No I said they can be seen as incentives to stay/turn up to work etc... if you like. But that's probably not what the OP was after - as I pointed out I'm pretty sure his company pays a salary too... Salary + standard benefits will get some people doing just enough to not get fired. Yes I know.. your company is full of highly motivated super geniuses with a trigger happy firing policy - unfortunately most workplaces are not like that and targeted incentives can be useful - making sure you pay more than everyone else might be useful for a profitable small tech firm... but by default only a few firms can at any time be paying the most... big salary increases across the board are not a realistic proposition for most firms.
Aside from a small firm of uber geeks you will find that workforces won't necessarily be motivated by their standard salary and benefits... Bigger organisations can't hire an entire workforce of perfect employees. Google for example is supposed to be a bit selective whereas at least one of their former employees (of a few years experience) was less than impressive IME and presumably spent lots of his time there sleeping on the bean bags... They're a big firm now - they likely have the same issues and big variations in productivity as plenty of other firms.
So no I'm simply not buying the idea that salary+ standard benefits + fire anyone not 'excellent' is really a realistic proposition for the vast majority of firms actively looking at creating incentives... if everyone took that approach the wage bills would be huge and most of the population unemployed.
OK, taking a step back.
A company want to complete a project. You propose there are methods to reduce the time it takes to complete the project by incentivising employees.
But this has numerous issues. Firstly, a project takes as long as it takes, you can't magically make things go faster if people are working appropriately. If the project takes 100 then it takes 100 hours, you can't change that. If you want the project to be done in a shorter number of days then you need employees to work more than their 40-50 hours a week and will need to look at paying over time or salaries where 70 hour weeks are properly remunerated. This can have its own issues and you may be better off hiring additional employees if the project cannot be met be the desired deadline with current staf
fing levels.
Secondly, any kind of reward or punishment for not hitting the arbitrary deadline makes for a very poor business practice. Again, a project takes as long as it takes. If something crops up that delays the project then there is not much that can be done about it, no one should loose out. If the workload was underestimated then the mistake should be noted for future reference. If the deadline is beaten then it means someone underestimated the work load or everyone was extremely lucky and all the slack time the employees wanted wasn't needed
Setting project related rewards leads to all/some of the following:
1) Managers setting unrealistic deadlines that can't be met. [hint, managers should never set deadlines, employees should be trusted to provide best estimated completion times.]
2) Employees set extremely lax estimated times to guarantee hitting the final deadline no matter what. The whole schedule becomes useless at this point.
3) Managers try to bribe, blackmail and corerce employees into working more hours than legally allowed,.
4) As above but employees aren't appropriately compensated for doing extra
hours.
5) employees suffer from burn out and stress for always chasing impossible deadlines given by management. They become less productive and may leave due to health reasons.
6) Quality of work rapidly diminishes in order to meet deadlines. E.g., software becomes poorly tested, buggy, messy and rushed.
7) Good Employees leave for a better job where they can be trusted to work without micromanagement.
It takes a certain amount of time to bake bread. You can't change that. The yeast needs time to work, the dough needs time to rest, and then time to bake. As long as the baker is working appropriately then as many loaves of bread as is possible will be produced per day. That work rate needs to be respected. If the baker gets sick or the oven breaks down then the bread output will decline. There is no need to punish the baker.
