Employee Incentives

One must balance the draining of employees lives with incentives to ensure that the employee has something to look forward to over the next ten years. My previous company offered a Rolex watch to anyone with 12 years service. For reasons unknown, they went insolvent after exactly 11 years 355 days thereby forgoing the need to ever buy a single Rolex, but they had a 100% retention rate for that duration and a lot of pyromaniac employees a few days later. My next employee offered a blunt pencil with the company logo after five years slave labour. The only use for this pencil was to create fictitious expenses until I could afford a Rolex.

As a manager I was expected to be on call for every minute of every hour of every day…without pay. The incentive for being woken up at 3:00 every morning was an extra 30 minutes sleep by being allowed to arrive late the following work day. My wife is disturbed each time I receive a call, my kids have violent fits whenever they hear the ringing tone of a blackberry and my goldfish couldn’t stand it any longer and committed suicide by leaping out of his fish tank. All for an extra 30 minutes. Oh yeah, and guess who’s to blame if the backups fail to run because some sleep deprived employee didn’t answer the phone?

If companies want to motivate their employees, then incentives should reflect modern times. For example, provide al the spotty geeky computer nerds with the incentive of a night with the hottest hooker in town and I will guarantee they will give 150% effort each day. Cost – roughly 150 quid per hooker. Cost saving, immense unless all return with Aids and the health insurance plan bankrupts the company. For women, maybe a breast implant, surely a win win situation for the company.
So when you are next deciding on incentives they need not be expensive but something that may change IT employees life forever.