I’ve been reading and watching reports on conditions at places like Amazon warehouses. In my understanding, workers are motivated/incentivized to meet performance wickets, like delivering/processing X packages in Y time, mostly through negative means – if they don’t meet their wickets, then they might receive negative reports or even be fired. And this means that bathroom breaks can increase the chances of failure to meet these criteria. In my understanding, there are positive incentives, but these are pretty weak, like a fast food gift card.
Is this really the best way to motivate and incentivize performance? In my work experience, workers do much better, especially when it’s a team effort, when the incentive is positive – positive reinforcement and financial incentives. Would this work for these big warehouses? Something like an extra 50 cents per hour if wicket X is met, or $1 for a higher wicket, etc.? For anyone who’s worked in this type of job, what incentive would make for the best performance?
Negative reinforcement is also useful, quite clearly, but in my experience it’s useful only for truly unacceptable things – negligence, failure to meet the very basics of the job, toxic behavior, etc. Not rushing around and doing the work but missing a wicket because one had to go to the bathroom and it took 10 minutes instead of 3.
Back in high school, I had a summer job in a coat factory. Imagine summer in a non-climate controlled warehouse, lugging arm fulls of heavy wool coats up and down portable metal steps to hang coats on multi-tier storage racks.
What motivated me were breaks to go sit outside in the sun because it was actually cooler than inside. It was also quite excellent motivation to get into college and not have to spend the rest of my life in a coat factory or something equally soul crushing.
So to answer the OP :In my case, positive re-enforcement would not help because the work conditions were so horrendous that the last thing you wanted to do was to work harder and longer (without breaks). Negative re-enforcement would be even less effective. Of course, this was a summer job for me so I wasn’t exactly vested. That said, the full time workers were complete slackers and/or completely worn down by the drudgery of their work. They would squabble about who got to drive the forklift next to load/unload the incoming trucks.
I watched a recent Vice episode on Amazon warehouse fulfillment center workers and it was clear that the humans were working for the robots. Completely dehumanizing environment in which even the human jobs were in the process of being replaced by better technology/robotics.
Set team goals.
Set individual goals.
Reward with incentive pay bonuses, monthly or quarterly.
Poor performance results in the loss of your job.
With unemployment rates at historical lows, there are plenty of people that would love to have your job.
Listen. I can live with the answer being no sometimes but at least actually hear what I have to say.
Pick one standard of work. When one manager rewards me (with a small bag of chips) and the next day a different manager threatens and punishes me for the same damn thing, I find it ----------- not useful.
Quit trying to turn us against each other. Our bosses actually announced for a week that they would financially reward any of us who turned in another coworker for “not working as hard as he or she could”. Huh? OK - someone clips some product, yeah I’m going to let you know. Someone threatens someone else I am calling security. But you want me to write up someone just because I THINK they could have moved faster? Whaddafuk? PS – it didn’t work. Our production fell off for the next month.
the easiest one; quit the lies and games. Sometimes we have more people than we do work and the manager needs to get people off the clock; what we call voluntary time off. We are promised 18 hours pay if we are scheduled for 5 shifts but if you volunteer to leave early that promise is off the table. Its part time work and most of us don’t have a burning need to be there. Some do; those between jobs. But for most of us its a few extra bucks. If you flat-out explained it folks would usually be happy to bail. But no ------- we have to make it a game.
“You VTO now or I’m keeping you here seven hours”. Dude, after 5 hours legally forcing us to remain would qualify as kidnapping.
“Go ahead and once you scan down you can clock out” and then I’ll just enter it as you took VTO.
“I saw you drop that package; you either VTO or I’m going to write you up” because that’s just what kind of asshole I am.
I had a boss lie to my face and I semi-called him for it. His reply was “Look, I just follow orders the same as you”. The old Adolf Eichmann defense. Really? You think that helps?
Actually give employees a place where they can voice their complaints. Da Jungle (as I lovingly call it) has a strict open door policy ------ the door is open any time you want to walk your ass out it and find another job. Ask to talk to the site lead and you will be fired or given every shit job we got. Call the “confidential HR number” and you get fired. Yeah – I know its confidential. But I also know that 11 of the 12 people who used it this year were canned for meaningless or made-up reasons the following week. So I have a feeling what they call confidential and what I call confidential are two different stories. And when you see your site HR sitting in the breakroom and hear them filling in the managers on just who is complaining about who ---------
I could go on all day.
