Salaries are clearly a very important part of work for job seekers, employers and employees alike. When we go to work, more often than not we are exchanging our time for a salary of a monetary value. Daniel Pink, who has authored various terrific books (including my personal favorite ‘A Whole New Mind’) has recently published a new book called ‘Drive’ for which I found an interesting review ‘Drive’ author Daniel Pink: Raises make bad motivators. This was shortly followed by a blog post from Daniel Pink clarifying his stance on salary raises and their relevance when it comes to motivating staff.
In his post ‘Raises *do* matter’ it is clearly not as black and white situation as perhaps it once was – pay them more and they will work harder. Pink highlights that employees will not succumb to childish practices such as “If-then” rewards — “If you do something great, then you’ll get a raise”, which he views as being dangerous.
Pink is an advocate of paying people well and ensuring there is a certain amount of equitability amongst employees for similar roles to keep people motivated. However, I would suggest that for some roles, such as sales, an incentive or bonus scheme can be very effective (i.e. the carrot and stick approach). This may not translate well into all professions and so requires us to look at the topic of incentives on a profession (and potentially individual) case by case basis. Pink concludes his post with “The best use of money is to take the issue of money off the table . . . Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.” No doubt there is some truth in this but in reality we all have bills to pay; have career, educational and financial ambitions; etc which means that remuneration is never too far from our thoughts and can be a good motivator.
Share your views on the topic – are you motivated by salary increases and/or other incentives at work?
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