February 17, 2017 at 10:45 am
An interesting trend I noticed in the replies to this article seems to be that pay / pay raises aren't as much of a carrot as people would think.
It seems the majority of us here would rather be part of a team that works well, with our work appreciated, and the pay is simply the icing on that cake.
February 17, 2017 at 2:06 pm
jasona.work - Friday, February 17, 2017 10:45 AMAn interesting trend I noticed in the replies to this article seems to be that pay / pay raises aren't as much of a carrot as people would think.
It seems the majority of us here would rather be part of a team that works well, with our work appreciated, and the pay is simply the icing on that cake.
Beyond a certain point money isn't a strong motivator. In the UK that point is somewhere between£40k & £50k
February 19, 2017 at 7:34 am
GeorgeCopeland - Friday, February 17, 2017 8:55 AMRod at work - Friday, February 17, 2017 8:37 AMInteresting article. I've seen stick and carrot approach for motivating behavior, both personally and professionally. Using a stick is often easier to see. I do think using a carrot for motivating behavior is a better approach, but sometimes that's just harder to do. For example, where I work because of the severe budget crunch, there haven't been any pay raises since 2008. And there's no hope of any pay raise for the foreseeable future. So there's no way a manager can motivate you with a pay raise. And I have to say the same was true of my previous job. So in these cases if the manager feels like they're not getting what they need, the only tool they have in their toolbox is a stick.I do think you're probably right Ben, about the best way of getting someone to perform at their best is if the motivation to do their best comes from within. But that's something a manager cannot influence. At best you can only do that when you're considering new recruits. Some way of determining if they've strongly motivated to do their best at the interview, not afterwards.
Pay increases are not the only carrot that a manager has, in fact it is a pretty poor carrot overall. Some people are motivated by money but for most people, if their pay is fair, more money won't motivate them at all. Having my labor used effectively is just about my main motivator, as it is for a lot of people. As someone else mentioned, working on an effective team is another one that I care about. In any case, there are many carrots that a manager has besides pay. A good manager will try to pay attention to these types of rewards.
Fair enough George, that is a good point.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
February 19, 2017 at 10:52 am
For me, "best" is a relative concept. At the crux of the matter is "do". Whatever I do I don't internally or externally measure in terms of "best", as doing for me is not a competition within myself or anyone else. In fact, competition becomes a distraction that I strongly believe detracts from performance. I'll defer the matter of best to the critics, within and without.
Instead, for me it boils down to two factors: motivation and doing.
One motivator for me is curiosity, the pursuit of novelty and discovery, a luxurious motivator that would be my sole motivator if I were over the hump financially, but alas I am not. So, my base motivator, avoiding starvation, pragmatically drives me to work for a living. It's not a spiritually uplifting or intellectually fulfilling manner of existence that differentiates us from animals, but it ensures to sustain the physical vessels within which our spirits reside. Perhaps, in a deeper sense, the motivation to avoid starvation is my only honest and pure one, and thus arguably the only one that ensures happiness. Perhaps being wired with more abstract motivators opens a Pandora's box as these, such as "curiosity", or to be "better", or to be the "best", might poison pure happiness if not carefully understood what benefits they purport to derive.
The second factor, doing, is just the mechanics of fulfilling my curiosity. If I'm curious enough, if the "voltage" of my curiosity is high enough, so to speak, the "current" will erupt in the form of doing. Now, the doing could be difficult due to lack of resources or unwarranted and thus threatening to my employment, so it is important for me to find and harness those curiosities that lead to doings that benefit my employer in a timely fashion. Once the novelty wears off, I'm back to working to prevent starvation, completing obligatory work well enough to earn a paycheck and keep my job.
