Likes to think

Many businesses use productivity incentives, but do they actually work?

Well, quite frankly – in a world were skill, experience and motivation are the key actuators in performance, it’s unlikely. Where it does have a benefit, it’s hard to prove and usually isn’t very significant. The ratio of productivity to incentive doesn’t seem to be very much, and the correlation coefficient will be erratic.

Now, give me my money

Bonuses do motivated for a while, but there are many shortcomings. If it’s late, not enough, withdrawn, doesn’t satisfy expectation or is in some way offset by a negative experience unrelated to it – its benefit is destroyed. If you do it once, it’s is expected again and again. Then, when a decision is made to move away from an incentive – those who benefited from it feel neglected, lost, hard done by and more importantly; they feel that they are now supposed to work less.

Those who don’t realise the direct benefits of incentives – ie those not earning through performance; feel left out, downgraded, disrespected and more importantly they feel – “well, I’m not getting paid more so why should I work harder?”

Incentives don’t last

An unobserved fact about incentives is that they don’t last. Let me clarify: even if the incentive is still administered – eventually it’ll be the norm to be paid an extra £100 per month. It’s no longer an incentive – it’s a deterrent. If I don’t work hard enough, the money I get will be taken away. So, the positive nature of an incentive is mutated in to the negative nature of a deterrent.

When they do create an increase in performance, they mask any other facilitators of development. Good coaching, great training and awesome leadership get confused and can’t be pinpointed. When the motivation derived from incentives build skill and experience – you then start paying bonus for no reason – your now highly skilled worker could perform just as well without the bonus; yet you’d never know. Your hands are tied so you can’t take it away, and they’re still stressed under the pressure to keep earning.

Time to normalise

Reciprocal normalisation is the response to an action that reflects the original action’s nature. Whereby, a positive response is elicited by a positive action, and a negative resonance for a negative action. Transferring to a paradigm that takes advantage of reciprocal normalisation reverses causality, also transferring obligations. Instead of the business being obliged to reward productivity, the employee is obliged to be more productive.

Potentiality is the way forward

Although incentive causes problems when attached to productivity, it can be used for other aspects of a working relationship. Instead of incentivising productivity; incentivise potentiality. This means rewarding those that have the potential to be highly productive – leaving the true productivity factors to be address more effectively with coaching, training and relationship building.

Someone who arrives on time, stays at the workstation and doesn’t have days off sick all the time has much more potential to be productive than someone who is never at their desk, wakes up late and who’s grandma dies every two weeks for 3 years.

This frees up your time to really focus on analysing skill sets, the dynamics of workflow management and ergonomics.

Giving bonuses for being on time, being at your workstations or not being absent is great.
Those who don’t receive their bonuses are highlighted and replaced if changes aren’t made – and as an added bonus the bane of management [shrinkage control] takes care of itself.

Happy workforce

Free of worry, about if they can earn their bonus, staff can become much more introspective and managers don’t have to fight a barrier of ‘bonus depression’ every month.
It’s a big change

I know the above recommendations might sounds ridiculous, but change often does. Waves will be caused, risk will rear its ugly head – but once you’re there, you’ll never go back.
Your big earner, change his pay and say, “right, you’re no longer getting a bonus – that extra £100 that you get every month anyway – is now in your wage”. The pressure comes off and now you’re free to work on focusing on skill – not effort.

Be warned though. By making these changes, you’ll expose any floors in coaching, mentoring, training and leadership – and if you don’t fix them, all the changes will have been in vain.

Okay, so… You’ve got the culture; you’ve got the great people, the ideas and the motivation – but wait!

NO time!

The company I work for is a smart, creative and progressive company that copes with the ebbs and flows of creative industries. We have product development meetings and regularly get together to solve problems – or to generally figure out how to do things just that little bit better.

Each of us is an expert of some sort or another; some more-so than others, of course. We’re each open minded, happy with our jobs and get a thrill out of overcoming the challenges we face every other day.

Skills are distributed, the team works together and we get on with our boss’, and their ideas. We’re not restricted in our work – well, other than the client’s brief that is.

