Incentives and the Art of Changing Behavior

If you want people to take on new roles, or act differently, it helps if your reward the new behavior. Here's how three companies reward the employees who made change work.

For many well-meaning managers, getting employees to change their behavior is a frustrating, challenging, confounding task. Employees often don?t see the value of performing their jobs differently or taking on new roles, or they don?t trust the reasons for change in the first place. If they don?t support the change, they won?t alter their behavior and the project can?t succeed.

Whether it?s getting people to use a new software system or changing the company?s approach to knowledge-sharing, employees want to see immediate and obvious personal payoffs before embracing a new system. The quickest way to make that link is to tie a reward and recognition program to the appropriate performance. Adults are like children. If you reward the behavior you want to see, it will get repeated. For maximum benefit, the reward and the acknowledgment have to be immediate and public. By recognizing employees in front of their peers, it not only reinforces the behavior in the individuals, it telegraphs to everyone around them that this is the conduct you expect and value.

It can be a casual approach, in which managers make a point of praising those who perform the new behaviors, or a formal incentive program that rewards employees with gifts every time they perform a new task. The important thing is to send the message to everyone that they will benefit from supporting the change initiative, Butler says.

To most effectively use reward and recognition to support a change initiative, and define the new behaviors in as much detail as possible. For example, you can?t just say that service reps should be friendlier to customers. You have to identify the characteristics of the desired new behavior, such as greeting customers warmly, asking if they have any other concerns, or addressing them by name. Once you know what the behavior looks like, translate it in detail to employees and then reward them on the spot for doing it.

Employees need clarity about what?s expected of them. But they also need incentives to get started. If employees know they will receive something of value when they perform a new task, they will become personally invested in the initiative. The rewards and recognition program gets people motivated.

Once they incorporate the new behavior into their routine, they will begin to see the intrinsic value of the change. Eventually the tangible reward becomes less important and the new behavior becomes inherent to their job performance.

The biggest mistake managers make is rewarding the wrong behavior. They focus all of their attention on those who won?t change, and ignore those who do. That sends the message to employees that you don?t value the change, and it can cripple your project.