The continued praise, good performance reviews, and subsequent pay raises for completing large quantities of work led to a situation where a coworker’s behavior was not the intended behavior my previous employer designed to elicit. The reward system was intended to compensate workers for their efforts. The problem with this system was the employee’s perception of what was actually being rewarded. My coworker must have understood that the quantity of work alone was the item being rewarded instead of the overall quality or amount of hard work in their efforts. Many times, during maintenance cycles, my coworker would sign off on work as being complete when he did not even look at the equipment needing repair or maintenance. To him, having his name on as many items as possible on sign-off sheets was the behavior our supervisors were looking for and rewarded. As long as the equipment did not break down or otherwise fail until its next maintenance cycle, he would be off the hook for not getting the maintenance or repair work done.
The first problem with this reward system is that for someone like me who wants to make sure their name on the sign-off sheets represents great effort and good quality of work, this compensation only encourages reduced work effort, dishonesty, and self-serving behaviors. Another problem with this reward system has to do with our efforts not being easily verified and the added competition for receiving the limited amount of pay increases budgeted each year. Our supervisors thought they could trust their employees to behave the way the reward system intended, but in this case, it failed miserably due to the misaligned perception of the behavior being rewarded. A better approach to this scenario would be to have the supervisors more directly involved in the maintenance cycle, verify the work being done, and if the equipment takes longer to break down, as my coworker always hoped form, they need to adjust the maintenance schedule to reflect that. Otherwise, the system will continue to reward the wrong behavior.
