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 If it’s late, not enough, withdrawn, doesn’t satisfy expectation or is in some way offset by a negative experience unrelated to it – its benefit is destroyed.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

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.