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 If it’s late, not enough, withdrawn, doesn’t satisfy expectation or is in some way offset by a negative experience unrelated to it – its benefit is destroyed.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.

How good is your team? Skill sets hidden away

Picture the scenario, someone comes up to you – your manager, the board of directors or who ever – they ask, “How good is your team?”

There are three types of answers.

There’s the completely clueless, worthless and unobserved answer:
Err, well, I suppose…. they’re good at, err…

Then there’s the apt, yet vogue ‘think on your feet’ answer that doesn’t really tell you anything new:
Well, my team is good at communicating and working together, and they have good sales – bla, bla, et cetera, bla.

Finally, nay revealingly, we have:
Well, Craig is the problems solver, and everyone knows he’s the go to man. Dan is the positive one that keeps everyone on a high. Charlie and Sarah are both calm under pressure and constantly beat their targets. As a whole, they understand each other’s skills and take advantage of knowing that if they need assistance they don’t need to be on their own…

Type one is an obvious negative. As a team leader, you’re obviously lacking – what’s worse, you’re not even on the team. You sit by them every day; you chat with them, catch up after the weekend and give them their score sheets. However, you’re no real benefit.

Imagine for a minute, that you’re leading your team up a mountain – if you don’t know how far they can go each day, important medical information, experience in climbing, how many supplies they can carry or how much they have left. You and the rest of your team will need a proper team – i.e. a rescue team to come and get you.

Type two is ambiguous. Of course your team communicates well, they were employed because of their communication skills, were they not? Of course they work together, they work in the same room, at the same counter, or at the same desk – they are together! When you can say they work collectively, then you’re talking.

If this is you, you don’t know your team well enough. You know what skills they ought to have, and you know what your boss wants to hear. This however, is most likely your limit. You go through your day thinking your team is better than it is, but failing to really appreciate the work they do. Your team don’t feel praised enough, because you can’t praise them correctly.

Your team going up a mountain with you are better off than the first team, you’re intelligent, you can think on your feet and you know what’s needed. Though, you’d fair a lot better and climb a lot further, if you only knew who had the skills you needed.

Unfortunately, you run the risk of assuming your team has the skills they need when they might not. You’ll over stretch them, push them more than they should be push and rile them up.

Type three is the only true team leader - the Edmund Hillary of Call Centres, or wherever you work.

If this is you, you not only know your team personally. You know them more than they know themselves. You pay attention to how they act, how they feel and what they say. You spend a good amount of your team investigating their skill sets and preparing them for the task ahead. You can navigate them effectively, each on their individual paths.

The good thing about having you as a team leader, is they when someone isn’t feeling motivated, you don’t instantly go, “Common chaps, let’s do this!” in an overzealous tone. You probe a little, to see if there is something you can do. If there’s not, you support them through their lull in two ways.
You let them under perform while they get it out of their system and you assist them by getting yourself and the rest of the team to pick up the slack.

Up the mountain, you’ve climbed harder, faster and more effectively than the others. Your team are tired and existed, but their proud of their achievements and are happy to give you more. If things go wrong, you instantly fashion a stretcher out of halve a tree and take turns pulling. You know when to pitch a tent to stay safe, and you know when to enough is enough.

So, how to you answer the question? How good is you team?

All too often is the case, that the first two are running the show. They fumble around at the bottom of the mountain trying to get somewhere, constantly having to give different approaches to the same problem, never really succeeding.

They don’t know what’s going on, or what skills their team has. Unfortunately, this means they those skills are hidden away, and never used.

You know when you’ve got a Hillary though. Straight up the side without question and back down again. The only time tactics suddenly change for this team is when; they’ve been up and down a few times – so are board and want to try something new and interesting.

Ask yourself, as leader, as a manager, a director or entrepreneur; next time you call yourself ‘world class’ – what’s so great about the cogs that turn in your business.

Places like call centres (or should that be the euphemism ‘Contact Centres’?), and big chain stores, employ their people with the intention of them being just another cog in the machine. Businesses want them cheap, easy to train, easy to maintain, easy to replicate and most of all – highly replaceable.

Customers have begun to expect the low service, low cost, low talent market place that has been created by casting out the talent and replacing them with automatons.

This is not just another rant about homo-robotics.

Just because your customers expect nothing more, it doesn’t mean that’s what they want.
Ask yourself, have you let your customers down, for so long, that they no longer care? Have your ignored your staff for so long that they no longer bother? Have you let yourself down for so long that you have given up trying?

More importantly, does your business culture clamp on to the delusion that you’re fantastic, amazing, ‘world class’, inspirational and innovative?

Can you ever be so good that you no longer need to try?

If your business model is such, that when a customer comes in store, or picks up the phone – they don’t care if your counter staff, your shelf stacker or your Telephone Technician is here today, gone tomorrow; it’s time to think.

How many customers do you have, that know the names of your staff?

How many customers do you have, that spare a moment for small talk about the weather?

Employing just another cog doesn’t fit the ‘fantastic’ label. To be an amazing business, you don’t just need an amazing product, and amazing brand and an amazing profit sheet.

Ask yourself, “Woud we miss you?”

Then, ask all the people who work for you.

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.

Obvious if you ask me.

Changing, for the most part, is a tiny step by tiny step kind of an affair. We just get on with things, cross our fingers, and hope that we’re going in the right direction.

That’s what we do as people.

Businesses aren’t people though – apart from the odd witty phrase that suggests otherwise, we have no reason to be mistaken about that fact.

Were we to continue with the metaphor however, we can see could say this:

If you’re going somewhere new, and you want to make a good impression, do you:

· Dress up?

· Make an effort?

· Buy a new pair of shoes?

If you’re meeting someone important, do you:

· Comb your hair?

· Sit up straight?

· Brush the lint off your trousers and the dandruff off your shoulder?

At an interview, do you?

· Care about first impression?

· Do you care about presentation?

· Or make an effort to speak clearly, and intelligibly?

Now, let’s get back to business. How many businesses do you know, that aren’t trying to go somewhere new? Or that aren’t trying to make a good impression?

How many customers do you know that aren’t important to the businesses that crave them?

How many businesses do you know that aren’t constantly involved in a game of first impressions?

In fact, how many do you know that aren’t doing a combination of all the above?

What about yours?

Change is an obvious thing in our personal lives, and we are quite often struck by surprises – even highly successful and intelligent people. This obviousness leads to it being an oft ignored subject; bar the odd stint of buying self-help books that go along with our new year’s de-resolutions, of course.

In business however, can you afford to ignore change? Sure, you might miss a few beats every so often, but it is your job – to ride the change, or predict it and to react to it, or at least to the fact that you may have missed it.

It’s not about trying to understand worldviews in their entirety. It is about, finding those world views that mean something to you, that are your worldviews, or the views of the people in whose world you want to be successful in. Find those micro-worldviews and tap in to them, and most importantly – when the world spins, revolve with it.