Exploring service desk employees' motivation and rewarding

Many service desk managers are struggling with the high turnover of service desk employees. Keeping the service desk job interesting and maintaining motivation is considered as a difficult task. In this study, we aim at exploring factors that affect the motivation and demotivation among IT service provider organizations' service desk employees. We shall explore how service desk staff see the concepts of motivation, demotivation and rewarding. Additionally, our goal is to identify how service desk contributes to a positive customer experience. Our unit of analysis is a Finnish service desk organization that uses IT service management best practice framework IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) in service provision. The research problem of this study is: How service desk employees' motivation and rewarding can be improved. The main contribution of this paper is to present results of a study that focused on bridging the motivation and rewarding mechanisms together as a compliment handling and rewarding procedure. 25 service desk employees were interviewed during a case study.