Motivating Employees Practice Questions

Item A: Greenfern Garden Centre Ltd

Greenfern Garden Centre Ltd is owned by Wendy Faulkner. It sells plants, tools and garden furniture from a large roadside site in Shropshire. The company employs 24 people. Sales assistants are paid an hourly wage of £12 and are expected to give customers detailed advice on which plants to buy.

Sales fall sharply in the winter months. Two new garden centres have opened within ten miles in the last year and Wendy has found it harder to keep experienced sales assistants. She wants to increase sales of garden furniture, which earns the company a much higher profit per item than plants.

Wendy is thinking about paying each sales assistant commission of 5% on the value of the sales they make themselves, on top of their hourly wage.

Table 1: Hours worked and value of sales, Week 1

Employee	Hours worked	Value of sales
Josh	32	£3 400
Mia	25	£2 150
Owen	38	£4 020

Item A: Stonebake Ltd

Stonebake Ltd is a bakery in Doncaster owned by Neil Deane. It uses flow production to make sliced loaves for supermarkets. The company has 40 production employees who are paid an hourly wage of £11.50 for a 40-hour week. Each employee works on one stage of the line, such as weighing dough, loading the ovens or packing finished loaves.

Last year labour turnover rose to 28% and each production employee was absent for an average of 9 days. Neil pays agency staff to cover absences. Two supermarket customers have complained about packs of bread that were sealed badly.

Item B: Stonebake Ltd

Neil is considering paying each production employee a bonus of £2 for every 100 loaves produced above a weekly target of 5 000 loaves. The speed of the production line is set by the ovens.

Table 1: Weekly output of one employee, Ffion

Week	Loaves produced
1	5 400
2	5 800
3	5 200
4	5 600

Item A: Kestrel Kitchens Ltd

Dermot Haines is the managing director of Kestrel Kitchens Ltd, a private limited company in Carlisle. It makes fitted kitchen units which it sells to independent showrooms. The units are largely made by hand and the company's reputation is built on high quality.

Kestrel Kitchens Ltd employs 36 production employees. They are paid an hourly wage of £13.50 and work a 38-hour week. Two local manufacturers now pay £15.00 an hour. Dermot does not want to increase the hourly wage. Instead, every production employee is offered fringe benefits: a free lunch in the staff canteen and a 20% discount on a kitchen for their own home.

Dermot sets all the production targets himself and employees are not asked for their views.

Table 1: Employee data for Kestrel Kitchens Ltd

Year	Number of production employees leaving	Average days absent per employee
2023	4	3.2
2024	6	5.1
2025	9	7.4

Dermot is considering paying production employees by piecework instead of an hourly wage. Each completed unit would earn the employee £95. A production employee currently completes an average of 6 units a week.

Item A: Harlow & Vale plc

Harlow & Vale plc owns 70 garden centres in the UK and Ireland. Each garden centre has a plant nursery, a café and a gift shop. The business employs 2 900 people, most of whom work part-time. 400 of its employees are plant care assistants, who each work an average of 1 000 hours a year.

Last year, 38% of Harlow & Vale's plant care assistants left the business. This was the highest figure for any job role in the company. Exit interviews gave two main reasons. First, the work is repetitive: assistants spend almost all day watering, moving and pricing plants. Second, assistants are paid £11.60 an hour, which is 40p an hour less than the supermarket on the same retail park pays its shelf stackers.

Replacing one plant care assistant costs Harlow & Vale about £1 200 in recruitment and training. A new assistant takes around eight weeks to learn how to care for the different plants, and customers have complained that staff cannot tell them which plants would suit their garden.

Item B: Harlow & Vale plc

The chief executive, Stuart Kemp, wants to improve the retention of plant care assistants. He is considering increasing their pay to £12.10 an hour. He is also considering giving plant care assistants greater responsibility: each would run one section of the plant nursery, deciding how it is laid out, ordering its plants and advising customers about them.

Item A: Kavana Coffee plc

Kavana Coffee plc runs 310 coffee shops in the UK and Ireland and employs 4 200 baristas. Baristas make drinks, serve customers and clean the shop. They are paid £11.40 per hour and are given the autonomy to offer a free drink to any customer who has waited more than five minutes to be served.

In 2024, 85% of baristas left Kavana within a year of joining. Chief executive Dilara Osman says many leave because the work is repetitive and they see no way to develop. It costs Kavana £600 to recruit and train each new barista.

Customers have posted complaints on social media about slow service and about baristas who do not know how the drinks on the menu are made. Last year Kavana's net profit fell by £3.2 million.

Dilara Osman wants to improve the motivation of Kavana's baristas so that fewer of them leave. She is considering paying each barista a bonus of £250 for every three months they stay with Kavana.