So, for me it is important to keep work interesting and in my spare time at work I explore ideas that are conducive to the employer's needs. Let's face it, any job will become tedious for the same reason as the Coolidge effect regarding sex. We're humans, not animals. Our minds need stimulation, and repetition is not stimulating. Is it any wonder we seek hobbies and amusements in our spare time away from the uncreative decades of monotonous work. Only the few enjoy surviving from creative activities, like car designers, programmers, painters, marketers, business leaders, hunters, and so on. The vast majority will repeatedly assemble simple or complex widgets, over and over, with minor variations: whether cutting grass or troubleshooting a query's execution plan.
Perhaps my best is, philosophically, when I work to prevent my starvation and that of my family, after the higher motivators of novelty and discovery wither. At that point, the job is like picking fruit from a tree, the fruit being the tasks and the tree being the company, for which I am grateful that they exist, that in fact somebody had once planted the seed and had grown and nurtured it to become the tree of industry that led to my employment.
These are my internal sticks and carrots, as Mr. Kubicek so adroitly alluded to.
February 19, 2017 at 2:13 pm
For me there needs to be a sense of fairness to a package and I wholeheartedly agree that raises are there to stop demotivation i.e. to maintain the fairness.
I find that carrot tactics work only in the short term and that stick techniques are best used for discipline purposes (hopefully never required).
In my experience motivation beyond this either exists within the individual or it does not.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
February 21, 2017 at 6:15 am
To me motivation comes from within. I have had managers who have used "carrot and stick" but this never works for any period. The only time I got demotivated was by a manager who felt his staff should be grateful for having a job and would never praise only criticise. He had zero comprehension of programming or SQL which made it impossible to discuss any issues with him!
February 21, 2017 at 6:29 am
For me it's personal pride, closely followed by money and a certain amount of autonomy. I am very motivated by earning a good salary.
I think disgust is a really good motivator, too. I work with a lot of people from a 3rd party support company who are so visibly de-motivated and poorly skilled that I spend much of my time privately wondering how on earth they can be happy with themselves when they're doing such a piss-poor job. They motivate me to do my best not to be like them. We all have our bad days, but when every day is like that it's time to look at your options.
June 24, 2017 at 7:15 pm
Critical motivators: Always learning new stuff. Pride in a good job. Respect from colleagues including bosses and subordinates. To be free to do things my own way provided that achieved what was needed. Being part of an effective and successful team. Knowing that what I did was useful. Most of the work ihas to be stuff I enjoy doing, or my motivation will decrease, I always needed all those things to be really happy in a job and I am lucky enough to have had all of them almost all the time.
Other things that were serious motivation factors for me were international collaboration, where I could spend time abroad and work together with engineers and academics from several countries as a member of a multicultural team; having time to do some research; getting decent training in wide range of things (technical and non-technical); and having time to read technical journals (and being given access to any articles I wanted).
Of course what are called hygiene factors (if you don't about know these already, read up on Herzberg's motivator-hygiene dual factor theory) are essential too for almost anyone - for example, I needed enough pay to support my family and to ensure that I would have a pension my wife and I could live on, and a decent amount of (paid) holiday time to spend with family and friends. But these are not motivators (that's why pay rises beyond a certain level are ineffective as carrots), rather they are the absence of demotivators.
Tom
June 24, 2017 at 8:25 pm
David.Poole - Friday, February 17, 2017 2:06 PMBeyond a certain point money isn't a strong motivator. In the UK that point is somewhere between£40k & £50k
Where that point is varies enormously from one part of the UK to another, and also varies enormously from person to person.
A person who wants to find and buy a family house in decent part of London to take up a new job there and has only a house in some place with cheap housing to sell (and a large part of teh sale price will be needed to pay off the mortgage on the low price house) will need to have a salary that will allow them to cope with a three-quarter-million pound (or maybe more) mortgage, and if he's only paid £50k per year he won't have, after income tax and NI payments, enough income to cover the mortgage payments on his London house and feed himself and his family. So for someone in that position, the hygiene point for salary is well over $50k.
On the other hand, someone who is happy with a two bedroom terraced house with perhaps 600 square feet of yard/garden in an area where housing is cheap can probably buy something for around £100k, so with current mortgage rates he would have no problems on a salary of £35k.
