Eleanor Valentine and Gary Yardley do basically the same job in an engineering company. They are both designers working on the same project and the Vice President has just made an announcement that special bonuses will be paid to employees making the best contribution in their field of expertise. The problem is, it’s difficult to differentiate between Elly’s work and Gary’s work because they interact so closely.
This example demonstrates a few things about reward and recognition that can cause tempers to become frayed and relationships within the workplace to deteriorate. Unless these factors are properly dealt with, any reward and recognition system is potentially doomed to be a management plaything with no effect on performance and motivation or it will become an officially sanctioned method to extort money from the business.
Definition
Firstly, to judge whether a job is well done, both the supervisors and the staff need to understand what the job really is, whose job it was in the first place and whether it needed to be done at all. After all, when we talk about the performance of machines we focus on the important and relevant outputs....