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Nonmonetary Incentives and the Implications of Work as a Source of Meaning (aeaweb.org)
From a research paper [PDF]: Many workers care about more than financial compensation in their job. Nonmonetary incentives often matter, too. A firm's mission and the design of one's job can create meaning and purpose for employees. As a result, firms will have reason to care about meaning of work. We believe economists can usefully contribute to the debate about the implications of meaningful work. We are not arguing that financial compensation is unimportant. Lazear (in this volume) provides an excel- lent review of monetary incentives in certain organizations. But we believe that in order to manage modern organizations and understand the future of work, studying workers' nonmonetary motives will be crucial.
I just want money. If you don't pay me enough money, I'm not coming into work.
"God bless America"
was invented by false and unknown prophet.
"America must bless Jesus, son of God and Mary"
I care about money. The more, the better. Any extraneous shit comes after you have PAID ME.
Good managers are rewarded for retaining and motivating people without paying them anything else. (Early in my career I was told by managers that I was "hard to read" or that "they weren't sure what fired me up"; that made the "f u pay me" conversation easier.)
Why is it so difficult for economists to acknowledge that people may and do derive value from things other than money? Psychologists have been showing this for decades now. There is an abundance of research on both sides of the coin. On the one hand, people may totally not care about money when they, for instance, work on things they find interesting and which aligns with personal values. On the other hand, the argument that monetary incentives undermine core values is also not true when money aids people in doing what they love (e.g., steve jobs and apple).
Are economists afraid that when they admit that non-monetary cues are valuable to people the world economy collapses?
This sounds like a white-collar issue, of which most slashdot readers are. But ask any blue-collar worker if incentives are worth more than money and the expected answer will be obvious.
https://youtu.be/FFrag8ll85w?t...
... can dry the sap outta one's vein. Don't fall for it. There is no indication that there is a purpose to anything in the Universe, including the Universe itself. Beware! Don't say you weren't warned.
outside the top 10-15% of jobs. I mean, we have nurses striking because their pay is too low, something I don't think I've seen in 30+ years.
This would be an interesting conversation if we had single payer healthcare. More so if we had basic income. In other words if all or a majority of people had their basic needs met. But in a country where 45,000 people die every year and overtime pay isn't guaranteed anymore this comes off as a bunch of managers trying to figure out how they get can 80 hours of value for 40 hours pay.
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"We are not arguing that financial compensation is unimportant."
Yes you are. And I've heard crap like this from bosses all my life. Even heard one once tell his employees if all they care about is money then they should leave. People left, by the way. And that business wound up failing a few years later when the asshat couldn't find any employees to work for 1/4 of what they were worth or less.
I suppose you COULD argue it's not the money that's important, but the sustenance, shelter, and transportation it buys sure as hell is.
Many workers care about more than financial compensation in their job
It'd be nice to be thanked for working our fucking balls off for the sole benefit of the company execs and shareholders yeah.
But let's not forget work is simply a means to survive, nothing more. Those that define their lives by working are in the minority and are, to the rest of us at least, borderline insane. We toil for our corporate masters in return for money which is then given to other corporate masters in return for making our lives pleasant.
In a marketplace where skill X earns Y dollars per time period, people will prefer working at a place where those non-monetary incentives are "better".
What's "better" for one person, may not be better for another. There are lots of things, from flex time to beer reviews, that can cause workers to appreciate one workplace more than another.
Compensation is important.
But as they say, find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
Getting paid a few percent more to go to a job I hate? No thanks.
Compensation is the only reason I ever have worked.
This kind of article seems to be arguing that management can appease appalling work conditions with a pat on the back, not actually rewarding them for accomplishments.
That being said, working with people you like and respect makes work less stressful and sometimes even fun.
If you're getting paid poorly, with people you would happily kill if you could only get away with it, it's probably way beyond time to leave.
Is there anything else beyond the dream of "making it" shown over and over again on media, and then, the dream never becomes true and the compensation patterns set in... just not to admit that one has been just screwed over for good?
...
There may be other countries where actual research is done on human fulfillment and happiness, in the US, in case you ever tried?
Result: Chastised, not taken serious, outcast suspected of "nastiness" and what else have you....
Look at the homeless - humans born to this planet like you and me, just not able to make it or destined for failure from - any reason is good for justification -
Will see what happens in the coming decades with the earth-ship turns quicker and quicker into the vortex of self-destruct... maybe ready for another try?
My guess: Too late honey, missed the train...
"From a research paper". Then copy-paste word for word from the paper. Outstanding editorial work, let's not even bother to attribute anyone with anything.
I gladly accept stock options, company car, company jet, real estate, rare metals, free vacations, use of yachts, hookers and other perks just like our bosses.
In individualist capitalist societies, all social structures are broken. Nations, tribes, friendships, romances, families, it all breaks down. The only social institute that remains is work.
