There’s a strange phenomenon that occurs in the business world. This cartoon from Geek Hero Comic captures the essence this key to employee performance and motivation. I have to say that I absolutely love it. Dave Thomas has talked about this for years in his classic Developing Expertise presentation, supported by the following quote:

Interestingly enough, a friend of mine (who is a quality control manager in a hospital) often makes identical statements in reference to doctors: Polite requests, coercion, etc. are useless at best and often detrimental. Peer pressure and competition are the key.

It’s a terrible way to manage employees, but I love the cruel reality the cartoon depicts. Although you will be getting a level of performance you never imagined you could get out of your employees, it comes as a Catch-22, because at the same time you’re introducing an extremely negative influences at the same time which will errode any sense of teamwork that you’ve ever had in your environment. Plus, you also introduce a sure-fire way to begin decreasing the quality of the work outputted by your employees.

I’ve personally been a witness to this several times in my career. I remember a number of years ago when I was working at a fast-growing Web-hosting company. Our support team, though of good quality, lacked tenacity in getting things done fast. I have always competed with myself wherever I have worked so I would turn out insane numbers while others would be just plain mediocre. Eventually, they introduced performance bonuses (kind, of). For every employee that reached a certain number of tickets completed per week, they could draw an envelope which would contain a random amount of cash ($5-$100). A list was emailed each week showing every employee and their efficiencies in their daily tasks ranging from number of calls, time on phone, number of email tickets, chats, etc.

Soon after this the place caught fire. All day long you would see smoke coming from the keyboards as the support reps raced through as many tickets as possible to meet their weekly quota. Soon enough, though, most people caught on that you could get your quota by cherry-picking the easy tickets and at the same time the real questions and issues that customer had would sit for a long time. No one would dare touch them because you could do 5-10 easy tickets in the time it took you to complete one difficult one. Furthermore, you can probably guess the types of answers you would get from the reps, short, abrupt, non-informative, not very customer-friendly.

I think that peer pressure and competition have their place in business. However, implemeting these influences should be done carefully, and employee performance must be carefully monitored so that quality is not sacrificed in behalf of quantity.

In the end, it’s necessary for any successful organization to implement, at least, some form of motivating atmosphere in the workplace. Whether it’s a healthy competition for best performance, or a board that shows output by each employee, implemeting these factors into the day-to-day activities of the organization will ensure that employees are motivated to perform at their best throughout the day. It’s amazing to see the change in a group of employees the moment there’s a list showing who has done how much of the work. Suddenly, the people at the top push a little harder to make sure that they are on top. The people close to the top work to improve a bit more so that they can get to the top, and the people at the bottom are faced with the ultimatum that they either get into gear and out of the bottom or they are probably facing a job change.

Managers are the key. They ensure that these competitive influences are kept in check. They are the key to ensure that there is enough competition to keep the team working at their greatest level of output, while at the same time, the manager is performing a good amount of quality control to ensure that the overall quality of the group does not destroy or undermine the overall mission of the organization. This then becomes the best way to improve performance.