Man Bites Croc?

Applying root cause analysis to reward programs

Thu, 04/28/2011 - 09:25

Let me begin by saying that I have a great deal of respect for Mike Micklewright’s achievements and contributions in the realms of business, training, and writing. I feel the need, however, to explore the nature of his reasoning in reference to his “Croc of the Month” article published in Quality Digest Daily on March 10, 2011.

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In fact, my hackles went up from the first paragraph and little alarm bells rang in my head throughout the entire article.

Micklewright’s disdain for reward systems in general is well known, and though I’ve had reservations concerning his opinion on the subject, I feel that this particular piece unduly “smushes together” several concepts and warrants review.

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Comments

Submitted by Wondra on Tue, 05/03/2011 - 19:19

I think you have to consider what you really want out of the reward system and create the right path to get there, otherwise you may find yourself in a situation where "you get what you want, but you may not want what you get."  An example of this would be a safety program in which an entire team gets a reward, let's say, a case of beer for having no OSHA recordable injuries in a month.  If there is one injury, everyone in the facility does not get the case of beer that month.

The goal would be to improve safety, of course.  But the real result is that people hide injuries in order to get the beer, or more importantly, make sure their peers get the beer and that they are not rebuked because they "lost the safety beer" for everyone.  The people who created the reward program may not even be aware of this behavior, or worse, look the other way because they are rewarded, financially or otherwise, for the "results".

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