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What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

theatlantic.com

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Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#31

Post by chrisdotcode »

pestaa wrote: post #29
etler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say this. People aren't going to work hard for someone else (they'll work enough to get by but that's it). If you empower them they'll be working for themselves, and they'll actually want to do a good job. It reminds me of a blog post by a guy managing a few open source projects. The quality of the pull requests he got were poor, and required a lot of fixing up. He decided to add anyone who gave a pull…

I don't think I would have been brave enough to give admin permissions to authors of disappointing pull requests. Well done. If you recall who he is, let us know.

This was Felixge - former core Node.js developer - with his pull request hack [0].

[0] http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#32

Post by stretchwithme »

Evidence used seems dubious. The worker productivity graph could just be reflecting the layoffs of workers that aren't productive, which often happens at the end of a massive bubble.

And restaurants where the management feels the need to install anti-theft systems, couldn't productivity increases be management being free to focus on other aspects of the business? Or thieves being caught or deciding to go elsewhere?

And is the restaurant a hotbed of creativity worthy of examination? And what were the longterm effects on employee and customer happiness?

Any business can probably be made to perform better in the short run. What is the long term effect of a change is a more important question.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#34

Post by vsbuffalo »

Sure, this might work with manual labor sectors of the economy, but for driven people in science or the software world, a boss being an asshole will soon see himself surrounded by bad people. The good people go elsewhere and be productive. I've seen this happen many times.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#35

Post by ryandrake »

kabdib wrote: post #7

Neither. Trust. Empowerment. For the really good folks: Just get out of their way (and have good channels of communication so that it's clear they're not utterly going off the rails). Having people continually worry if they're going to be punished will make your org a hopeless mess. Supplying people with free snackies and flexible hours without giving them freedom won't make them work harder, it'll just give them a s…

Not a good general rule. What if your employees are simply mediocre performers? Do you really want to trust & empower them? Get out of their way? I don't think so. Not every company can afford to hire the very, very best.

Employee incentives and motivation is not a one-size-fits-all optimization problem. It depends on the company, on the team, on what they're working on, etc.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#36

Post by dmfdmf »

I think it was Bill Walsh (yes, the 49ers football coach) who wrote about one of his keys to managing the players. He found that some people are negatively motivated and needed to be pressured to improve, some people were positively motivated and needed praise and some people could be left alone. The trick was figuring out which class each player fell into.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#37

Post by avelis »

"Drive" by Dan Pink is a book I found to be a good read on motivation in general. I suggest anyone with some time to check it out. Book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

The way I see it none of those two items are what makes employee's work harder.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#38

Post by davidw »

ryandrake wrote: post #35
kabdib wrote: post #7

Neither. Trust. Empowerment. For the really good folks: Just get out of their way (and have good channels of communication so that it's clear they're not utterly going off the rails). Having people continually worry if they're going to be punished will make your org a hopeless mess. Supplying people with free snackies and flexible hours without giving them freedom won't make them work harder, it'll just give them a s…

Not a good general rule. What if your employees are simply mediocre performers? Do you really want to trust & empower them? Get out of their way? I don't think so. Not every company can afford to hire the very, very best. Employee incentives and motivation is not a one-size-fits-all optimization problem. It depends on the company, on the team, on what they're working on, etc.

I think 'caring' works pretty well for most people. What I mean is this: care about what they're doing. Ask after it. Ask if there are problems, or they need help, or about what problems they faced. This lets them know that people do care about the results and are watching, without being authoritarian or putting them on some kind of pedastal. I think you can be a mediocre worker (I've met some really awesome coders myself, guys like Andrew Tridgell, and compared to them, I'm as mediocre as it gets), and still put in your best effort, be diligent at what you do, and so on.

Re: What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering?

#40

Post by JanneVee »

Punishment only takes you so far. Like this dialogue from "Office Space".

Peter Gibbons: The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

Bob Porter: Don't... don't care?

Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.

Bob Slydell: I beg your pardon?

Peter Gibbons: Eight bosses.

Bob Slydell: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

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