Rewards the Efficacy of Short-Term

Rewards

The Efficacy of Short-Term Rewards

Of course that fat, end-of-the-year bonus check is lovely to get. Even in these lean days, when that annual largesse may have been put on a diet, the bonus given for a long period of good work is certainly beneficial in terms of proving to be an incentive for a worker to continue to put in his or her all. However, and this is something that can all-too-often be overlooked in the rush of everyday business, short-term rewards are also important. This paper examines one situation that the writer has personal experience with in which a system of short-term rewards was instituted with the result that both productivity and employee satisfaction increased.

One summer I was working as a combination warehouse person/delivery person. The food bank where I worked accepted donations at a warehouse that I (along with about a dozen other workers) organized according to how perishable they were and basic food type. My duties also included putting together "food baskets," which were actually boxes that we put together for whole families, and delivering these boxes of food to families as well as other organizations such as churches and schools.

All of the paid workers were young and working for low wages. There were also a number of older workers (ranging from their fifties to their eighties) who worked as volunteers. This created a certain amount of conflict because the volunteers tended to look down on those of us who were working for money rather than out of a spirit of giving (as they perceived the situation). This conflict was exacerbated by the fact that the director of the agency rewarded the volunteers on a monthly basis with a dinner for all of them at a nice restaurant and a drawing for gift cards for different stores. Her rational (when I asked) about why the volunteers were rewarded relatively lavishly when they worked intermittently and the paid workers were not rewarded was that volunteers needed different types of motivation.

When I began to work there, the regular, paid workers were given a review that might lead to a raise every six months and were given an annual bonus. However, because the turnover was so high, most of the paid workers never actually saw an annual bonus. One of the reasons that the paid workers left (other than the fact that the pay was low and the hours were erratic) was that the volunteers were given short-term rewards while the paid workers (who tended to view the volunteer workers as dilettantes) were asked to wait for six months to have their work acknowledged.

The director of the agency went to a workshop after I had been there for four months and came back with the intention of revamping the reward system and asked me along with one of the volunteer workers to assist in setting up this system. The system that we established followed established protocols for rewards systems in several key ways. The first of these was that we established a clearer focus between short-term goals and long-term or institutional goals. For example, a short-term goal included contacting local farmers' markets to get more donations of fresh produce to the agency. An associated short-term goal was that the agency needed to have more available refrigerators in the storage area to keep the produce fresh.

A team was chosen from the paid and volunteer workers were given set goals in terms of the amount of fresh food brought in and distributed. After two weeks, the progress toward these goals was assessed and each member of the team (which had surpassed the goals) was given a gift certificate for the farmers' markets. The effect of this short-term goal was that it proved to be extremely powerful. This arose from the fact that it was relatively immediate; it also arose from the fact that it created alliances between the paid and volunteer workers and helped to clarify institutional goals.