In the book Drive and in the course Inspiring and Motivating individuals are reported various suggestions related to the best practices to reward people. The best practices are based on what the researches in that field say.

The best practices are:

• If the work to be done is a routine:
  • ask yourself if it can be made more varied and connect the work to a purpose.
    • If yes give occasional unexpected rewards and praise people.
    • If not, give rewards but explain the scope of the work. Recognise that the task is boring and leave people the decision about how to do it.
• If the work to be done is not a routine, give occasional unexpected rewards and focus on satisfying autonomy, competence and purpose of the task.
• Rewards must be unexpected, otherwise they become ineffective.
• Rewards must be given only after the completion of the task.
• Payments should be sufficient in order to put the money out of the motivation bench.
• People with similar responsibilities should have similar wages.
• Similar jobs should be have wages similar to other companies.
• Pay a little more than the standard for that job.
• If there are factors that influence payments, they should be important and a little difficult to be reached.
• Rewards must be aligned to the desired behaviours.
• The timing of the reward is important and should be variable otherwise it become expected.

Intrinsic motivation is more effective than extrinsic motivation. However, in organisation extrinsic motivation through payment rewards are often necessary to motivate people. This because organisation sometimes have goals that do not always fit people goals and therefore payment rewards are a way to maintain people motivated. The risk of using only this kind of rewarding system is that if people find other organisation where payment rewards are higher, they likely change organisation.

Related Questions:

Related Topics:

• Motivation

References

• Drive | 2011 | Daniel Pink
• Inspiring and Motivating individuals | 2019 | University of Michigan by Coursera