Bonus Time

It is the best part of the year.

You have been performance managed and appraised. Your year-end rating has been cross calibrated / validated / ranked and stacked. You have emerged from the annual death match unscathed.

Your rating has been moderated to allow for business results. Senior managers have assessed “the curve” to check it meets stakeholder expectations. Budgets have been authorised and bonus slips have been printed.

Management effort has been expended, funds are flowing and you got your:

• Five percent
• Fifteen percent
• Fifty percent — bankers, they need the money, mostly to buy friends.

A pay reward for a job well done. How does it make you feel?  Enthused?  Raring to go?

Of course, you are. You have been rewarded and incentivised and motivated to do a better job next year. Haven’t you?  Perhaps not…

Bonuses don’t work

At least not according to Alfie Kohn – a social scientist and author of Punished by Rewards.

He believes that when we say… If you do this, then you will get that … and hand out bonuses and rewards for a job well done,  then all we manage to do is kill intrinsic motivation.

This is, of course, sacrilege. We base our businesses on performance related pay. In fact we base our society on the same idea — remember school? “if you do this reading then you will get that gold star.”

Mr Kohn is controversial in the extreme. Pay for performance works, saying anything else is simply not cricket (Un American for my transatlantic colleagues)

Mr Kohn is so Un American he even made Oprah

Oprah Winfrey asked her producers to try out one of the experiments in Alfie’s book.

Behind a hidden TV camera 10 teenagers were asked to test a new puzzle. Half of them were given $5 for their trouble, half of them were just asked to give the puzzle a go.

What happened when the children were left alone in the room? You will have to watch the video below to find out.

There are of course better ways to kill motivation than giving bonuses

If you really want to disengage somebody make sure everybody else gets a bonus but not them.

I thought I’d point that out, just in case my boss reads this.

After all, it is bonus time.