I think you can probably say that the point will be - for most developer/dba/IT/CS people'in the UK - somewhere between 35k and 120k.
Also, some people are far more motivated by money than others - perhaps their preferred car is a Rolls Royce Dawn and they want a salary that will let them buy one, use it to do an extensive holiday tour every year as well as plenty of shorter drives, and replace it with the latest RR top model every three years. Or perhaps they insist on having an acre to contain stable and horses for their wife and daughters, so they need a country house (and have to employ and hence pay a groom and a gardner) as well as the town house. Or maybe they insist on drinking really good wine with dinner and lunch (not the £200 per case stuff that an ordinary bloke like me regards as something for very special occassions only, that's not good wine, but the £2000 per case stuff). Or whatever other way of spending silly amounts of money they regard as essential. There are many people who will not see anything below 100k as an acceptable salary, and some who would demand significantly more that that (of course probably very few of them are DBAs or Software Engineers or Computer Scientists like us).
Tom
April 7, 2023 at 5:53 pm
I'm an old-fashioned kind of person and I readily admit that I'm definitely a stick guy. It has worked in my family for generations, and I can see the results.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6324016290112
Before I go ahead, check out this link from this morning, and then hear me out.
I have documented info from both sides of my family going back to the 1400's in eastern and western Europe, and nowhere have I found records of ANYONE ever begin convicted of a crime or being imprisoned. In the here and now, my wife and I have raised four sons, the youngest of which is 51 years old. I was at first very much in conflict with the youngest because of the requirements I had for our famiy. Now, that one is the founder of a very successful business, the most successful of the four. He didn't get there by being coddled.
Firm, even-handed discipline motivates people to do their best. None of my sons were ever abused, but they all knew and learned to appreciate high expectations. Our sons were never paid for performing as expected and participating in household chores and responsibiities. They were simply encouraged to be their best.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
April 7, 2023 at 9:27 pm
jasona.work - Friday, February 17, 2017 10:45 AMAn interesting trend I noticed in the replies to this article seems to be that pay / pay raises aren't as much of a carrot as people would think.It seems the majority of us here would rather be part of a team that works well, with our work appreciated, and the pay is simply the icing on that cake.
Beyond a certain point money isn't a strong motivator. In the UK that point is somewhere between£40k & £50k
Ohh how times have changed, 2017 isn't even that long ago.
April 7, 2023 at 9:27 pm
jasona.work - Friday, February 17, 2017 10:45 AMAn interesting trend I noticed in the replies to this article seems to be that pay / pay raises aren't as much of a carrot as people would think.It seems the majority of us here would rather be part of a team that works well, with our work appreciated, and the pay is simply the icing on that cake.
Beyond a certain point money isn't a strong motivator. In the UK that point is somewhere between£40k & £50k
Ohh how times have changed, 2017 isn't even that long ago.
April 7, 2023 at 9:27 pm
jasona.work - Friday, February 17, 2017 10:45 AMAn interesting trend I noticed in the replies to this article seems to be that pay / pay raises aren't as much of a carrot as people would think.It seems the majority of us here would rather be part of a team that works well, with our work appreciated, and the pay is simply the icing on that cake.
Beyond a certain point money isn't a strong motivator. In the UK that point is somewhere between£40k & £50k
Ohh how times have changed, 2017 isn't even that long ago.
April 7, 2023 at 9:27 pm
jasona.work - Friday, February 17, 2017 10:45 AMAn interesting trend I noticed in the replies to this article seems to be that pay / pay raises aren't as much of a carrot as people would think.It seems the majority of us here would rather be part of a team that works well, with our work appreciated, and the pay is simply the icing on that cake.
Beyond a certain point money isn't a strong motivator. In the UK that point is somewhere between£40k & £50k
Ohh how times have changed, 2017 isn't even that long ago.
April 7, 2023 at 9:28 pm
Can someone delete my extra posts? My internet had a hiccup and it posted several times...
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