Alternatives to Monetary Bonuses

After watching the TED video in class, I wanted to research more about how better to motivate people by not just throwing money at them and calling it a day. I want to find new ways to motivate people to perform at their best, while keeping their sanity. I have a personal example of this. I have noticed a dramatic difference in a friend when he moved from one place of employment to another. The first place, everything was about money and using it as a motivator. He was miserable there because he just went there, did his work, for a paycheck. The new place, it is a much more fun environment and he is constantly praised and told how great it is to have him working there. He feels like he matters at this new place and he is more happy at work and has become more productive than ever.

I found a interesting article at Forbes.com that helps point out areas and way to make your employees productive and motivated without resorting to huge cash bonuses.

"Recent studies by David Rock, an executive coach, and Jeffry Schwartz, a neuroscientist, have identified several motivators that influence behavior more effectively than money. For one, people want to elevate their status. Organizations often assume that the only way to raise an employee's status is by a promotion, but status can be enhanced in many less costly ways. The perception of status increases significantly whenever people are given credible informal praise for daily tasks rather than waiting for annual results.

People are also motivated by having autonomy, but more money doesn't often equal greater perceived autonomy. In fact, you usually have to give up autonomy to rise up the compensation ladder. The real heart of autonomy as a motivator, however, rests with the perception that you are executing your own decisions without a lot of oversight or rules, which is hardly common in the corporate world today.

Similarly, feelings of relatedness and fairness are motivators. They are determined more by informal interactions, social networks and daily perceptions than by money or formal promotions.

This is not to suggest that money doesn't motivate. Certainly it encourages self-serving materialism. But those who rely on money as their sole or primary motivator are on perilous terrain, particularly if they ignore other more powerful and emotional sources of human motivation.

A few years ago we did research with elite military units that included the Navy Seals, the Green Berets and the Marines. Not surprisingly, we found that money is not what motivates an emotional commitment to such groups. We also learned that pride in daily training exercises was almost as important a motivational force as pride in the unit. And the Marines spend 75% of their military life in training exercises.

The Marines' boot camp takes 12 weeks while other services take 8. Those 12 weeks are devoted to exercises designed to inculcate the Corps' emotional values of honor, courage and commitment. During that arduous period, recruits are required to do all kinds of anxiety-producing things like leap off high towers, swim in deep water with full backpack burdens and run miles up and down hills.

Their drill instructors are master motivators whom they initially hate and fear. Before long those instructors become aspirational role models who breed respect, courage and commitment. A drill instructor is up at the crack of dawn before his recruits, works into the night preparing for the next day and changes his uniform several times a day. (He always looks the part of a Marine leader.)

To understand the emotional commitment that drill instructors engender, we conducted a focus group discussion with some eight recruits 10 weeks into their program. One of them was a young woman about 5 feet tall who weighed less than 100 pounds. She looked a bit out of place to us, so at one point we asked her what had attracted her to the Corps. Her impassioned reply remains a permanent fixture in our memory: "Gentlemen, the Marines make me shine -- every single day!" That is pride in one's work at its best, with money irrelevant."

I completely agree with her quote. Money can only go so far, but personal achievement and a sense of importance can last a lifetime. Money comes and goes fast and it feels like a rat race. Money causes people to be narrow-minded and forget what is really important in life. I want to work for a company that knows how important it is to encourage and praise their employees.