Increasing Employee Productivity the Right Way

Here is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make: Offer a bonus or reward as an incentive for instant employee co operation. Gestures of gratitude for a job well done are appropriate. Bribes to insure the job gets done well, are not.

For instance, let's imagine you have a pressing deadline to meet. Your client is important to your company, as his account is worth millions. Five volunteers from your staff have agreed to work overtime on Saturday. They have dutifully assembled, as promised, and are now going over the final details before carrying out your work orders. Your special customer requests your services quarterly, and his repeat business order is large. Gratefully, your client's basic instructions are also simple to execute. You feel anxious and pressured to complete this job without errors, and deliver by the client's tight deadline. Even though you designated a supervisor (one of the five employees) to check accuracy and quality, doubt and fear still linger. The entire operation has to run smoothly.

Panicked, you present your crew with the following proposition:" If you complete half of the order by Noon; I will buy your lunch and deliver it myself! Such a rash gesture-actually more like a bribe-was offered with sincerity and goodwill. Your agenda is simply to satisfy a good customer; which you plan to do by raising the groups awareness and sense of urgency towards their work; feeding them at your own expense. I would venture to say that you've employed this strategy many times before. And, I'm also willing to bet it works like a charm-every time. The questions you should be asking yourself are as follows:

1. Are my employees aware of their true potential, or are they lazy and indifferent?
2. When I offer an incentive why does productivity rise significantly? (There are only two answers to choose from):
A). They appreciate the gesture, breaking their backs to make my quota out of gratitude. Or, Most likely:
B). They easily meet my quota; until a big job makes me I'm ill at ease, in which case they bait me, working at a snail's pace in order to extort extra perks they neither earn, nor deserve..

Let's get back to Saturday.The work order you're fretting over, calls for the production of 1400 duplicated items-small medical manuals, to be exact. A few easy steps and five shop employees are sufficient for assembly. Production started at 5:00 AM. Two hours later at 7:00 AM, you

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