It differs from place and time. You have a fantastic management team like we did when we first opened and there isn’t a better job out there. Seriously; we had people pass up jobs with a better potential because it was that rewarding in terms of pride and being a part of a team. But with bad bosses it can be worse than slavery. A slave knows he at least has some value; he can be sold off. For us we feel more like toilet paper; to be covered in shit and tossed away. And you feel powerless to change it.
And since saying all this can get me fired ------------- lets keep it here please. Seriously. I can name a dozen people who got canned because one of the Company Bots found something posted on the net. First rule of Da Jungle is – you don’t talk about Da Jungle. An early friend got fired for saying how good it was! But he spoke to a reporter without permission and that just isn’t allowed. That kind of stuff doesn’t help either.
Actually; no. We needed roughly 150 warn bodies for the next couple weeks. We got less than 100 by taking anything with a pulse who was not openly drooling or sharpening their knives. Right now with most folks working, things not looking that terrible, and us having the reputation we do -------- even at twice our state minimum wage its a hard sell. Folks can go to any of the other places around us, get treated like a human, and only make a buck or two less than I do. So that is what they do.
I see kopek has already answered this, but specifically: this is not how low unemployment works. There are relatively few people who want to work who are not working, and many jobs that are going begging, especially jobs with low appeal. Therefore it’s workers who have the choices, not employers.
First of all, make sure that the behaviors your are incenting are those that drive the success of the business. For instance, too many call centers incent agents on average hold time and call duration - neither of which relate to customer satisfaction and both of which can be maniplulated by the CC agent. A much better (IMHO) metric would be first call resolution. It is more difficult to track, which is why most companies don’t incent agents on that metric, but it is really what drives call center success. Determine those behaviors that make your business successful, and reward them. Not easy, but any other approach is counterproductive.
Funny you would mention the place next door to us that just signed a huge deal with Walmart. I am seriously considering it but ----- its full-time and right now I’m not that interested in full-time. I work basically because I cannot watch television and I don’t have the discipline to actually go to a gym. 18 to 30 hours is best and right at 20 would be perfect. Da Jungle gets me out of the house, get a good physical workout, lets me make friends across a really broad reach of humanity - and sometimes gives me a good chuckle when the bosses are especially stupid. It doesn’t mean I won’t quit — or won’t end up fired sooner or later. But in a place where 7 weeks earns you the rank of seasoned employee my 5 years almost makes me an exhibit in a freak show. And I actually kinda like it!
It’s hard to find one thing that motivates everyone. Even when money is no object, some people just don’t care. Some of the things that motivated me in the past:
Not my immediate boss, but his boss coming out and acknowledging me for a job well done. It was a quick handshake and “good job the other day”, no one else was around, but it still made me feel good.
My immediate supervisor used to buy freezer pops out of his own pocket, throw them in the freezer and tell everyone to help themselves. He didn’t have to do it, but he did it anyway and while those things are fairly cheap, it still made me feel good because “he thought of us”.
Bosses that use the terms “we” and “us” rather than “me” or “mine”…It made me feel like we were all a team.
Bosses that would defend their people rather than throw them under the bus when a superior would accuse me or someone of doing something wrong.
Those were all motivators for me. Some people don’t care for those things and would rather get a gift card or something tangible, I was a little easier to please I guess.
In my company I’m friends with the director of operations for the whse. They seem to get a lot of food rewards - pizza party, etc., when the goals are met for the facility. I think a major thing is making sure the folks are trained sufficiently (we distribute medications, and picking accuracy is extremely important) and that the individual goals are obtainable. From what I’ve heard about the local Amazon whse, the goals are set so high you’re constantly running. Not just working at a consistent pace, but literally running. Our folks have metrics to meet, but it’s much more important that they be accurate than fast.
My company doesn’t have part-time positions, it’s all full time, at least 40 hrs, with benefits from the day you start and 21 days of PTO the first year. Air-conditioned (although working in the cooler isn’t fun, I’m sure). It’s still a warehouse job, but I teach the warehouse folks Excel, to give them the skills to move into the office jobs, and most seem happy. Of course, those that aren’t know they can go literally next store and get a whse job there.
Good pay (not just competitive), full time employment and benefits would be a pretty solid place to start. Seems to be the industries that struggle terribly with this stuff are the same ones that are squeezing margins and people in every brutal way possible. Asking how to get a near-minimum wage worker to perform better is ignoring the basic problem.
They aren’t the only guilty party out there, but they make for an easy case study. They set goals…people meet those goals…they determine the goals were set too low…they increase the goals…rinse, lather, repeat. The business rule that you must always be improving is simply toxic. There literally is a maximum output but a spreadsheet doesn’t really communicate that fact very well when it come to people.
