5 Minute Freewrite - No Incentives

All, doing a 5 minute freewrite. Thank you for reading.

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While incentives are great for pushing people to come up with ideas or to collaborate better, there are fundamental items that should not have any form of incentives because it will make people dread what they are doing.

Take for example, forcefully meeting a company metric such as volunteering hours. To me, volunteering should never be a metric but something that come right out of the heart. If incentives needs to be used to spur people to do volunteer work and people whom actually attend are being forced to attend so as to show that the company is actively volunteering, this would have changed the whole spirit of volunteering.

In my company, this is exactly what is happening. The incentive given is that if a particular day is being selected as the volunteering day, everybody should go even if you are having deadlines the other day. The incentive was to give everybody a half day off the same day when the activity is completed. This might sound super appealing, but people just end up heading to the activity to clock mileage and claim the free off. Volunteering should really be voluntary basis than forcing everyone to go to meet a specific metric. It is actually sad to see volunteering being put on the line with incentives to look good. This is one specific thing that should have no incentives because the satisfaction through volunteering is way more than what money can buy.