 Hey everybody, welcome back. It's Veronica Howard. Let's talk a little bit about performance pay and extrinsic rewards to help you understand where we're coming from. I want to first talk to you about organizational behavior management. This is actually my specialty area, using behavior analysis in the workplace to solve workplace issues, to change employee performance, to increase productivity. This is something called organizational behavior management. And in the University of Alaska Anchorage behavior analysis concentration in our program, we have of course specifically dedicated to taking behavior analysis and applying it in the workplace. So I encourage you to check that out. One of the places where you see OBM being used often is in something called performance based pay or performance pay. This is pretty common in jobs where you want to increase employee motivation to work, but it's limited to ways in which you can increase motivation related to giving people more money. Performance-based pay is used in jobs where employees can control their own performance, but has the potential to be used almost anywhere. And this is important because we know that when we're trying to figure out employee performance issues, it can be kind of challenging. Very often we think about employee motivation as this kind of idiosyncratic, you know, they should be here and they just should, and I'm using that capital S should, they can employee just should do their job because it's their job to do their job, which then we get in this kind of circular reasoning like why are they doing their job, well, because it's their job to do their job, but what happens if they don't do their job, then they're not doing their job. And it kind of creates a little bit of a problem. So as a workplace specialist, I really enjoy the movie office space as it's one where a guy works in kind of a really toxic work environment with a crappy manager. And we can bemoan managers, we can talk about the fact that maybe managers are poorly prepared, maybe managers don't know what they're doing, but it doesn't help address the issue. How do you make it better? Then OBM is one of the ways of making workplaces better, making them pay off, because when you think about employee performance issues, it's not common sense. And the contingencies, the sort of environmental supports that employees need to effectively do their jobs, they're not common sense. We should apply the lens of science to understand workplace issues. Let's look at some examples of performance pay. So in a study by Derrickson McNally from 1987, they were using like a super simple check entry task. This is really common in OBM, we look at how quickly people do a job. And they were looking at bank tellers, how quickly do bank tellers actually enter, bang, or how quickly do they enter checks? How quickly do they transact their business? The researchers wanted to explore how quickly can they process checks per hour. And they found that under baseline conditions, when there were no effective contingencies in place, when there wasn't really any incentive for the employees, they were pretty slow. They processed about a thousand checks per hour. But when employees could earn bonuses, when they could earn more reinforcement for processing checks faster, we saw that the number of checks processed increased about 350%, just a huge increase, which shows you that reinforcement matters. Derrickson McNally also looked at what is employee turnover like? And under the baseline condition where there was no reinforcer for doing your job well and faster, there was a lot of employees leaving the agency every quarter. In the baseline condition, over 100 employees left. It's a boring job, all you're doing is entering checks, whatever. But when employees could earn bonuses for doing their job and doing their job well, employee turnover decreased dramatically. And then finally, looking at overtime. Now, overtime is incredibly costly for businesses. And remember, from the baseline condition, people were processing checks really, really slowly. And if you didn't get through all the checks during the workday, well, you'd have to stick around and continue processing checks into the evening and earn time and a half for doing it. In the baseline condition, they found that there were over 400 hours of work time accrued by employees every quarter. And in the performance pay condition, the amount of overtime dropped dramatically. So those bonuses that employees could earn for processing and doing their job well actually came out of the overtime pay budget. And the organization ended up saving money on overtime and reallocating those savings to employee performance pay. So this is really, really beneficial for businesses if you know what you're doing. And you can see implicit within this is this idea of a ratio schedule of reinforcement. So if you understand schedules of reinforcement, you can really help anticipate the outcomes of performance-based pay. You can help set up contingencies where employee job performance improve and then employee satisfaction could be improved. You increase the profitability for the company. You improve the quality of services and the outcomes provided for the consumer. Organizational behavior management is amazing. Now, there have been some suggestions that we should be using this in lots of different places. For instance, what about teachers? What can we do in terms of teacher performance pay? Teachers have less control over how students are coming into the class because maybe they don't control the student. They don't control their preparation or their academic potential. They don't control what happens at home. But there are some scientifically validated curricula that help improve teaching. Many teachers refuse to use them. Many teachers also have unions that kind of fight the idea of giving teacher bonuses contingent on certain kinds of student performance or other qualities. But performance-based pay could help change that. About a decade ago, there was a prominent suggestion that perhaps if teachers were given a chance to improve, that people could earn greater rewards for teaching well. And the difficulty there is how do you define teaching well? In this case, what Obama was suggesting at the time was that rewards should be based on the quality of teaching. And that's kind of difficult. This does highlight, though, this idea of what do we reward? What do we reinforce? What do we incent for people? And there's the reason that there's historically been a lot of concern related to this is you want to make sure that you're not doing anything that jeopardizes intrinsic motivation, a love of learning. We don't necessarily want to incent teachers for, for instance, standardized test performance because many teachers, and I think rightly so, are concerned that standardized test performance is not the best metric or not the best way of establishing what a person has learned. So what do we do? We know that intrinsic motivation is really important. And Alfie Kohn is a very outspoken critic of behavior analysis because he and others argue that using reinforcement, using any kind of extrinsic reward ruins the intrinsic motivation that students have to learn. And I will admit that on some level, they are right. Alfie Kohn, for instance, said that punishment and reward proceed from the basic same psychological model. And these kind of conceived motivation is nothing more than the manipulation of behavior, which I think is unfair. But let's put a pin in that for now and we'll come back to it. Let me tell you why it's a fair concern that extrinsic motivation ruins motivation. There was a study where they evaluated how many tasks do kids do in a preschool in a given day. And they found that on average in baseline, the kids were completing about 50 of these little academic small play tasks. They provided a condition where kids could earn little tokens, little rewards, little reinforcers, if they completed more tasks. And they found that the number of tasks increased. And then to evaluate whether extrinsic rewards were demotivating, they removed those rewards and went back to a baseline condition. They found that compared to the initial baseline, compared to baseline number one, the number of tasks completed had dropped and dwindled. So the number of tasks completed following the reinforcement condition was smaller. This was evidence that motivation decreases performance because we see a decrease in that response following baseline. However, what's important to note was that this effect was actually temporary. When the researchers came back in about a week and a half to do a follow up study, they found that in a subsequent condition, the level had returned to baseline responding. So these changes that we see from reinforcement to baseline when the reinforcers removed are temporary. While we do see that reinforcement can temporarily suppress motivation, it does not suppress motivation in the long run. So you should have no concerns about using extrinsic motivation if it helps your learner in the short run to acquire some of those skills to learn some of those tasks. Finally, you always, as we mentioned before, want to be fading out extrinsic reinforcers. You always want to be planning for how are you going to transition the learner from artificial to natural reinforcement. And that should always be a plan that you're having or that you're making before you even begin the reinforcement procedure, because you don't want to use reinforcement poorly. You do not want to squash motivation. You want to have a good plan for how you're going to transition back to natural reinforcement. Anyway, thank you so much for joining me. I'll see you guys next time.