rewarding & not motivating?
I once had a conversation about incentive schemes with an operations manager of a medium-sized organisation. "Just hand out cream eggs" I was told. A similar approach is where Management choose the 'Star Of The Month' and hand out a random reward at the month-end to an arbitrarily selected member of staff. This attitude to improving workplace motivation is not uncommon but, while it has some positive factors by way of recognising special individuals, it normally does not improve organisation-wide levels of motivation and nor does it increase performance across the team or unit.
What is happening in both of these scenarios is Recognition not Incentivisation and there are three major issues that arise:
- Firstly, this kind of recognition is often fairly arbitrary and the staff are never really clear why someone has been chosen to be star of the month nor what they, as individuals, can do to be similarly recognised.
- Secondly, unless there are clear rules about what has to be achieved in order to qualify, just handing out rewards to staff is, in effect, simply bribing them to do a job they are already paid to do.
- Thirdly, recognition of this type tends to favour the individual at the expense of the team. Overall operational success is a result of team performance and recognising individuals can be divisive and can impair team-working unless there are other schemes in place.
In respect of workforce performance, the ultimate result of recognising without incentivising is often a demotivated workforce rather than one inspired to try harder.
Recognition is an important tool for Management but it should never be thought of as a performance-management tool for operational incentivisation and motivation.
Goal for management
The goal for managers is to create a balanced approach to motivation where incentivisation and recognition can work hand in hand to help improve individual and team performance towards defined organisational performance targets.
The first step is the introduction of a clear and transparent incentive scheme in which individuals and teams have clear targets such that:
- Staff know what their individual and team targets are
- Staff know what they have to do to achieve them
- They know what rewards they will receive if they achieve them
This means that it is important to have:
- Simple and easy to understand rules for the campaign
- Targets that are appropriate for the individuals - Baby-step targets to get the underachievers re-engaged, stretch targets for the bulk of the workforce and super-targets for the star-performers.
- Targets that have appropriate time-periods that are relevant to the staff. Weekly and Monthly targets are good - and Daily targets work well if they can be managed without too much overhead.
The Team Leader
The role of the team-leader or supervisor is key to the success of an incentive scheme and it is important that team-leaders:
- Understand what the organisation is trying to achieve through the incentive campaign
- What is expected of the Team Leader
- How the Team Leader will benefit from improved team performance
Recognition
From the foundation of a clear and objective incentivisation scheme it is then possible to introduce Recognition into the mix. The rules for recognition should be based primarily on the performance measures of the incentive scheme and there should be a number of opportunities for recognising individuals and teams - and over an appropriate time-frame. Many recognition schemes are monthly but there is nothing to prohibit daily and weekly recognition as well.
As well as recognising for hard 'operational' achievement there is always the option to recognise for softer achievement (such as Best Attendance or Tidiest Workstation) and also to recognise for fun things. It all helps to create a motivational 'buzz' in the workplace.
Conclusions
Incentivisation and Recognition work hand in hand but the best results come where recognition sits on a solid incentivisation foundation. What ever you try to implement, please remember to monitor its impact on key performance indicators such as productivity, absenteeism, staff attrition and staff morale. You will get a much better understanding of what works and what doesn't by collecting performance data prior to introducing your scheme and then looking at what aspects of achievement change over the next few weeks. It is not always as easy as it sounds so watch out for our forth-coming paper on Benchmarking and KPI's.
Contact John Archibald on tel. +44 (0)1273 669 707, email. john.archibald@incentivise.com.
+44 (0) 1273 669 707
