Page 54 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Reward and Recognition Programs Don’t Work

performers and causes their morale to decrease. Do you really
want a program that adds more stress to your supervisors and
takes them away from their primary job of increasing employee
productivity? Ironic, isn’t it?

Reason 8: Programs Foster Cheating
My father always told me, “Don’t make people into cheaters.”
Growing up, I never quite knew what this meant, but I finally
do: Don’t create circumstances under which good people will
be tempted to break the rules. Unfortunately, this is a frequent
issue with reward and recognition programs. Just look at the
tube socks example. Supervisors and employees violated serious
safety procedures for the sake of winning socks!
Cheating or deception of some form tends to occur in most
programs. Examples range from the fairly benign to the illegal,
including expediting or delaying orders or expenses, withhold-
ing information or providing misleading information, taking
shortcuts, stealing customers, or in some other way attempting
to make oneself look better than one’s fellow co-workers. Pro-
grams with high-value rewards and few winners are most likely
to turn employees into cheaters.
Pharmaceutical companies are famous for holding sales
contests in which representatives can earn large bonuses and
elaborate vacations. As you probably know, the pharmaceutical
industry has been heavily regulated in an effort to prevent sales
representatives from more or less bribing doctors into writing
prescriptions for their products. So, the days of luxury golf out-
ings have been commonly replaced with “take-in” lunch for the
office staff. Meet Linda—a thirty-five-year-old pharmaceutical
sales representative from New Jersey. She has a personal credit
card and an arrangement with an upscale restaurant in her ter-
ritory. All of her “docs” are welcome to enjoy dining with family
and friends on her dime at any time. In fact, one doctor recently