So what’s the problem?

What about time, money, workload even?

Sometimes a team can have all the right ingredients, but lack the available resources to move forward. Or, at least at a pace it’s capable of.

We’ve been a little slow recently as far as PD is concerned; luckily we’ve got loads of work coming in.

What’s even better than that is that even though we don’t have the time just now, we’ve not lost sight of our goal – to change for the better.

Sometimes you’ll hear from business leaders – we just don’t have the time or the people to do things differently. Just make sure that’s true, and it’s not an idle excuse.

Not having the time is no excuse to give up, to ignore it or procrastinate; for the truly innovative work to the bone and at least keep ahead of the pack.

Creativity in business – nice or necessity

Being a creative thinker gives a person many advantages over his or her colleagues. Allowing the passing on of that creative thinking to the rest of the business however, creates an advantage over its [the business] competitors – sometimes enough to give it an edge.

The culture within a business concerned with creativity needs to be very open. It is no longer the domain of those upper managers.

To clarify: Empowering your employees by giving them opportunities to be creative, or going further by creating expectations and training on it, does not make them decision makers. You shouldn’t panic as a manager if your workforce is paying attention to things you’re confident wont work. As a manager you’re there to ensure they don’t go off too far.

Someone with the right talents or training will have a valuable set of skills to use when working on an idea.

Give your people the power to negotiate its acceptance, by you the manager and the rest of the workforce.

Inside Out - Motivation the right way round

People are motivated from the inside out; providing external gratification like giving them DVD players etc will help someone that is currently motivated stay that way. But if someone feels undervalued at their core, then no amount of trinkets and prizes will do. Only by helping that person overcome their state can we move on to making them happy. Allowing them the rush of recieving material goods will do now good for them, or your team in the long run.

People are people; they are always people. This is not to say that they are all the same. Just that it doesn’t matter where they are, what they are doing, or how much they are being paid. They are still people, and should be treated that way.

You can have different opinions, you can have different methods, and you can have different priorities. But as long as you all genuinely share the same common and specific goals, you are a team.

People are not mushrooms. Mushrooms grow well if you keep them in the dark and feed them hourse manure, people on the other hand do not.

My responce to a CEO’s blog, for a company I used to work for. The reply to it, was written personally and was posstive, though not included here. I’ve removed the names for obvious reasons.

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Over the past three years I’ve noticed, as have many others, that [the company] is struggling to ‘keep with the times’.

Where I expected to join a company that leads its industry, that leads its people and that leads with its best foot forward – I found myself working for a company that sits complacently with other companies in the industry, is ignorant to ‘individual circumstance’ and is by no mean pushing the fold.

For the most part the people within the company are creative, intelligent and motivated. In contrast, [the company] proper is passive and appeaseable.

Creative and driven individuals don’t mince their words, nor do the companies that choose to foster them. Innovative companies, such as Google et al, are uncompromisingly creative. They don’t pull punches; they throw whatever they’ve got and live with the results. They know the score – hard work needs hard play. You don’t win by following suit, a runner knows the risks are higher the harder you train, but the dice is still thrown and the gamble taken.

I love the fact that we are starting to let new things in, but there is a bigger step to take. As [a colleuge] suggested, and I shall paraphrase with an aphorism of my own – it’s not about letting new technologies in the door, it’s about ‘taking the bull by the horns’ and making it work for us.
The very same thing can be said for talent. We’re very good at finding talent, at carrot and stick recruitment; but where we really need to work is talent realisation. We need to stop making people do thing because they are capable of doing them, and start getting people do to things because it’s what drives them – it’s what they derive passion from.

In today’s innovative climate, it isn’t good enough to be satisfied because your balance sheet shows good numbers. Neither your profit and loss, nor your shareholders can be the top priority in pointing to the direction of progress. They are there to keep us afloat, but they are by no means our power. I keep thinking that instead of “Revenue Engine” we should be talking about “Innovation Engine”. We give permission to innovate, but we do not drive it.

