For about 134 years I’ve been suggesting that to be good at HR you should be good at humans. Operations managers and factory foremen needed to know about the machines they were charged with maintaining and running at peak efficiency and HR should be judged similarly. If you are in HR, you are responsible for making sure the machines of …
Incentive Program Design – Here’s your Big-A** Award!
Quick – how many milliliters of morphine should you give to dull the pain of surgery? Don’t know? Let’s try this –which chemotherapy drug do you give for cancer? Give up? Okay how about this one – should you take aspirin and Coumadin at the same time? Unless there is an MD, LPN, RN, NP or some other group of …
Big Bonuses—Good For Driving Everyday Performance?
Do big bonuses drive performance and behavior in general? I’ve always broken this question up into two camps: the sales and non-sales camp. First, the easy one—sales. We can split hairs and argue whether commission to salespeople is a bonus or part of an incentive plan that’s expected, but isn’t that what bonus plans are supposed to do—drive behavior? For me, …
The Bonus Rules
If you’ve been in HR for at least 30 minutes you’ve heard someone in your organization bitch about a bonus. It comes part and parcel with the gig – from the beginning of time when the first caveman decided he needed some additional incentive for his cave drawers and developed the 5 drawings and you get an extra brontosaurus burger …
Our Employees Are Addicted to Rewards
We can prattle on and on about whether intrinsic or extrinsic rewards are best. We can cite Dan Pink and we can cite the Incentive Research Foundation. We can talk all we want about whether incentives are great or not. Those are beliefs, opinions and interpretations. What isn’t an interpretation is that one of the main components of the brain’s …
The Cowell Corollary – American Idol and Performance Reviews
American Idol is an interesting little program. And an interesting study in performance evaluation.Each week, as contestants perform their hearts out in hopes of earning viewer votes, four judges wait to rip apart provide input on the contestants’ efforts. It’s a rather humbling experience for many. But the real study for me as a performance professional is what I’ve dubbed the Cowell Corollary. The …