6 ms·

Here's an idea: remove all politics from the process completely and do away with performance-oriented bonus systems. They've taken what was essentially a way t

Here's an idea: remove all politics from the process completely and do away with performance-oriented bonus systems. They've taken what was essentially a way to make their work into a game and... made it into a game. Making work into a game is an idiotic idea. Make work into work. Pay people a fair salary that gets their minds off of their salary. Align the goals of the employee with the goals of the company, not their own selfish instincts to game whatever system you put in place to try to "reward" them. Make the success of the company be their reward, whether that be with equity or simple fair across-the-board raises. I worked for a company a few years ago that used to be full of politics and internal conflict. One year they did extremely well and decided to simplify and give everyone a straight $10,000 bonus, from the janitor to the CEO. There was no way to game this: everyone knew how much everyone got. Everyone was proud of the company and each other. Instead of secretly discussing how much bonus other people got behind their back, everyone was excited and happy and asking each other "so what are you going to do with your 10 G's?" It was the best day at that company. You can argue against this all you want, but I experienced a level of alignment there that was unparalleled. The people who get off on doing all they can to advance their own paycheck and get a bigger bonus only ended up hurting the company through their politics and game-playing. They were invariably working in a self-centered direction tangent to the company's goals. When that was removed, the dynamic changed completely and it was remarkable how much improvement the company saw not just in the workplace but across the board. New products were released that year that were better than the last, quality improved, efficiency improved. These fears that in order to achieve high performance, we must reward the high performers with carrots and hit the slackers with sticks are a bastardized religious fiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

