The Working Week 79

This week, Wayne discusses incentives and motivation with Brooks Mitchell, a Professor of Management at the University of Wyoming and President of Snowfly.com, a company that uses gaming to promote reward and recognition.

As Brooks explains, this somewhat unconventional approach to reward and motivation is actually based on sound behavioural research - any human activity that is positively reinforced will be repeated.

In other words, workers will try harder and be more enthusiastic about achieving workplace goals if they can obtain instant rewards for their efforts.

Brooks argues that achieving better employee motivation in the workplace involves four major themes: immediate recognition, relevant incentive rewards, accountability and the behavior-changing power of intermittent positive reinforcement. It's also based on money, not merchandise – because money equals choice and can also be broken into small amounts.

It's certainly a novel idea, but with a third of incentive programmes actually decreasing performance, it's one that certainly shouldn't be ignored.

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