi-media and using it on our websites and Flat Screen monitors.

Nonetheless, take Karen's suggestion and move the board inside the department, and do some research to determine what motivates YOUR employees. It will depend on your corporate culture and your center's demographics.

JStaten, when you say it sits right outside the department...is it situated there because it is seen as a good "sign post" when entering the place? I don't necessarily find it a bad idea to have it "just outside the department," although we have views that say you should bring it right in there. To me, the employees within the department will have the same regard/value for the bulletin whether it is bolted on the outside wall or somewhere in the department. The energy that goes into the content on the builletin is what will be meaningful.

I don't know what kind of content you have put on it before if any - and if you have since moved it inside the dept, don't worry about it. The nice thing is to showcase what people have to offer.

You can use ideas like showcasing a particular get-together that the team were involved in (pictures). You can have an Employee Spotlight of the Month (find the reasons for that person to be there). You can post short phrases about what this dept works on. You can also post positive feedback (respecting anonymity where it applies) that points directly to some kind of service that happened in your dept.

I have employees that post pictures of their team to their wall and the odd thing that matters to them about their work. And I have group shots of my employees pinned to my wall as well as emails that I am proud of and also handwritten summaries of my proud moments about my team members pinned right in front of me, and I started the habit of updating those every few months. Anyone who comes in to see me is going to see that silly pride. (Instead of plants and prints and personal photos in frames on the desk.)

Find what matters and pin it up :)

JStaten, if you return here, it would be nice to see what happened with your motivation plans.

I work for a software company and we are always making improvements to our service/product. We have a white board hanging in our department that I have team members put up ideas on how to improve the customers experience with our department.

Then, once a week during our team meetings we look at all of the ideas, select one or two as a team and launch internal projects to implement them. We use a SCRUM project management process to do this.

This way, the team sees their ideas getting implemented into the company, we improve our service/product and they are building onto their skills.

For our MRM intiative, we have a mascot. His name is Dr. Axelrod A. Abacus...DR AAA (I work for AAA club). Our Club also puts out a daily briefing and Dr. AAA puts words of wisdom, customer responses, employee ideas etc in the briefing...every other week or so his out fit is enhanced or changed. THe employees get a kick out of it and cant wait to open the briefing to see what the Dr. is up to. Today he was dressed as batman...and received many great comments. It get the employees involved and they enjoy sending him emails.