bloblaw 14y ago
> One year they did extremely well and decided to simplify and give everyone a straight $10,000 bonus, from the janitor to the CEO So the guy that watches YouTube videos for 3 hours, and the guy that takes 2 hours worth of smoke breaks a day got the same as the gal that works 50 hours a week and fixes the majority of the product issues? Contributions are not equal so please don't treat them that way or you will only disenfranchise your BEST employees. And remember, your best employees are the ones that have the most options elsewhere....
- moron 14y ago
  > So the guy that watches YouTube videos for 3 hours, and the guy that takes 2 hours worth of smoke breaks a day got the same as the gal that works 50 hours a week and fixes the majority of the product issues? If those guys have jobs at your company, you have bigger problems than your bonus structure. Unless they are doing more work than they appear to be doing, which is entirely possible.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- calinet6 14y ago
  I expected this response, thanks for taking the time to write it. The problem is one of statistics. Your employees will always, no matter how hard you try, fit on a bell curve. Here's the hilarious way most people think about this bell curve (just imagine this defines the set of employees actually working at a company, not just new hires; because it does): http://www.intellectcorp.com/images/bell-curve-hiring.jpg http://www.intellectcorp.com/images/bell-curve-hiring.jpg Say you have 100 employees. There will always be 4-5 who will be exceptional—the upper quintile. There will always be 4-5 who are at the bottom—the lower quintile. The problem is, this will always be true. If you fire the bottom 5, then there will be a new "bottom 5". People will always be worried about their job, the pressure of not being fired will be a negative-feedback motivator (or that's the idea), and the top people at the company will continue to be rewarded. Two questions: 1. Do you truly think that the top employees are working harder because you reward them? How much harder? 2. What about the other 90 employees? Your top employees aren't what you should be worried about. Firstly, if you depend on them and (as you say they have the most options elsewhere) heaven forbid they leave, where does that leave you? Fucked, that's where. Second, even if you think the top employees are doing the work of 2 people each, or even 3 people (which is a lot to expect of anyone), 80-90% of your work output is still being done by the thickest part of that bell curve. What's the answer? Improve the system. Making systematic, broad improvements will help everyone do better work. This is the true reason the straight 10k bonus worked so well: it was a systematic reward. But other things work even better: provide free lunch and your employees won't leave the office as much. Provide free dinner and they'll stay late. Bam, systematic across-the-board improvement in working hours and efficiency that no bonus would ever come close to. Allow frequent employee skill-improvement days, make them focus on honing their skill sets for 1 day a month without the stress of real work. Bam, everyone gets better, not just the top 5%. There are countless others. Figure out how to make the 90% in the middle work the hardest—and trust me, it's not by promising them bonuses if they can make it into the top 5%. That might be motivating for the upper 10% or maybe 15%, but not the rest. Improvements to the system they're in are the only good answer. The antiquated structure of bonuses and rewards and the punishment of firing is a religious myth left over from protestant and catholic beliefs in punishment and shame. They're not based on behavior, they're not based on science, and they're simply not true. Are monetary rewards entirely bad? No, of course not, people should be rewarded for doing good work. I personally think that this reward should be in the form of simple, understandable fair compensation, with as few barriers to that as possible. Other reward systems may work too. But they should not be the focus—the focus should be on improving the system your employees work in, as it will result in gains an order above what's possible with carrot and stick. Again, please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
bloblaw 14y ago
> These fears that in order to achieve high performance, we must reward the high performers with carrots and hit the slackers with sticks are a bastardized religious fiction. The point is to incentivize everyone with the carrot, and forget about the stick. Getting a small bonus or no bonus is not a punishment because a "bonus" is precisely that....a bonus is the reward/carrot. Not being rewarded with a bonus is not the same thing as being punished.
- calinet6 14y ago
  You are correct, but keep in mind that it is a negative reinforcement, and carries with it many of the demoralizing effects of being punished. My main issue with the bonus structure is that by motivating everyone with a bonus you turn the workplace into a social game where the focus is on the bonus or reward itself, and frankly, only 10-15% of people really care about it or think they have a shot at it, and those who do are more into the game than the work itself. Point being, I don't really want my employees chasing carrots, I want them writing software. The negative effects of the game playing and misdirected goals outweigh the positive motivation effects for the tiny percentage of the workforce who cares. I'd rather bring the whole company up.
jeremyarussell 14y ago
from the janitor to the CEO. It's cool to hear that, too many people forget that the janitor's, maintenance crews, and other misc jobs that most people would see as beneath them are all extremely important. How much work would get done if every day you had to go dump your own trashcan? Getting you out of whatever grove you might have been in before? Or how demoralizing it would be to go to a workplace that has sticky floors? (to anyone who might think I'm being sarcastic, I'm being sincere. Too often these positions aren't looked at as important to the working of the whole company, when it couldn't be farther from the truth.)
- pcopley 14y ago
  As someone who used to be a janitor I can tell you exactly why most people don't care about them: 95% of the time they're not employees, they're contractors. Every office I've worked in has contracted out the janitorial work to a business that strictly does office cleaning n days a week.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Anecdotally, the business in my story above did not, and still does not, contract out janitorial work.

bloblaw 14y ago

> One year they did extremely well and decided to simplify and give everyone a straight $10,000 bonus, from the janitor to the CEO So the guy that watches YouTube videos for 3 hours, and the guy that takes 2 hours worth of smoke breaks a day got the same as the gal that works 50 hours a week and fixes the majority of the product issues? Contributions are not equal so please don't treat them that way or you will only disenfranchise your BEST employees. And remember, your best employees are the ones that have the most options elsewhere....