This causes people to seek purpose in their work, to identify themselves with it, to hate those who do not work as hard.
This is all very convenient for the ruling caste, a new form of religion, bypassing all stupid rituals, enslaving people directly, while they thank you for it.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Flexible hours? Telework? Job security? 10K a year? 20K a year? 30K a year? Excellent, we can share less of the profit with you by offering those terms.
I want fair compensation but I also want and have a job that I enjoy and which I think does something with a positive impact on the world. Iâ(TM)ve turned down higher paying jobs because they didnâ(TM)t offer these things
If the only thing in life you can see any value in is money, I feel sorry for you, because you'll never be satisfied. Money is only a means to an end. If you chase money as though it were the end until itself, you'll be forever chasing, trying to get more money in order to finally be satisfied. But no amount of money is ever enough, because it doesn't provide satisfaction, contentment.
Just look at all the multi-millionaire stars of stage and screen who have committed suicide, or otherwise ruined their lives. They've had tons of money, yet life was so empty death seemed the only way out.
Or perhaps you didn't notice the summary says people value non-monetary things TOO. Nobody said money isn't useful, and even important. They said it's not the only thing that is important.
I could switch jobs and earn probably 50% more, at least 35% more easily. I don't do that because money isn't the only thing important to me. Time with my family is important. My job provides me important time with my family in multiple ways. They let me work from home, so I can have breakfast with my daughter instead of sitting in traffic. They give me time off no questions ask whenever I need it. Actually last week I tried to ask my boss if it was cool for me to take the next day off and he couldn't even understand how that was a question. If I wanted to take a day to go to the water park with my family, that was 100% up to me - I just needed to tell him, not ask him. They respect my work hours vs home hours and don't expect me to be working at 8PM.
My boss and my company treat me with respect. They ask me "are you okay with doing it this way?", or even "how do you think we should it?", rather than dictating from on high.
Our company had a conversation about what we want to do to improve the world. We don't want to sell just another product like the others, that doesn't really benefit anyone. We want to do something different, something we can believe in as our work doing a little something to make the world a slightly better place.
A year ago I thought I might have to switch jobs because I wasn't sure I could trust my new boss. I don't want to work for someone I don't trust. That matters to me. It turns out he has earned some trust, so I'm still there. Trust and honestly matters.
For many years I ran my own businesses, with a few employees. I work for a much larger, much more stable, company now, because stability matters. It gives me peace of mind. (For further peace of mind, I also have a backup, another large, stable company I could switch to if needed).
My job let's me learn and grow, working on different things, and gives me some flexibility in what I want to work on. Learning and growing are important to me.
I could go on and on, but you get the gist.
Like stocks?
Seriously, let's be honest here: Show me ONE C-level that cares about mission statement, meaningful work, job design or any other bullshit-feelgood wording and we'll talk about it.
Can't find one?
Guess why.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
said this. Worth reading about him, he's the guy that coined the term 'knowledge worker'.
Of course compensation is important. But a job you like doing is equally important for a meaningful life.
Think about the hours you spend at work, commuting and sleeping. Not that much time left for other things. Meaning, your work is a big part of your life. It is in my opinion important to spend it on work you like doing, otherwise life would become miserable.
I have a friend in a rather boring job who says: “I work to make other things possible”. Such as a nice holiday destination etc. But at the same time he doesn’t enjoy most of his waking hours.
I work at my 3rd employer, since this month I work there for 20 years. Yes, the compensation is ok, but I only stayed so long because most of the time I truly enjoy it, find it interesting, challenging and with opportunities to meet great people.
This is so not true, money isn't everything. How short sighted and narrow minded can you be? I'm not in for the money.
I'm in for the stock options.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Probably top management (or shareholders) mostly care about the bottom line. Or worse: nothing but the bottom line. But even then: hiring workers from a low-wage country that only care about the pay, could be worse for that bottom line than hiring workers from a higher-wage country if they care about things besides pay. Likewise if that decision affects customers' perception of the company.
So even assuming the worst for management's motives, having a look at those non-monetary incentives could be beneficial for the bottom line. Not to mention other yardsticks along which a company's performance might be measured.
Nice try boss, but I'm not taking a pay cut. I'm ready to live in the Star Trek universe though, preferably a nice slice of TNG.
is that they're having trouble making ends meet. Given what student loans are like these days and the high cost of living in a lot of areas I can believe it. Nurses are one of those essential services you need even when the average cost of a house is $500k+. Like school teachers, police and fire department. People living in those communities want those services but they don't want to pay the people providing them enough to live where they work.
People have started using the word "gentrification" but I think we need something better to describe what happens when the working class are squeezed out of an area but the well to do and rich still want their services.
