Pizza is life. This is known. If you find yourself marooned on a deserted island you could survive forever on pizza but not money. Is pizza the single greatest motivating factor in life? That’s debatable. Some might argue that sex is more motivating than pizza, some might say that eating pizza is better than sex. Regardless of your stance on pizza, a new study about workplace productivity has shown that pizza is a better motivator than money.
To conduct the study, Ariely sent three out of four workers at a semiconductor factory in Israel messages at the start of the week that promised them specific rewards for assembling a prescribed number of chips each day.
One group was promised a “Well Done!” text message from the boss at the end of the week. Another group was promised a bonus of about $30. A third group was told they would get a voucher for a free pizza. A fourth group, roughly 25 percent of the workers, got no message and no offer
Then the participants were told to get to work.
So what motivation, if any, really works?
During the beginning of the week-long experiment, free pizza came out first, showing a 6.7 percent increase in productivity over the control group. A “Well Done!” saw a 6.6 percent increase. And money claimed a measly third place with just 4.9 percent over the control group.
But as the week finished up, money fell into last place, performing 13.2 percent worse than the control group.
At the end of study, as reported in New York Magazine, the “Well Done!” text was the ultimate winner. Free pizza came in second and the control group was third. Money finished behind no extra motivation.
What does it all mean? According to the experts, it means people love praise and appreciation more than tangible rewards and money.
radass
If you’ve ever had a boss (or coach) who was the biggest asshole in the world and made you work you goddamn ass off for the tiniest bit of praise then these results probably make sense to you. Though I would think that money is a bigger motivator than free food. I’m 99.99% certain that if you were to run this experiment at a hedge fund and the compensation promised was significant you would find that nobody gives a flying fuck about pizza. However, the number of factory workers across the globe is probably ten eleventy trillion times the number of dudes that work at hedge funds, so I suppose this experiment is actually a quasi-decent representation of the real world.
…To read up on the study and for more analysis you can click on over to NYMag.com!…