Rewards and Punishment
Punishments and rewards often make employees more motivated and more likely to follow rules. A workplace is a place where many people with different personalities come together. Some people might do better when they are rewarded, while others might do better when they are afraid of being punished.
Managers try to get their employees to work harder and do a better job by promising rewards. In the same way, they warn the staff about how painful punishments will be.
A boss or manager always wants their workers to do better, and even better is better. They don’t know whether to punish or praise employees when they do a good job.
Rewarding good work and punishing bad or unwanted behaviour are the main ways that organisations keep people motivated. But over time, businesses have learned that rewards often make people behave in a good way and encourage them to do it again. In the same way, punishment may get people to follow the rules temporarily, but it usually lowers morale and makes them less productive in the long run.
People at work have a variety of personalities. Some are motivated by rewards, while others are scared of getting in trouble. It’s important for managers to know how each employee works and to create an environment that rewards great work. He or she will also notice when performance is below par and deal with it in the right way. Many incentives are focused on making money, but you should also think about incentives for employees who don’t work in sales.
Rewards
When you reward behaviour, it draws attention to the fact that an employee did something or behaved in a way that the company or manager wants them to.
Some good ways to motivate employees are to give them promotions and positive feedback.
One example is a worker who comes to the company every month to get a nice salary. He or she will keep trying to be productive and improve performance to get the most rewards until it is no longer valuable to them.
There’s more than one right way to do something. But workers don’t think about what to do next time when they get a reward. It means they can do the same thing over and over again. It seems that rewards make it harder for employees to think outside the box and come up with better solutions to problems.
For instance, your company might decide that employees should be rewarded every year based on a regular review that happens every year. The problem starts when workers decide they only need to work hard before their reviews.
A promise of a reward that can be earned by doing something is called an incentive. Many times, incentives are used to boost sales, get projects done on time, or stick to a budget. People can get rewards on their own, or they can depend on how well the whole group does. There may be ongoing incentives for you. It’s also common to offer rewards for meeting goals every six months or once a year. For incentives to work, they need to be worthwhile, well-defined, and doable.
Different Kinds of Rewards
Smart managers find out what kinds of rewards will motivate their workers and then make incentive plans around those. Some employees like getting paid in cash, while others would rather have paid time off, flexible hours, or big discounts on the company’s goods and services. The amount of money the company has can affect the rewards. A big company might take its employees on an annual cruise if they reach a company goal. A smaller company, on the other hand, might give gourmet coffee gift cards to its best employees at the end of each month.
Punishments
At work, punishments can include nagging someone to do their work, making threats or hovering over them, reprimanding them verbally or in writing, cutting their pay, demoting them, or suspending them for work.
Punishment can make people lose motivation and be mentally torturous for them as well. They might lose motivation to work if their bosses or supervisors tell them bad things about it, no matter how hard they try.
Most of the time, when someone says, “You have learned a lesson,” they mean they were punished in some way. Many times, people use the word “punishment” instead of “lesson.”
If employees are punished before all the facts are known, they will rebel against the punishment instead of seeing it as a warning against a certain behaviour.
On the other hand, punishment is not inherently bad either. It’s an idea that means putting values into action. In the workplace, some people or members of a team may get public praise or rewards for something they have done. But for some people, being noticed by their peers might not be as fun as it sounds.
It’s sometimes better to make mistakes in order to learn. If you have a good boss or manager, they may teach you how to avoid making the same mistakes.
For the same reason, sometimes you may have to work longer hours as a punishment. That’s when you have the chance to learn a lot more than the workers who were getting the rewards. Winning isn’t always the goal; sometimes the goal is to learn.
The correct term for punishment at work is “disciplinary action.” For employees to be effective, they need to know the rules and policies of the workplace and what will happen if they break the rules or don’t meet performance standards. When employees don’t know what breaking company rules means, it can be hard to enforce standards or punish bad behaviour without getting angry responses. There should be a written policy that spells out what is expected and what will happen if the rules are broken.
Conclusion
There may be times when people act in ways that are simply unacceptable at work. Safety equipment that doesn’t work right, sexual harassment, or abusive behaviour that we think is wrong are some examples. In these kinds of situations, we can’t have a workplace where people don’t fear getting in trouble.
It’s possible for rewards and punishments to be useless at the wrong time or very useful at the right time. It depends on what kind of punishment or reward is used. You need to be able to look at things critically and decide what can be done to make things better for both the employees and the manager or boss.