There were N salespeople, and N company cars. At the end of each week who drove which car for the following week was worked out. The top performer got to drive the BMW (quelle surprise). The next N-2 got to drive identical OK cars – something like a Mondeo. The lowest performer _had_ to drive a bright orange Skoda, and this was in the days of the old Eastern European style Skodas. Nice.

Another sales colleague worked at a place where your weekly performance determined where you worked the next week. You started off at the door end of a large open plan office, and after enough weeks of good performance you got to the other end. If you kept up the good work you were promoted to the next league and got an office. There were better and better offices so you could keep striving to climb the greasy pole. A different world, thankfully.

Alison, I can only assume that selling attracts a different type of person – the bank had very different reward structures for branch staff to IT, and the annual performance reviews were mainly a source of much griping and low morale within the IT teams as the metrics were completely inappropriate.

In my current team, we do have targets, but we reach them as a team, and are rewarded as a team – and among other initiatives, it’s helped to build a very strong team in a very short space of time.

Yep, that’s my feeling. Personally I think that if my boss thought I would do my job better in erturn for a trip to New York that I would feel pretty insulted

We do pay family members for doing housework, so I guess we recognise money as a motivator to some extent. But we all get paid the same rate – and everyone is responsible for recording their own work on the jobs list. If I sweep the floor I get 10p – if Leo does it he gets 10p. No-one is the boss, it is not a competition, and there is no winner.

I don’t read books telling me how to bring up my children.

Punished by Rewards

We all went out to dinner last night to say thank you to each other for a really pleasant week at home.

Pea is going for an extra ski session later on today as her instructor thinks she has potential, so we are giving her the extra chance to do so.

Small verbal rewards throughout the day are good, I can’t function without them! I like to be told I look nice, dinner was good, I doing well etc etc. I do the same to the children. Something as simple as putting a picture on the wall fills them with pride and they love to show everyone who comes to the house. Buzz loves to play his games and get to the next level, I have no interest at all, I’d rather watch paint dry but he is so pleased that I ‘wow’ and ‘woohoo’ for him. This morning I had to sit and be shown around all three of their zoo’s on Roar, again boring for me and no big deal but vital to them that I looked and praised.

When they do something I dislike it is a much shorter lived conversation, but it is a conversation that happens.

I also struggle with the difference between praising effort and recognising something innate and stating it as fact eg ‘you’re really good at that’ vs ‘you’re trying really hard at that’ – which is more valuable? It’s easy to think that something which requires effort is worth more praise but actually you wouldn’t want to squash or underplay a geninue talent either.

I think we all like applause to a degree but I wouldn’t want my kids to live for it – agree with Tim, balance is the key.

I think praise is extremely important, children are coded to seek positive feedback, but if you forget to tell your children when they are doing things you don’t like, they can be forgiven for assuming that it is ok to carry on. Balance, that’s the thing.