Employee Engagement & Success is Simpler Than It Seems: When the Company Does Well ($), They Should Do Well

In popular sports, incentives are built into player contracts that boil down to “When the club does well, you do well.” 

There are rewards when the whole (club, team, company) sees success. Why is this the case, as opposed to rewarding individual performance? Simply: because they are part of a team, and team incentives work. 

“Team-directed incentives had a markedly superior effect on performance compared to individually-directed incentives.” (The Effects of Incentives on Workplace Performance: A Meta- analytic Review of Research Studies) 

So let’s look at this seemingly simple idea across business industries. 

Imagine if you are a graphic designer and part of a cross-functional team who has been asked to launch a marketing campaign. You and your teammates work hard and fast to deliver an awesome campaign and sales go up by 10% that quarter.  

The sales team, the head of marketing, and the CRO team all make a hefty bonus and you get a high five. How do you feel? 

This simple idea of rewarding team results is too often lost when businesses either only reward leadership levels, or with (forgive me) tone-deaf things like free lunch or a party… instead of increased pay, bonuses, or benefits an individual has said are valuable to them. 

Leaders know everyone, not just leaders of teams, are crucial to success. But this doesn’t always translate to effective incentive and engagement programs that reflect that. It’s no wonder we’re facing things like the Great Resignation, “Act your wage” and Quiet Quitting. Employees have endless evidence that, even when they’re paid well, even if they indeed get something like annual cost of living raises, their compensation isn’t tied to team or company success. And we wonder where loyalty went. 

That’s why it’s important for people to know that 

1. They are part of a team 
2. When the team does well, they do well.

Anything less is demotivating and culture-crushing over time. And that is why this is one of the points we measure in our team performance diagnostic: Atlas.

There are clear-cut action items leaders can take to close the gap between capability and performance—to improve business across the board: productivity, engagement, happiness, profitability, time saved, and more. 

All you have to do is know what to look at, and measure it… because what you can measure, you can improve. Learn more about what we can measure here, and how we help businesses succeed here.