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So you want time off at the right seasons for traveling to each destination? How do you feel about getting work calls while traveling with your family? How about working 40 hours while traveling, as many people do?
Do you like to travel in a van, or in first-class on airliners? Do you enjoy spending time around other travelers, rather than homebodies?
I dare say your work can have quite an effect on your travel.
Yeah my work tried that. When I got back they asked why I didn't answer my phone. I asked how one answers the phone under several hundred feet of rock or on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. No answer.
Was in the city sightseeing but that's not relevant.
I donâ(TM)t feel sorry for you. If youâ(TM)ve decided that what you spend â8 hours a dayâ(TM) doing is only worth some small number of $, no one will be able to help you escape having to do that. Every Single Day. Best of Luck
This is an example of different people having different values and preferences. I very much encourage my co-workers to call me, for a number of reasons.
At my job, we each have our own area of expertise and responsibility. Especially with my 20 years of both experience and constant study, there are certain things which are very much in my domain and either I care very much how it's done, or I have significantly more knowledge or experience about a certain thing (such as about code that I wrote).
I very much value efficiency, getting a good value, more bang for the buck. Therefore it bugs me when I find out that someone spent 8 hours trying to figure out something I could have told them in four minutes. I'd much rather answer their call - I'm probably driving (Bluetooth) or sitting at some social gathering I don't care about anyway, so their call is a welcome break from the boredom. It's just far more efficient to ask me, sometimes.
Other times, I've come back from being gone, or just from concentrating on other work, and found that a co-worker has made a big mess which could have been avoided with a five-minute conversation, because they were stretching too far outside their limits*.
Sometimes I have to clean up their mess. Other times the situation doesn't allow me to clean it up, so I have to live with their mess. I'd rather take the phone call.
I'm ALSO able to say "I'm a bit busy right now, but I can call you back in two hours", or even "I'm going to have to work with you on that when I get back to the office. There are some traps there that might bite you, so it might be a good idea to wait."
I can totally understand people not wanting you be disturbed though!
* In my experience there is a "right" amount of stretching one's abilities. Just like with physical fitness, fitness experts tell us to stretch our muscles, but don't stretch so far that it hurts - pain indicates damage. I'm not saying people should never do more than they've done before. Studies in education indicate learning happens when people go just a little beyond what they know well - not when they are in deep over their head.
> Me, I show up, work hard for 8 hours, and expect a check
> every two weeks. That is the extent of my requirements.
If that's that the extent of your boss's requirements, great. You've got a nice work environment.
* It took many years, but the principle has been established that female employees are not required to be their male boss' s sex partners. Now all we have to do is establish that male employees should not be required to be their male boss's beer buddies. It's glossed over with euphemisms like "after hours teambuilding excercises", but it basically comes down to cruising the strip joints, crawling the pubs, and getting home totally plastered at 2:30 AM in the morning.
* "work hard for 8 hours" is fine. Not 12 hours day-in day-out without overtime, and being on call 24x7 even when on vacation.
* Mandatory Fecesbook accounts. Someone please tell the HR-cunts that being an overgrown 13-year old girl who needs to constatnly post selfies does not constitute the one true way to live.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
None of the places I shop at take stock options as payment. That is why money comes first, everything else anywhere after that.
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You shop in the wrong places, pleb! ;)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're hardcore man. I'm one of those SJW snowflakes that would prefer not to show up for Christmas, or any other public holiday.
Who am I kidding, on top of that I also prefer not to show up for 40 days a year and to have the flexibility to work from home.
This is a not-so-subtle wedge to attempt induce learned helplessness in workers by conditioning them to accept the idea that they should stay in their place and accept lower wages using some variant of "your reward will be in heaven".
Lazear (in this volume) provides an excel- lent review of monetary incentives in certain organizations.
excel- lent ??
The problem with these articles are that bosses will read them and then say "wow, I don't have to give anyone a raise, because they're motivated by other things." No, the point of this article is that if you have someone who is already paid at market-rate, then you may need to be more creative in how you reward them. But your employees know that they can't pay the rent with "great job!" certificates and being given more training classes.
Although if you pay them poorly, then some of your employees will use those extra training classes to pay their rent - at a new employer.
In other news, a random PDF I can link to says some people are looking into stuff.
You live in bizzaro world. Forcing female employees to sleep with you had always been frowned on even if it and associated behaviors have been cracked down on harder.
Forced to drink with boss? Say no pussy. If that's too hard just say you have other plans. Are you in Japan or something? You know people say no there too?
Mandatory facebook accounts?
HAHAHAHA
Oh god you live in the darkest universe I hope you find the stargate and escape one day.
How many of you have had title inflations? Oh, you're not a programmer, you're a developer, a designer, a fill_in_the_blank. I mean, really, to janitors get paid more by having a title of "sanitary engineer"? Do they get more respect?
