talking helps.

Not just for the employee who sits across from their manager in a conversation, but also for the company.

And it helps a lot more than bonuses that are promised to employees if they have done an exceptionally good job in a year.

Kim Maurus

volunteer.

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This statement, which is irritating at first glance, is the result of a study by the Frankfurt School of Finance.

Timo Vogelsang, who works in the "Accounting" department, has worked with two other researchers on the question of what drives employees to perform better.

Performance-related surcharges on the salary are not necessarily.

"Practitioners have long seen bonuses as a way of controlling behavior in a more differentiated way," said Vogelsang on Tuesday at a lecture.

For example, large companies such as Deloitte, Microsoft and Bosch have stopped linking employee appraisals to bonus payments in recent years.

The company's HR managers noticed that the exchange between the supervisor and the employee was no longer so open.

Bonuses and feedback talks

Vogelsang wanted to test this impression in his study.

He made a food discounter the object of the investigation.

Vogelsang and his colleagues randomly divided the 224 branches into four groups.

For example, some branch managers received a certain bonus over a period of several months when a certain profit was achieved, while some only spoke to their managers weekly about the progress of the profit increase.

The third group received both bonuses and feedback talks, and in the fourth control group, store managers worked as before.

A comparison of the profits within three months showed that those branch managers who only had regular discussions about profit increases actually achieved some: an increase of seven percent compared to those who were “only” promised bonuses.

This cash-incentive-driven group failed to increase profits.

In addition, the positive effect of the talks fizzled out if the branch managers were to receive additional money, and there was no significant increase in profits in this group either.

Having fun at work and in your free time is crucial

How can this be explained?

On the one hand, according to Vogelsang, the quality of the conversation is higher if the same conversation is not also about possible bonuses.

"In such discussions with the manager, problems are often openly mentioned." According to the researcher's interpretation, it is different when money is also at stake: The branch manager then has to fear that his manager may possibly attribute the problems he has raised to himself.

This is supported by other data collected in the study.

The perceived quality of the feedback and the motivation of the branch managers was significantly higher when there were only discussions.

According to Vogelsang, if a company still wants to reward the performance of its employees with money, so-called spot bonuses can make sense.

This performance fee is paid immediately after the good performance and is not related to annual appraisals.

Another possibility are cross-person team bonuses.

Bonuses linked to sales figures

According to Vogelsang, however, the results cannot be transferred to the Frankfurt financial sector, where salaries and bonuses are very different from those for employees in supermarkets.

Nevertheless, he sees a certain generality in areas in which bonuses are linked to objective values ​​such as sales figures.

One conclusion is that employees are not always concerned with how much money they make.

Having fun at work, getting along well with each other and also having free time are beneficial for boosting corporate profits.

Vogelsang is currently conducting a similar study with young professionals.

A retailer complained about the absent days of his trainees.

In the study, the apprentices received either a bonus or more vacation days if they attended regularly.

Paradoxically, this meant that the trainees in the bonus group were absent far more often than before.

According to Vogelsang's explanation, the introduction of the bonus signaled to the young people: "My work is strenuous, my boss knows it and wants to counteract it." Reinforced by the feeling of doing strenuous work, many then preferred to stay at home.