Lisa pointed me this evening to a 1993 article by Alfie Kohn called "For Best Results, Forget the Bonus." Apparently, offering workers rewards as incentives is hardly better than punishing them. Have you had a job where some workers (or all workers) received rewards of some sort? Do you feel it changed your focus so that you cared more about the reward than about the work itself?
The best response may receive a prize!
Monday, September 17, 2007
Bonus post
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2 comments:
Mr. Kohn (who also has a book called Punished by Rewards) has a point, but I think he oversells it. Essentially, what often happens in workplaces is that they institute a dumb-headed incentive program that is cheap and much more related to sucking up than to making the company better. Since the managers are bad, and have no real grasp of management, the incentive program just makes the workers crazy.
On the other hand, if workers feel as if they have an actual stake in the company, and that the work they do pays off for them, it can have an effect. If the payoff is money, it helps if it's big money; oddly enough, what really helps is if it's not money at all, but some ridiculous thing like flying everybody to Jamaica for the weekend. I would find that annoying, but it seems to work.
As I remember, the sample of Harvard Business School cases I saw had three big points, repeated over and over.
1) If your managers suck, better policies will not help.
2) If your data sucks, adjusting it will not help.
3) Your chances of success increase proportionately to the size of the warehouse full of cash you start with. Small warehouse=failure. Big warehouse=need for even bigger warehouse in ten years.
Oh, I hope HBS doesn't sue me now. I rephrased all that in my own words, so it's not infringement, right?
Thanks,
-V.
I suspect too many companies have rewards programs at the same time that raises don't even keep up with inflation (let alone increase the real pay for long-time employees) and huge health care cost increases. Rewards can't make up for that, even if companies hope they'll serve as a distraction.
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