
What Makes Employees Work Harder: Punishment or Pampering? - godarderik
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/what-makes-employees-work-harder-punishment-or-pampering/279071/
======
kabdib
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 sense of entitlement.

~~~
ryandrake
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.

~~~
rhizome
_What if your employees are simply mediocre performers?_

What if there was something that could motivate them to get better?

~~~
ktom
I would suggest that the best performers are internally motivated and not
externally motivated.

So ultimately if you could motivate them to be better, then by definition they
would be mediocre performers.

Based on my personal experience, I would not be surprised if you were to show
me a study that found a strong correlation between being internally motivated
and being considered a star performer.

~~~
calinet6
All people operate within a system, whether visible or not. Improve your
systems, improve your quality; regardless of your employees.

Besides, by definition, most of your employees will be average. Otherwise the
average would shift. Focus on bringing the whole bell curve up by improving
your systems and your management, rather than on terms you use for
individuals. You're better off optimizing your company and your management to
handle this diversity, since it's a natural result of a sample.

------
crazygringo
This debate has been around for half a century. It's far, far more nuanced
than this article suggests. Here's the original formulation of it:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y)

But it's not that Theory Y is necessarily "better". It depends on tons of
different variables. And there have been plenty more theories after X and Y...

~~~
ojbyrne
>And there have been plenty more theories after X and Y...

Specifically Theory Z - which can probably be summed up as "some combination
of both X and Y"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_Z](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_Z)

~~~
rhizome
Which is an instance of the Hegelian Dialectic, which is itself bullshit.

------
dsr_
Paying attention to people who are used to being ignored makes them do more.
Negative attention or positive attention, both work.

If, as management, you are ignoring your employees, you aren't doing your job
well.

Negative attention can produce short term positive results, because the
employee acquires focus. Long term, employees with self-respect will leave. If
you can replace them with a robot, you should do that ASAP.

Positive attention can produce both short and long term positive results, but
positive attention which is not earned will be converted into negative
attention when the employee figures out you are not sincere. Don't be a
hypocrite.

------
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.

------
Amadou
I skimmed the research paper and I don't think it says what the Atlantic
article claims. It looks like the paper's authors think making employee-theft
less cost-effective caused employees to make up the difference in their income
by working harder on tasks that also generated income for the company. That
doesn't mean they worked harder, just that they spent the same effort in
different areas.

Assuming their model is even correct (I didn't see an attempt to test the
model itself in this paper) that would mean jobs which are not associated with
easy theft would not benefit from getting the big brother treatment.

But that's just my evaluation based on skimming it.

------
benjohnson
It _really_ depends on the the employee.

Some thrive on open-ended projects, some thrive with bite-sized chunks of work
with quick feedback.

For me, as an employer, I tend to go look at their car. If it's a mess inside,
then I tend to lump them in the "needs quick feedback" category.

~~~
pestaa
This tip just made my day, thank you.

Now I'm not even sure I want to clean up my car inside.

------
mullingitover
If they have no other employment options, the answer to this question is
'yes.' If they have marketable skills, punishment will definitely make them
work harder...at finding a better class of employer.

------
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.

~~~
ArbitraryLimits
Bill Walsh might have said it also, but this football coach was probably
first:

"Bull Cyclone once said to Tommy Atkins, a player who became a career Marine,
'Tommy, there are two kinds of young men—those you have to kick in the pants
to get their potential and those you have to pat on the back. If you, as a
leader, make a mistake, you've done a great injustice. So be very careful and
decide as accurately as you can whether to kick or to pat.'"

See
[http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1...](http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1122011/)

------
InvisibleCities
The problem with "feel bad" motivation strategies is that they only really
work in the short term. Sure, putting tracking devices on employees increases
productivity right then, but after a few months, once the employees have
figured out how to game the system (or realize that the data from these
devices isn't being scrutinized, because performing that kind of rigorous data
analysis is expensive/time consuming), productivity will drop right back to
where it was before.

~~~
jdbernard
Or worse, because now they have easy metrics to justify their "work", and if
they were invested personally in the company you can bet they aren't now. Now
it is an us-vs-them situation where they feel justified by doing the bare
minimum as long as they satisfy the tracking methods.

------
ef4
Neither. What's even better (at least for creative workers like programmers
and designers) is autonomy and ownership.

~~~
Amadou
It has been a while - like 20 years - since I studied this, but I believe
Denning concluded the same thing even for factory line workers.

~~~
whacker
Its W. Edwards Deming.

------
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.

~~~
tcskeptic
Yes, this exactly, and observed in practice. Layoffs in non-union shops are
not done by seniority (Talking manufacturing here) they are done by relatively
objective measures of employee "goodness" things like attendance, piece
productivity, safety procedure compliance, etc. We (in manufacturing) know
this before the layoffs occur and account for it in financial and strategic
planning. We also account for it when hiring starts again. Not only will skill
levels go down, but far from the new folks arriving with universally great
attitudes and work ethics after having been unemployed for a while, the
incoming workers on average will be significantly less productive attitude
wise than the existing workforce. This will only gradually improve until the
next downturn. The newly hired who are truly terrible will probably get fired
in the interim, the newly hired who are mediocre will bump along and be the
first out the door during the next layoff. (And yes, the sad truth is that
cyclical layoffs are a fact of life for many manufacturing workers)

I assume that this would apply in other industries as well.

------
adammil
Many people I know, including me, simply need to know that the outcome of the
work matters. Shipping product that results in zero feedback is a motivation
killer. Even a little customer feedback provides an immediate productivity
boost whether the feedback is good or bad. Similarly, a back-office project
with no visibility or customer connection would be hell.

