Bonuses, motivation and managing people.

Why salary bonus and other incentives fail to meet their objectives

Picked this up from Keith Pitty's weblog. Interesting article, and a subject that is much debated here. Our company has always given healthy bonuses, but one I've not felt that directly linked to my work. Our evaluation processes have changed many times as well, pretty much always for the better.

I have to say that while I think most developers will to some extent agree with the concepts of this article, very few will want to see them implemented. You see there are, and always will be, developers who are mearly doing this as a job, and you cannot dismiss them as bad developers and many are very good.

Traditionally our company has employed young people with very few comitments, this has led to a team who are willing to put in the hours and give, perhapse, too much of themselves to the job. This is now changing as the company grows up, and therefore our policies on rewards will have to change. We now have people who value holiday far more than I, and therefore are not happy with our relatively low holiday allowance. There are people who will never work much overtime as they have responsibility to families, a very new thing for our company.

All of these people will have differing views about what they want from the company, and I suspect many will be more than happy for a bonus scheme to continue.