Imagine that you have a few hours left on a Saturday and you have to choose between two “household activities”: going to the supermarket to do the monthly shopping or planning your summer vacation. If you don’t do the shopping, you know that you will have to go out several times later, do small purchases at bakeries and convenience stores, spend more time and money, travel more, among other things. Planning your vacation would be something that you could do at another time without any major problems, after all, there are still months left until your trip and this can be done at more alternative times. If you still chose to plan the trip, don’t blame yourself: you are human and acted like the vast majority of people.
This is how people work. More than understanding it, it is essential to accept it and learn to deal with it. When faced with a choice or a prioritization, people choose what is best for them. Economists are well aware that the term utility means the value of something to a specific individual. Well, it would be great if uk consumer data list in your company always chose what is best for the sustainable growth of the company. Incentive experts even try to align individual incentives with the company's goals, but the big flaw is that all incentive programs assume that what is valuable to the person is money. People go far beyond that. After all, would you go to the supermarket or plan a vacation?
When faced with a choice, people choose the ones that are most useful to them, and there are many variables that influence the decision. To list some, we have: direct financial reward, long-term financial reward (this is where incentive programs would end), intellectual effort, physical effort, aptitude, personal relationships involved, challenge, personal recognition, immediate and long-term pleasure. To complicate matters a little more, all of these stimuli have different weights from person to person. This is what makes us wonderfully complex. Let's take the example of pleasure. Pleasure is a strong motivation for most people and is divided between immediate and long-term. Some choose cigarettes, others choose exercise, some choose steak, others choose salad, and people are happy in their own way.
The fact is that all intellectual work is, in essence, voluntary. The more you need proactivity, creativity and overcoming, the more you depend on people's benevolence. They want it, they do it. They don't want it... Just look at technology professionals, for example, in various companies. A programmer can give you fifteen different justifications for saying it is not possible to do what is being asked of them within the stipulated deadline. And the worst part is that all of them will be plausible, coherent and often technically correct. Many times the real reason is: I don't want to. The difference between doing the basics required for the job and doing something truly different, in various roles in the company, is huge. And all this difference comes exclusively from each person's personal will.
So we ask ourselves: what is the point of timekeeping systems or time tracking for teams where the only thing we want is the intellectual product of the work? How can we pay for an idea someone has in the shower? How can we discount the time someone spends on Facebook? These questions do not exist. Putting a timekeeping system in place for an intellectual team means conveying the following message: I just want you to think about the company from the moment you clocked in until the moment you clocked out. Are these the teams that will make a difference? Thought has no boundaries, no time to start, no time to end.
Given all the complexity, how can we solve it? It’s not easy. There is no ready-made formula. If there were, companies with well-designed incentive programs would perform equally well. Leaders would not be valued as much. Companies are made up of people and they should be recognized as such. We need to understand people and the importance of each of their motivations, described above. There must be closeness and it must be real. People must enjoy their work, they can and should relate primarily to others they like. They must be assigned to roles that suit their motivations, and a lot of time must be invested in this. What is the best way? Ask them. They will be able to tell you. While it is very easy to do the minimum in intellectual work, there are no limits to the maximum. In this sense, for people who want it, all compensation is symbolic.
From the Inside Out
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