------
RougeFemme
Punishment works "well" in the short-term AND when the job market is bad AND
for jobs that are low-skill where the employees are treated as interchangeable
cogs. "Pampering" \- or in most cases, simply showing that you respect and
value your employees - works better in the long-term, regardless of the skill
level of the employees. But too many companies are focused only on the short
term.

------
teeja
The end of the article says, "If you're looking for a job, any job, try North
Dakota." The article that links to blames the great ND economy on oil.
[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-
geog...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-geography-of-
jobs-smart-policies-are-good-but-oil-is-better/279055/)

Energy's partly responsible. But there's a more important reason that NoDak
didn't suffer at all during the recession: its publicly-owned State Bank. It
remained sane and stable and crime-free while those traits were rare in the
other 49 states. Check it.

------
pacala
A sense of purpose. Long-term financial stability.

~~~
wffurr
You could think of this in terms of Maslow's hierarchy - those seeking self-
actualization should be the most productive. The trick is having both the
security and freedom to pursue work with purpose and then finding work with a
meaningful purpose that you identify with and are good at.

------
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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)

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

------
scotttobejoking
This one is a bit of a puff piece...

Workers work harder in a recession. No big surprise. But I fail to see a clear
link between a _recession_ and "punishment or pampering".

The one is a general climate which makes you value your job more, and the
other is an act of relationship between you and your employer. It's not at all
clear whether punishment or pampering is more effective at making you value
your job (or your employer) more.

I would suspect that a more valuable line of approach than looking at
recession statistics (who's going to manufacture a recession to get their
employees to stay?) would be to ask a parent of children whether to use the
carrot of the stick. They would probably point out that:

1)All their children are different and respond differently

2) _Both_ negative and positive feedback are needed, but at different times,
and in complicated ways.

Edit: clarity of language

------
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.

------
Sakes
This immediately reminded me of Dan Pink's - The puzzle of motivation - ted
talk.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html)

It focuses on how incentives affect the efficiency of creative jobs.

------
gesman
What makes an employer to think that harder == better?

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guerrilla
Neither, I found my answer here a while back:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work.html)

------
ArekDymalski
I find it ridiculous that in 21st century people still hope that there will be
one, easy-to-implement (and preferably instantly working and cheap as well)
answer to this question. There are several (at least 20) different
(de)motivators and each of us have his own configuration of them. But we still
have to listen to the stick or carrot debate. Sigh....

------
mrbgty
The type of job must make a big difference in whether 'feel-bad' works better
than 'feel-good'.

------
alan_cx
My to words are "respect" and "appreciation".

------
VladRussian2
employees working harder/better is just like an engine running more
powerful/faster. It is not necessarily translates into business/project
success, ie. the question is what this engine attached to, where the car (if
it is a car) is being driven to or may be it is just a snowplow moving snow
from one place to another and back, until sun shines and snow melts away :)

------
dredmorbius
My approach: nurturing, with sharp corrective feedback when necessary.

Technological and information processes are difficult to measure even in the
best cases. As systems theorist Dennis Meadows notes, there are simple
problems, in which solutions track monotonically better, and complex problems,
in which the long-run preferred solution presents costs and negative growth in
initial phases. We're willing to accept this for short-term projects with
well-established trajectories: a new business launch, building or
infrastructure construction. It's much more difficult to accept and sell such
approaches where the problem space is novel, where there's little experience
with it, where progress isn't particularly visible, and/or the timelines are
long (Meadows' principle work has been in the area of resource and population
limits, which expresses all of these characteristics).

My experience and observations are that:

\- People and organizations both prefer stability and predictability. If I
don't know from day to day that I'll have a job, that my door badge will work
(among the reasons I find them psychically deadening, and I've heard similar
views voiced unprompted by others -- "well, I've still got a job" as they
entered the building), my productivity _will_ suffer. Much of the shift of
pressure in the past 40 years or so has been of risk from organizations onto
individuals.

\- Consistency in feedback helps. This is difficult with complex systems, and
devising good metrics can be difficult. I've often provided harsh feedback for
systems I use (of late, Google+, though it's annoying me less, today, GNOME in
another H/N story). Though I'm doing so as someone _outside the control
structure of the organizations providing the service._ It's one thing to take
criticism from someone who can choose to stay or walk away, it's another when
it comes from someone who can tell you to walk. One of the interesting aspects
of Free Software development is that it very often divorces the technical
criticism and workflow from employment. A kernel developer can hop from job to
job, and still do the same work. They can be harshly criticized by Linus or
others on LKML, but those people have no ability to fire the developer, only
to make a decision to accept or not accept submissions.

\- Organizational sanity helps. However (see my first point) organizations
which themselves operate in high-risk environments are often poorly structured
to be able to shield their employees from those pressures (and if you find
yourself with management who succeeds in doing this, you've struck gold).
Returning to Meadows' work, one challenge we're all facing are decreasing
margins -- there was much more room for error in the 1950s - 1970s, it's
vastly thinner now.

\- I've had some experience working with children, and one of my observations
was that giving them a fair amount of latitude, but very clear boundaries,
seemed to maximize engagement, learning, independence, _and_ discipline. The
first time I really had to crack the whip I was amazed at how little
chastisement went a long way (it was an effort not to slip while delivering my
lecture). And it served to establish boundaries.

"Fair but firm" is what guides me. It doesn't work always, but it's a pretty
good start.

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VeejayRampay
Sorry to be so negative but what a moronic article.

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AnthonBerg
Stimulation stimulates!

