How Reward Systems Stifle Productivity

Hello, Reader!

Earlier this year, I gave a speech about motivation which was based almost entirely on an online course I’ve completed about cognitive science. I considered writing it in the form of a blog post, but I’ve decided that I prefer it a lot more in front of an audience I can interact with. However, there is one part of the talk that needs its own post- reward systems as extrinsic motivators and why they are ineffective at best and damaging at worst. The problem is that reward systems follow us throughout our lives; starting from sticker charts as young children, through grades in school years, all the way through monetary incentives and perks in your working life. 

The most obvious issue with rewards is that they aren’t a long term solution. One thing that rewarding yourself is good for is kick-starting work that you’re procrastinating. For example, “if I get out of bed and start my work, I can have a piece of cake” is okay but “I can have a piece of cake for every task I complete from my to-do list” is not sustainable and harmful to your productivity. If you are constantly rewarded, you become extrinsically driven which means that you complete tasks for a reward rather than, for example, self-improvement.

That isn’t only harmful because it damages your intrinsic motivation but also because you start becoming dependent on the rewards. Eventually, it gets to the point where the reward isn’t something special but something that’s the default and inseparable from your work. This means that to continue to motivate yourself using a reward system, you’ll need to increase the rewards because the rewards you become accustomed to will be insufficient to give you the external motivation needed. 

The biggest problem with reward systems is something that we are almost completely desensitised to, but something that is a huge problem in (especially) our education system; creating an attitude of finishing over learning. An example in an educational environment is homework: something that students, and teachers, forget is that it’s supposed to be a tool to subsidise learning beyond the classroom, but more often than not it’s a chore. Students complete it for the sake of finishing it rather than to further their knowledge or help their understanding of classwork. It doesn’t end there: in the workplace, you can be expected to take required training or extra classes, which many people complete for the sole reward of a qualification at the end rather than for the purpose of learning something or improve the quality of their work. When you focus on receiving the reward at the end, it doesn’t only stifle your learning process but also, in the case of an assigned task or project, also suppresses your creativity. If you need to “think outside of the box”, the thought of a reward at the end slows you down by giving you tunnel-vision to finishing the task, making it difficult to think of creative solutions. Here’s an amazing TedTalk which focuses its first part exactly on that - a study testing how reward systems affect our thinking process.

By recognising the subconscious effect rewards have on your motivation and productivity, you can actively work to combat those effects and even be able to use reward systems to your advantage, knowing when they can help you instead of harm you. These situations are, depending on your job, few and far between but, occasionally, using rewards can benefit you. Using a reward to kick-start your work can be helpful, as long as it isn’t something you become dependent on. Moreover, if the task ahead of you is boring, repetitive and doesn’t require any creative thinking, a reward can make you complete it faster - but still, it can make the quality of your work suffer.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you where and how you find your motivation- just know that looking forward to a bar of chocolate at the end of each chapter of your textbook is going to make it much harder to absorb any information.

Happy motivating!

Love, 

Agnes xo