moron 14y ago
> So the guy that watches YouTube videos for 3 hours, and the guy that takes 2 hours worth of smoke breaks a day got the same as the gal that works 50 hours a week and fixes the majority of the product issues? If those guys have jobs at your company, you have bigger problems than your bonus structure. Unless they are doing more work than they appear to be doing, which is entirely possible.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
calinet6 14y ago
I expected this response, thanks for taking the time to write it. The problem is one of statistics. Your employees will always, no matter how hard you try, fit on a bell curve. Here's the hilarious way most people think about this bell curve (just imagine this defines the set of employees actually working at a company, not just new hires; because it does): http://www.intellectcorp.com/images/bell-curve-hiring.jpg http://www.intellectcorp.com/images/bell-curve-hiring.jpg Say you have 100 employees. There will always be 4-5 who will be exceptional—the upper quintile. There will always be 4-5 who are at the bottom—the lower quintile. The problem is, this will always be true. If you fire the bottom 5, then there will be a new "bottom 5". People will always be worried about their job, the pressure of not being fired will be a negative-feedback motivator (or that's the idea), and the top people at the company will continue to be rewarded. Two questions: 1. Do you truly think that the top employees are working harder because you reward them? How much harder? 2. What about the other 90 employees? Your top employees aren't what you should be worried about. Firstly, if you depend on them and (as you say they have the most options elsewhere) heaven forbid they leave, where does that leave you? Fucked, that's where. Second, even if you think the top employees are doing the work of 2 people each, or even 3 people (which is a lot to expect of anyone), 80-90% of your work output is still being done by the thickest part of that bell curve. What's the answer? Improve the system. Making systematic, broad improvements will help everyone do better work. This is the true reason the straight 10k bonus worked so well: it was a systematic reward. But other things work even better: provide free lunch and your employees won't leave the office as much. Provide free dinner and they'll stay late. Bam, systematic across-the-board improvement in working hours and efficiency that no bonus would ever come close to. Allow frequent employee skill-improvement days, make them focus on honing their skill sets for 1 day a month without the stress of real work. Bam, everyone gets better, not just the top 5%. There are countless others. Figure out how to make the 90% in the middle work the hardest—and trust me, it's not by promising them bonuses if they can make it into the top 5%. That might be motivating for the upper 10% or maybe 15%, but not the rest. Improvements to the system they're in are the only good answer. The antiquated structure of bonuses and rewards and the punishment of firing is a religious myth left over from protestant and catholic beliefs in punishment and shame. They're not based on behavior, they're not based on science, and they're simply not true. Are monetary rewards entirely bad? No, of course not, people should be rewarded for doing good work. I personally think that this reward should be in the form of simple, understandable fair compensation, with as few barriers to that as possible. Other reward systems may work too. But they should not be the focus—the focus should be on improving the system your employees work in, as it will result in gains an order above what's possible with carrot and stick. Again, please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

bloblaw 14y ago

> These fears that in order to achieve high performance, we must reward the high performers with carrots and hit the slackers with sticks are a bastardized religious fiction. The point is to incentivize everyone with the carrot, and forget about the stick. Getting a small bonus or no bonus is not a punishment because a "bonus" is precisely that....a bonus is the reward/carrot. Not being rewarded with a bonus is not the same thing as being punished.

calinet6 14y ago
You are correct, but keep in mind that it is a negative reinforcement, and carries with it many of the demoralizing effects of being punished. My main issue with the bonus structure is that by motivating everyone with a bonus you turn the workplace into a social game where the focus is on the bonus or reward itself, and frankly, only 10-15% of people really care about it or think they have a shot at it, and those who do are more into the game than the work itself. Point being, I don't really want my employees chasing carrots, I want them writing software. The negative effects of the game playing and misdirected goals outweigh the positive motivation effects for the tiny percentage of the workforce who cares. I'd rather bring the whole company up.

jeremyarussell 14y ago

from the janitor to the CEO. It's cool to hear that, too many people forget that the janitor's, maintenance crews, and other misc jobs that most people would see as beneath them are all extremely important. How much work would get done if every day you had to go dump your own trashcan? Getting you out of whatever grove you might have been in before? Or how demoralizing it would be to go to a workplace that has sticky floors? (to anyone who might think I'm being sarcastic, I'm being sincere. Too often these positions aren't looked at as important to the working of the whole company, when it couldn't be farther from the truth.)

pcopley 14y ago
As someone who used to be a janitor I can tell you exactly why most people don't care about them: 95% of the time they're not employees, they're contractors. Every office I've worked in has contracted out the janitorial work to a business that strictly does office cleaning n days a week.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Anecdotally, the business in my story above did not, and still does not, contract out janitorial work.