Trying to motivate your employees?  Don’t.  All you are doing is robbing them of pride in their work and creating a dependency between employee and employer.  If you want a “quality focused” workforce we must provide for meaningful work and appeal to the employee intrinsic side of motivation.

Extrinisc motivational techniques are wasteful and expensive.  They allow Management to duck their responsibilites to effectively lead. Employees probably don’t mind getting gifts, awards, and bonuses but they would much rather have effective leadership and meaningful work.

Schemes to motivate employees can actually backfire, causing internal competition where teams, shifts, departments, and plants learn to optimize themselves while sub-optimizing the larger system.  Improvements in safety, production, quality does not come from slogans, games, or competition.  Improvements come Leaders that can execute “process improvement” initiatives with their employees.

Show me a company that is proud of their incentive programs and I will show you a CEO that is wondering why there isn’t the team work she desires!