No, yes, and its more complicated than that all at once.
Our goals are set in terms of “takt time” - the time required to produce a perfect unit of work. And on their face mostly they are reasonable. Except — things happen beyond your control. I am expected to be able to unload 6k boxes from a 53 foot trailer in 90 minutes, making sure each label is up and reasonably centered. Actually, most times, I can do it faster than that. If – IF IF IF – the person who loaded the trailer built nice clean faces/walls and the load didn’t get abused in transit. If the trailer came from New Jersey I know I’m screwed because all 6k are basically going to look like they were dumped in through the roof. And there will be damaged boxes which slow me down. And missing labels. And spilled rancid soy milk (my joy of joys tonight) and ------- I am screwed for the next three hours. My hope is that I get something else where I can make up the shortfall. I actually care about the customer so I don’t send on broken stuff or cut corners as most would and I still manage. Our takt times haven’t changed very much in 5 years; what has changed is the quality of the ball we’re handed. That has gone in the dumper.
And therefor the quality of what we pass along to the USPS has gone down. And to the customer in the end.
Our managers aren’t really paid all that well; the big money is from production incentives and bonuses that apply only to them. And their bosses change the contest and the rules monthly. Last month it was total-production-per-hour. So all the bosses were basically “screw the customer, grab it, toss it, move it along”. This month its things going to the wrong location - so this month we can move a little slower just as long as we remain 100% error free. Next month Lord knows what the game will be.
That is where it gets frustrating. I know what it takes to do perfect work; I CAN DO perfect work. And then I am ordered to do lousy work. I get paid the same and our building boss gets a free vacation to Europe. Until the end of the month when the rule book changes again. Customer centric? Maybe somewhere in Seattle they are. Me? I’ve seen managers personally load things they knew the customer would have to return just to get the scan/number/point. The peasant gets blamed and the boyar gets triple his pay in incentives.
If business is a game think of Da Jungle as rugby. Without the teamwork.
If the managers are given incentives to meet specific goals that somehow diverge from “perfect work” then that definition of perfect is inaccurate. I don’t think anyone needs reminding that perfection as a standard is totally and completely unreasonable. You don’t need to go to B-school to sort that one out.
The reason that managers are given changing goals is a tactic as old as time. They incentivize a focus on a specific aspect of work, knowing that it will have costs elsewhere. Their expectation is that the operation will improve by X amount in that aspect over the short term. This is good, but not the ultimate goal. The goal is that you’ll have developed a new permanent habit in that regard. The next month you’re given a different goal and you adjust, but you don’t adjust all the way back to where you started. You adjust so that you’re now at only 0.3X better in the original aspect while improving in the new area of focus by Y amount. They are now getting a free 0.3X improvement. When that 0.3X improvement deteriorates, they rerun the program to get everyone back up to X again and repeat the cycle.
It’s not stupidity. They are manipulating human nature and playing the long game. This is cheaper than hiring good people and retaining them. All else being equal, a long tenured employee will always operate at the highest efficiency, but that costs more than grinding down a rotating flock of disposable drones though meaningless incentive programs like this.
Bear in mind, folks, that the OP asked about “incentives” not “motivators” - they are 2 very different things. Motivators are things that are more tangential to the companies immediate success, but make employees happier - things like salary, benefits, full time hours, etc. fit into this category. Incentives are things that don’t necessarily contribute to employee happiness, but directly drive the success of the business - x widgets completed in y minutes at z quality level or sales quotas, for example.
A company that incents but doesn’t motivate will likely see high turnover. A company that motivates but does not incent will likely not exist long.
Again, IMHO, maybe. There is a book out there called “The Anything Store” – it is worth a read. JB basically went with a more Japanese/Chinese model hoping to build something where the company and your family were at least equal if not “company first”. And with the “Eleven Commandments” and the other things we had up until about 5 years ago it worked. If someone made it through Month 3 the chances were very good they would still be there Year 3. Usually if someone left (especially in management) is was not totally voluntary.
On the goals being unreasonable; that is by design but in the same way it is for say Marine boot camp. The jobs I do look impossible to you that first day you walk in the door. But ------ if you are lucky enough (now) to get trained in how they were designed to be done, you have a little luck from up the supply chain, and you half try, they are possible. But barely.
Again, going to the Marines -------- you will love it and you will hate it and that is the intention. But it is never dull.
YEAAAAAAHHHHH!