Ice cream is yum, but it won’t engage your employees

(first published on April 9th 2016, migrated from my LinkedIn articles)

I came across a post this morning called “18 ways managers can reward and engage staff for low cost”.

At №1 in the list is this:

Plan a surprise achievement celebration for an employee or a team of employees.

Buy some ice cream, some small cups and lots of different toppings. It won’t cost you much and the employees you recognise will be delighted that their work was noticed and appreciated (and everyone likes ice cream!).

The article then goes on to list 17 other techniques for making your staff feel all warm and fuzzy inside, with the hope that they will keep churning out stuff during times when there are “ever shrinking budgets”.

I don’t want to criticise the article — although the title kind of implies that rewarding and engaging staff usually requires spending significant amounts of money, and when circumstances befall us we must do it “on the cheap”.

What about the “18 ways” listed? There is nothing inherently wrong with any of them — in fact, they are all potentially nice and useful things to do. But I’m not sure they really get to the heart of the matter, and it is a real shame that buying ice cream is at №1. Unfortunately, the myth of “carrot and stick” motivation remains alive and well in the mindset of many of today’s managers and leaders.

“If we give ’em ice cream and pizza, and say ‘good job’ every now and then, they’ll continue to work long and hard for us”.

The other ways on the list start to touch on what actually motivates us as human beings. And this leads me onto the way I would describe how to reward and engage employees:

Focus on creating a rewarding and engaging environment.

As Dan Pink and numerous others have shown us, humans are motivated by intrinsic factors, not ice cream and praise. We’re not dogs!

The problem is that if you only buy ice cream in “the bad times”, it will come across as an attempt to keep everyone working hard — remember, you hired smart people who will see through this. They will smile and eat the ice cream, but they will not become engaged or feel rewarded by it.

However, if you buy ice cream for staff every week as a matter of course — with no expectation of increased engagement, motivation or performance, then you are contributing selflessly to a fun and happy environment where folks are appreciated for being there and their ongoing contribution in the good times and the bad.

Do you see the difference?

The real gains come from building an awesome place to work, not trying to engage and reward people extrinsically. Here are my 4 ways for rewarding and engaging staff intrinsically (regardless of budget cuts or otherwise):

1. Make the work meaningful, creating a real purpose for each and every person in your organisation.
2. Let people work with autonomy (don’t micromanage).
3. Provide coaching and cross skilling opportunities for folks to master their craft.
4. Above all, keep asking folks which of their basic human needs are not being met in the workplace, and what YOU as their manager can do to address this.

If you are a manager, it’s up to you to contribute to creating an environment where every individual in your organisation can thrive.

Don’t belittle that responsibility down to buying some ice cream and saying “good job”.

Thanks for reading! If you are looking for help with your software or product delivery, I provide agile coaching, public training (both theory and practical) up to executive management level, and more. As well as public events, I can also run training internally in your organisation for a massively reduced cost, so please ✍ get in touch.