Incentives send signals. Unfortunately, too often there is a conflict between what you say and what your incentives signal.
- You encourage teamwork, but incentivize individual success.
- You say you value autonomy, but punish deviation.
- You want innovation, but reward predictability.
- You talk about empoweremnet, but override decisions.
An incentive is a tool used to motivate people to do something they would not do otherwise. It can be used as a solution to a problem. We can use it to better understand why people do what they do.
When you push people to increase one dimension of their output, you can create unintended effects on the other dimensions.
You need to make sure what you incentivize is indeed what you want to encourage because sometimes incentives achieve the opposite of what they were designed for.
Such as the fine introduced to discourage parents from being late picking up kids in the kindergarten, that actually promoted late pickups. Before the policy, parents felt bad when they arrived late. Now parents could just pay to avoid the feeling of guilt.
You need to understand the psychology behind the incentives to make them work.
For instance, we have a tendency to settle for a smaller present reward rather than to wait for a larger one in the future. The idea is simple: "now" is very strong and hard to resist.
With behavior
change, the costs are now; the benefits are in the future. Therefore, make the
incentive not too far in the future. If someone changes their behavior in the
desired direction, give them an immediate reward.
