You get what you reward
Change the incentives and you change the behaviour
At BetterWork we’ve been exploring why people inside companies behave in certain ways, choosing to make decisions about how they work that feel counter-intuitive and quite illogical to us, ways of working that are unsustainable for the people and generally not for the good of the business.
We started examining this in more detail and discovered that primary drivers of these behaviours are how, why and when people are rewarded and receive acknowledgement.
As a leader do you want the people in your company to:
1.collaborate better?
2. act in the best interests of the customer?
3. share their failures in order to collectively learn and grow?
Is this the case in your company at the moment? If not, ask yourself:
“How are we rewarding people inside the company, both emotionally and financially?”
Are people trying very hard to prove their value in unusual ways, such as yelling about being in crisis (and then about how we’re no longer in crisis because they saved the day) or by continually telling everyone how busy they are? Are they praised for putting out fires and staying late. Is their bonus or financial incentive linked to sales targets, tasks completed and positive feedback?
We’ve learned over time that our work has the most meaningful and impactful change when companies start to incentivise better behaviours in line with our interventions.
The best intentions of all teams are undermined by rewarding the wrong behaviours.
The below is our approach to rethinking rewards and encouraging better behaviours:
- Firstly, as a leader of a company or team you need to acknowledge that changing behaviours requires a deliberate and intentional approach.
- Start with the end in mind, by knowing what as a company you are trying to accomplish, what the measures of success are for you as a business. If you have unclear measures of success people will invent their own ideas of what’s expected of them (which leads to weird behaviours like sending mails at 2am so people know they’re a hard worker).
- Once you understand what success looks like: from a revenue, client experience, product innovation etc. perspective, spend time defining what team or individual behaviours would best enable this. Is it continuously improving the client experience? If yes, then having client experience measures in place that you need to be improving towards should be guiding the rewards structure. In meetings do people discuss the customer, do they obsess about improving their interactions?
- Now focus on rewarding these behaviours (this isn’t necessarily financial, social rewards are sometimes more powerful in driving behaviour). When someone talks about addressing a particular challenge or resolving something, is that acknowledged? Is this in any way linked to them staying late/ feeling compelled to yell about a crisis? If everyone leaves work and is able to go home and live a balanced life without a crisis happening, is that rewarded?
- Spend time reviewing your renumeration and incentive models. Does this encourage the kinds of work that will achieve your organisation’s end goals?
*We’ve created communal bonus pools for people development and client satisfaction in one of the teams we’ve worked with. This helped encourage cross company collaboration to improve those performance areas.
- Avoid rewarding the wrong things. Does your bonus structure encourage collaboration and sharing, or are you creating fiefdoms where people feel like they need to be the owners or custodians of valuable information to be rewarded. If this happens in your organisation, “thank goodness we had X who knew Y in the room otherwise we would’ve crashed and burned”, you’ve just rewarded X for keeping information to his or her self.
- Lastly, think about how you interact with your teams. Reflect on your own leadership style to understand what behaviours you’re encouraging in your own teams. Is this aligned with what is best for the company, and for them as people?
If you’d like to incentivise better behaviours in your company and rethink rewards, get in touch — team@betterwork.co.za