The situations that are stifling innovation within [the company] are not due to the attitudes of our managers towards our ideas – far from it, for the most part our ideas themselves are taken on and a dialogue is opened. What the problem is, is fear. If we’re not scared of our boss, then our boss is scare of theirs – or our boss’ boss is scared of those senior to them. Somewhere along the line, the voice of innovation goes quiet. Someone somewhere quits or gives up trying, not because it’s easier to roll over, but because they feel that’s the only option.

From vibrant “wow” and excitable “cool”, we step ever closer to “well the problem is” and “I like it, but…”

We’re starting on the way to doing things right; we have the Innovation Challenge which, we are informed, was a great success. Hopefully this will help begin the ‘fostering of innovation’. What companies need now, are not big, national or global innovation projects. By doing so, you turn innovation upside down. Innovation should not start at the top, nor should it start as a “make a big impact” idea. It should be in the very fibre of the company, and the big idea should flow along the same channels as the tiny ones. An individual on the lowest level should be just as comfortable in saying, “we need a new risk model” as “we need a new toaster in the staff kitchen”.

As a big company, we are drawn in by what the others are doing. We create a habit of making one size fits all projects they try to capture our employee audience and entice them into helping build the company further. However, if we take a leaf from the book that tells us about our clients, we know that it will not work that way. We need to focus on small groups and engage individuals personally.

We see this in examples in every area of life. A restaurant doesn’t just create one big pie for it’s customers – it provides specially made meals, and the good places will customise it to your whim. When you buy a computer, you no longer get one of whatever is available; you get exactly what you want. We can see the different in thanking everyone using generalisations and compare that to individual praise. Saying, “thanks for the hard work” is ineffective if contrasted with, “thank you for developing a new scripting system, everyone loves it and it’s increased sales x, y and z”.

By all means, have a capture all project working its way through the company, but it will not drive the company far. What we need is not hulking great achievements every year, or every quarter; we need daily innovation. Every day, a light must go on in the mind of at least one of the thousands of people we have.

Be individual, be specific – it’s a hard formula to get right, but it’s the winning one.
It’s not surprising that as an insurance company we deal with risk differently to other companies like Google and Apple. Our working lives are centred on taking as little risk as possible and mitigating those we must take.

The shear mass of [the company] as a business protects us from change and lets us cope as we take time to pick up on the innovation of other more willing companies. How long can that last? “Innovate or die” really must become the terminology we use. As aggressive and brass as it sounds, we can only go so far when we try to use nice, flowery and comforting words. Saying, “lets work as a team” doesn’t do what it used to. This phrase used to motivated people, but now, as it has been used so often, it does little more than placate. It’s too general, and too overused a phase.

I personally have decided to leave [the company]. Not because I’m angry with they way I’ve been treated, though I have had my moments of frustration. Not because I don’t feel adequately compensated for my work, or I think that my skills and strengths are in someway suppressed as a sacrifice for the power trips of others. These are all things that I have been concerned with in my tenure here, but they are not the cause of my departure.

The single most pertinent cause of my resignation is that I am a highly creative person. In stark disparity, and an opposite of how it should be, I am in fact leaving because I’m creative, instead of staying because I am so.

[the company] has drained my motivation to the point where I am not concerned with achievement, where I am complacent with being mediocre and am no longer shocked by the lack of meritocracy. This is something that I am not willing to put up with, and cannot let me self continue doing. It has been a long hard three months trying to balance my lack of motivation, my search for new opportunities and my personal need to commit to the job at hand. I no longer make a difference, and that very fact makes a difference in me.

I wish I had someone to blame, just for the sake of convenience. Yet none of the people I work with should shoulder it, not my boss or any of my colleagues. It is the culture of [the company], with its inflexible processes and its “not your job to think” attitude towards the lower echelon that I belong to. It’s [the company]’s willingness to pay £500 per day for a consultant with the gift of the gab, or a friend upon high, yet readiness to support the laziness of systems that do not, and cannot, identify personal strength and seem operated to try and play down the achievements of the masses.

Web 2.0 is a revolution in the attitudes of those who influence the Internet, lets all hope it’ll be a revolution for [the comapny] too.