OMG - don't try to read my post until I break it up with some HTML tags!
For close to 20 years I've had a close relationship with Maritz Inc., the
company in Missouri that's all about getting more out of a company's prime
stakeholders: both direct employees and the folks who work in the channel,
whether for dealers, franchisees or completely independent retailers. In that
whole time, plus more, we've done a lot of measuring: needs assessments,
performance appraisals, gap analyses and more.
And the data's pretty
conclusive: Noncash awards motivate better than cash. For one thing, cash
disappears. It becomes next month's car payment, or Susie's braces. Ever
noticed how critical household systems can somehow smell extra money
coming in and choose that moment to break down? Now - how many times
have you ever looked fondly at the hood of your car and said, "Yup. I won
those ball joints in the sales contest in 2005."?
Also, cash rewards,
won consistently, can start to feel like a regular part of the paycheck. So the
motivation value goes away. But worse, the whole thing backfires if the rules
change and the award gets harder to win. At that point, it doesn't feel like a
rewards and recognition program anymore. I just feels like a pay cut, and a
sneaky one at that.
But a crystal salad bowl or flat-screen
television, or even a pen-and-pencil set - or an actual engraved loving cup,
even if it's just brass-plated? You'll always be able to point to that and
remember the great thing you did, preferably with your whole team, to get it.
The after-program data Maritz teams have collected over the
decades continues to show that's exactly how program participants feel -
noncash beats cash for trophy value. But not always.
As the nature
of the work changes and the jobs (and teams) get more sophisticated, there's
something even more important than trophies. And that's what Alfie Kohn
started to get at with his book from the early 1990s, Punished By Rewards.
Within five years of Alfie's book, the entire New Economy, as we called it then,
would prove him right: a feeling of shared destiny, of building something new
and grand, and the intrinsic joy in the work itself, would motivate an entire
cohort of software developers, technology marketers and innovators of all
kinds to pour everything they had - and more - into building out the first
generation of what we now so casually refer to, in lower case, as just the web.
Remember when we spoke, in some awe, of the World Wide Web?
Granted, there was lots of talk about people becoming billionaires.
And staffers were getting paid in stock options instead of cash in the hopes
of big future paydays. But I think that if you look closely at what was really
going on, the money for most people was secondary to the creative endeavor.
Research has shown the same thing in formal studies, as has
experience in other creative settings. Fact is, there isn't enough money in the
world, and there aren't enough trophies, to reward the kind of dedication that
we see in an awful lot of people in all kinds of settings.
Think, for
example, of the really caring staffers in nursing facilities, some of the most
poorly paid people in the economy. Yet they too, just like the people solving
the creative problems of art, science and technology, bring to their jobs a
dedication to their patients and their craft - and all they ask is the tools and
resources to do their jobs well.
So is cash the best motivator?
Not hardly.
