Cineworld, After much observation and speculation, we have decided that we must intervene for the good of not only your employees but the management and supervisors. If just one good thing comes of this letter then we know that our concern and anger has not been in vain. We sincerely hope you take all of the things this letter addresses on board, not only will it improve the company but it will greatly improve the employees thoughts towards work and quite possible their quality of life. So sit back, relax, maybe get a cup of tea? Prepare to be inundated with information from people who have experienced first hand how badly and wrongly this company is run.

[ A LITTLE BIT ABOUT HOW MOTIVATION WORKS ]
Firstly I'd just like to point out people's motivations are unbelievably interesting, the science is really surprising. We are not as endlessly manipulable and predictable as you think. There's a whole set of unbelievably interesting studies, I want to give you two, that call into question that if you reward something you get more of the behaviour you want, if you punish something you get less of it.

Let's talk about a study done at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here's what they did, they took a group of people and gave them a set of challenges, things like memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzles, physical tasks such as throwing a ball through a hoop. To incentivise their performance, they gave them 3 levels of reward. If you did ok, you got a small monetary reward. If you did well you got a medium monetary reward, and if you did exceptionally well you got a large cash prize. This is a typical motivation scheme within organisations. We reward the very top performers and we ignore the low performers. So what happens? Firstly as long as the task in hand only used mechanical skills, using the left side of the brain, bonuses worked as they were expected, the higher their pay the better their performance. Now for the interesting part, once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

For simple straight forward tasks, if you do this then you get that, they're great. For tasks that are algorithmic with a set of rules, where you just have to follow along and get a right answer, carrots and sticks are outstanding! When a task gets more complicated, when it requires some creative, conceptual thinking (up selling) those kinds of rewards don't work. 8 of the 9 tasks examined across the 3 experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.

There is a company in Cambridge called Red Gate who have a sales force. Now how would you normally compensate them? Bonuses, rewards, commissions, right? What Red Gate did was eliminated these extra incentives but then what incentive would they have to make sales? Let's look at what happened when they did so, sales rose. Staff became more collaborative, management spent less time policing staff and who gets what and more time actually trying to help the customer.

The first assumption is that human beings are fundamentally inert and passive, if we didn't have a carrot dangling in front of us, or a stick being wield over us we would not do anything. There are a lot of people who believe this, the curious thing is no one thinks this about him or herself, they only believe it about other people and that is the wrong starting assumption. That is not human nature, human nature is to be active and engaged, if you don't believe this fact then find me a 2 year old that is not active and engaged. That is how we are out of the box, that's the default setting. The second assumption is to reward what you want and punish what you don't want and that's not always true. So what does work?

If you want high performance, the solution is not to entice people with a sweeter carrot or threaten people with a sharper stick. The way to do it is with intrinsic motivation, the desire to do things because it matters. Doing things because we like it or it's interesting or because it's part of something important.

Fact, money is a motivator, at work, but in a slightly strange way. If you don't pay people enough they won't be motivated. There's another paradox here though, that the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough so they're not thinking about money they're thinking about the work.

Once you do that there's 3 factors that science shows leads to better performance not to mention personal satisfaction. These are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy, the urge to direct our own lives. In many ways the aspect of management runs in foul of that. Management is good if you want compliance but if you want engagement self direction is the way forward. Now I've told you what autonomy is, let me give you a few examples of how it works and it's outcome.

I'm sure you're aware of Facebook, everyday Facebook staff decide what they want to work on and are allowed to make changes across the site without asking for permission...................

The second example is Google, who do something similar. 20% of the employees time spent at work can be used doing anything they want, not restricting them to one thing. As I'm sure you're familiar with many of google's products, half of ideas for them were  conjured during these 20% periods, Google Mail, Google News, Google Plus, Google Documents, all created during the free time of the employees.

Mastery, the desire to get better and better at something that matters. This is why people play musical instruments in their spare time. You have people working in all these ways that seem irrational economically. They play instruments, why?  It's not going to get them a partner, it's not going to make them money, so why are they doing it? It's because it's fun, because you get better at it, because it's satisfying.

Let's say I have an idea for a business model, here's how it would work. You take a bunch of people around the world, who are doing highly skilled work, but they're willing to do it for free, for 20 sometimes 30 hours a week. Then take what they create and instead of selling it, give it away. You'd think I'm insane, right? Although if you take a look at things, you have Linux operating system, which is powering over a quarter of corporate servers. Another example is Wikipedia.

