Incentivizing Critical Thinking
One of the summer jobs I held to fund my college education was as a frame welder and sub-floor builder at a mobile home plant. My crew was composed of jail birds that got out on 8-hour work release each day before going back the Grey Bar Hotel at night.
One day, the section manager came through and said the company wanted to speed things up. He set a goal of five frames complete with sub-floor decks, rough plumbing, and the HVAC trunk. It was a tough goal but attainable. “If you can motivate your crew to build five a day with minimal discrepancies, I’ll pay them a full day’s pay no matter what time they finish,” he promised. “And you can leave if you finish early.”
I called the crew together and told them about the new incentive. They were eager to try and sure enough, within a couple of days, we’d upped things from about three and a half to a solid five in eight hours. Discrepancies all but disappeared because now, there was an incentive to anticipate problems and prevent them before they occurred.
Within another week, our output was five with the same quality but we were done in six hours.
Now people who live in a jail have no reason to finish an outside job early because that means they just go back to jail sooner. Instead, it was the pay that pumped them up. Most folks convicted and serving county time owe lots of people lots of money.
Things were good for a while but the crews on down the line from us didn’t like us leaving with pay when they couldn’t.
Not too many weeks later, the manager came around again. “Charlie, this leaving early thing is killing our other crews. I think we need to up your output again but I’ll still pay for eight hours and let you go early.”
When I informed the crew, their faces changed like a cloud passing in front of the sun and eye contact was lost. But after a little coaxing they rose to the occasion and we were turning six in about seven hours.
Yeah, you guessed it. A week later, the boss came around again and said we needed to turn six but we couldn’t leave early if we did. In spite of my appeals and encouragement, production dropped back to 3.5 floors and the old level of discrepancies came back. For the hardliners out there, you can’t threaten people with being fired who are already in jail.
Problems? You bet. Plumbing guys built rough-ins in an incorrect mirror image because floors start upside down and are then flipped right side up. The HVAC guys similarly fell off, too. Deckers cut holes in the wrong places where pipes and vents were to come up and the sheet vinyl guys rolled on the wrong colors and incorrectly sized the pieces. Why did this competent crew suddenly go full throttle stupid on me?
The reason was simple; there was no incentive to think and prevent problems. “Why waste a lot of time trying to do well; we get paid the same, right?” said the biker with the long stringy hair. “And when we did do well, all we got was punished with more floors.” Read this as, the incentive had been removed and the trust in management had been destroyed.
The lesson here is, when an employer is looking for seemingly unexplainable causes of errors and waste ask yourself; what is the incentive for my people to apply critical thinking and do well? And two; never enact or promise incentives you can’t live with or that come without qualifications for changes if things zoom ahead or drop off.
It’s easy to scoff and blow poor performance off as just poor quality employees with no personal work ethic or self-discipline—which coincidentally is a thought pattern that’s a disincentive for you to solve a production problem.
