Employee motivation and engagement has seldom been a more topical issue. The issue of how to motivate people has been a matter of debate since the days of people such as Maslow and McGregor. Despite both men outlining the various intrinsic motivators, for much of the last century our ideas of motivation have revolved around extrinsic factors.
That hasn’t stopped people like Dan Pink from banging the drum of intrinsic motivation however, and his RSAnimates video remains the most viewed RSA talk ever. Many companies have tried to implement intrinsic means of improving employee engagement, with award programs such as employee of the month proving stubbornly popular.
Some new research from Washington University suggests however that such schemes can often do more harm than good.
They found that employees often resort to gaming the system (or at least trying to), whilst people who had achieved strong performance before the scheme was introduced suffered a 6-8% reduction in performance afterwards. The suggestion is that they were demotivated by the presence of an award scheme to promote behaviour they already exhibited.
The researchers believe that the award program actually ended up decreasing productivity by 1.4% rather than improving it. With gamification being used an increasing amount to encourage participation in social business projects, this is something that all social deployment people should be aware of.
While awards programs can be powerful tools for motivating employees, companies must think carefully about the unintended consequences that can cripple their efficacy.
I have known for a long time that employee of the month recognitions don't get you far and that it can actually cause resentment from other employees. I agree that the personal recognition by the leader can be very effective as long as the praise is both specific and impactful…ie what were the things that made the performance so good AND how did the performance impact the leader and the organization.
Any serious student of leadership could have predicted the results of this study before it was ever conducted. Herzberg proved this point years ago and his research has been confirmed multiple times.
From a leadership point of view, people who exhibit regular tardiness or absenteeism do so for various reasons, but it isn't because they want a little extra money. In fact, recognition of a worker's skills or success on a particular project is a proven technique; if the recognition is genuine. "Employee of the Month" type programs often are not.
This is an interesting article about those employees that "appear" to be engaged and productive, but are not. The incentives and the rewards that we think might be motivating our employees may not be doing their job. The good news is that there are some rewards that work, and I appreciate that the author shared some great examples of both.