So what's going on? Why are people doing this, many of them are technically sophisticated, highly skilled and HAVE jobs, yes, they're working a job for pay doing technically sophisticated, challenging work, yet during their limited discretionary time, they do equally if not more technically sophisticated work, not for their employer, for FREE! That's a strange behaviour, it's clear that challenge and mastery along with making a contribution matters.

I'd also like to point out that a survey was carried out a few years back asking the general public what the top motivator was for them at work. Do you know what it was? The top motivator by FAR was making progress in one's work. Not necessarily dramatic progress, just a little bit of progress, rarely was the answer incentives.

[ SO HOW DOES THIS TIE IN WITH CINEWORLD? ]
To begin with, the supervisors. A lot of us feel that supervisors are more like pernickety whip wielding slave drivers, names will not be mentioned as we feel it is unfair on them but instead of being these pernickety  whip wielding slave drivers they should pull their heads out of the sky (or their rear), get off their high horse and remember how it feels to be a multifunctional again and that just because you have a little extra power and command over the work force it doesn't mean you need to constantly exert it and overstep your position. We would how ever like to point out one supervisor in particular, this is Dean Eales for his spectacular supervising skills towards us Multifunctionals. You may not see him as the best supervisor yourself but after conducting a short survey, over 90% of staff voted Dean as their favourite supervisor. He is authoritative but respectful at the same time, unlike the others, who command you around trying to beat you into submission so you do what you're told. Which is why we've noticed they don't know how to deal with some of the other staff that have unwavering self belief and confidence and dont care what they think because negative feedback works in reverse of what they want.

As much as we enjoy all the managers outside of work and think they're all great people we have to disagree inside the work place, for instance, Sayedur only cares about selling, Emma seems to have gone off on a power trip since you left, Kel is just left to sit in the office for most of the day since being made practically redundant from the projection booth.

All of the supervisors seem to be in a state of 'every man for himself' as ironic as the expression is being that most of the supervisors are females, it is making things difficult in all aspects and areas. For example when supervisor x leaves and doesn't get stock or have the film posters sorted, it leaves supervisor y and employees at 1 in the morning trying to fix what should have been done earlier as well as the tasks at hand.

We get the impression there's very little cross communication and that none of the managers talk to each other. They're so wrapped up in their own area. I can't imagine Sayedur sitting down with another manager and talking about how he can improve sales by working with the Multifunctionals as well as making the job more engaging and enjoyable. It seems all Sayedur sees is large, large, large and forces it upon everyone. Don't misinterpret what were saying we encourage this thought path but only in moderation. You also have to consider other contributing factors because when it seems like profit over-steers from the well being of the staff, we tend not to want to do it. Another point being “refresher” Maximum Impact. We feel that a refresher day in up selling is completely unnecessary, not only does it undermine our intelligence as we are required to up sell on every shift, it wastes company money - which may we add is something you have made abundantly clear you have none of; What with the hours being cut for most people. I'd like to point out that although it is helpful and insightful as well as a good team building session it doesn't need to be retaken.

We also get the impression that the highest manager delegates jobs to the lower ones, who in turn give them to the supervisors, who half heartedly do them because it's not their job or it's passed on to us, leaving us with jobs we feel we don't have to do and supervisors with credit they don't deserve. They also complain at us for doing jobs we're doing to the best of our ability and jobs that have been given to us because they can't be bothered to do them themselves. In which case some of us can see this clearer than others, or maybe other people are just happy to smile and put up with it in case  of ruffling feathers further up the chain. Honestly these competitions aren't any incentive for the most of us, excuse the vulgar expression but you can sugar coat a piece of shit but its still a piece of shit at the end of the day.

Maybe it doesn't worry you as much as it does us, that a few 18-24 year olds with next to no business experience can see where the company is going wrong, maybe not sort it out but at least offer some constructive criticism, where as a list of managers who have been working in retail for x amount of years are oblivious or can't tackle the problems at hand.

Referencing the examples above, although in this area of work letting people pursue what they like whilst on-shift would be counterproductive, maybe allowing the option to switch between areas at the beginning of the shift if both parties are happy to do so, or at least find out where people enjoy working most to make the most out of their potential, rather than having them spend the day avoiding doing work because it's an unpleasant experience.

Instead of thinking although said employees are actively thinking about the job, albeit they hate it but are thinking of ways to improve the job and are having rational and conscious thoughts this letter will probably come across as being a nuisance and complaining, so punishment should be exerted which is why we have decided to remain anonymous for the time being. We hope you take in to consideration what has been said, we look forward to seeing what comes of this.

Thank you for taking the time to read this extremely long winded and moany letter but work has started to become some what more of a chore than something to look forward to and enjoy like it should.

The majority of Cineworld's Multifunctionals.