Of course not. And do you *really* think that upper management gives a flyin' fart about you, as long as you're willing to do "whatever it takes"? And even then, how much are they going to show you that it matters, in terms of *MONEY*?
Horse hockey. As a datapoint, I think it was in Studs Terkel's book from the late 70's, Working, that he mentioned a study showing that 80% of EVERYONE wasn't just unhappy in their job, but actively hated it. You - are you all wild and enthused when you come back to work Monday morning? Is it as important to you as the weekend, or the holiday, and how you spent that?
If people determine meaning from their jobs, they have far more fundamental problems!
> That balance point is different for different people
It is indeed different for different people. Most people probably don't realize the extent to which you CHOOSE that point.
If you're making over about $25,000, you are in the top 2% highest income in the world - you're rich. Above that, you're deciding "I'm going to give up X in order to be even more rich". If you're reading this, you probably already have a very high income. Income-wise, you're among the richest people in the world. You may still be living paycheck to paycheck by blowing $6.50 on a latte every day, and $180/ month for 650 TV channels, but that's a choice too. You *could* have $100,000 in the bank at your income level.
Well, to quote Montana Max (only because that was where I first heard it)...
o/~ The best things in life are free
But you can give them to the birds and bees.
I need my money.
That's what I want... o/~
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"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More on Dan Pink and his writings: https://www.danpink.com/about/
Alfie Kohn also writes on the topic of intrinsic motivation
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
https://www.alfiekohn.org/puni...
I put together a reading list of related ideas here:
"High Performance Organizations Reading List"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Of course, appropriate compensation is important in a society like the USA that has so many exchange transactions (as opposed to subsistence, gift, and planned transactions). Like Dan Pink says, people need to be paid enough to "take money off the table" as an issue. And for some people who like to work independently, saving up money is a way to buy their own time to work on things they care about.
But once money is off the table, these sorts of non-monetary issues affect productivity:
* Purpose (Finding meaning in what you do in how it affects people and the rest of the world)
* Autonomy (being able to make decisions about what you do and how you do it)
* Mastery (personal growth in technical skills and other areas)
* Community
* Infrastructure
Dan Pink talks about the first three in the video above.
Community is related to shared purpose, but I feel is a different thing in itself about how people relate to each other and have fun together. While I feel it problematical to ask employees to travel long distances for special events or to give up evenings or weekends for "team building exercises", a company that uses some of the work day to build community is likely making a good investment. Those can be relatively simple things like lunch-and-learns, holiday parties in the late afternoon, special lunches with invited guests, and so on. Even something like a regular "all hands" meeting to discuss what is going on in the company can help build community. Enjoyable training sessions like using appropriate humor in communications could also help. Even just starting voice or video chats ten minutes before the appointed time so people who show up early can chat briefly about stuff they are doing outside of work can make a difference. But community is not any one thing -- it is about the whole as a culture and also strengthening many individual one-to-one relationships.
Infrastructure overlaps with "Autonomy" to an extent -- but larger organizational choices can make a big difference for software developers; for example:
* The process choices -- e.g. see David Thomas on moving beyond "Agile" to "Agility"
* The tool/language/library choices -- e.g. in the web space there are so many poorly thought out overly-complex systems being adopted like Angular from big-name herd effects. Contrast such overly-complex systems with the idea of simplicity like in "Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey (developer of Clojure) or ideas by Chuck Moore (developer of Forth) or by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls (with Smalltalk) or Leo Horie (with Mithril.js/HyperScript) and Adam Morse (with Tachyons.css). You don't have to use these specific languages or libraries to learn to appreciate things from the perspective of appropriate simplicity as the ultimate elegance, which can then be applied to whatever you are stuck with for legacy reasons.
* Having the appropriate tools you need to do your job (e.g. adequate computing, adequate displays, an appropriate workspace, good audio/visual communications, etc.)
And of course the specific relation an employee has with a manager makes a huge difference, given it is often said people
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Companies show appreciation with dead Presidents. It's the only thing that actually matters. Which is why CEOs go for that above all else; in fact, all executive compensation ultimately comes down to just that. If you're the sort who can be made to love your slavedriving job by just giving you a few "atta-boys" or "certificates of appreciation" printed on the company laser printer, you're an idiot.
That being said, not all compensation is cash. More time off ? Certainly a motivator for many (including me) - but ultimately can be assigned a cash value. Better office conditions (get rid of the open office floor plans) ? Free food ? Flex time scheduling ? Telework ? All these have value to employees - and all are going to cost something. Some may well be a better "bang-for-the-buck" than just giving more cash. But Title inflation ? Only of value if you leave your current job and use the glorified title to... you guessed it... get more MONEY from the next place. Of course, with everyone doing it it's actual value is often quite a bit lower than one might expect.
The whole thing reeks of a few academics trying to justify their existence.
And failing.