“At the end of every working day people leave either more motivated to come back and do their jobs again tomorrow or less motivated as a result of what happens to them that day. Performance is about what happens every day.” — Aubrey C. Daniels (2000).
It is important in the workplace, whether you are in the field of applied behavior analysis or another field, to consider whether the correct employee behaviors are being reinforced. Behavior that is reinforced (positively or negatively) increase in frequency in the future; whereas behavior that is punished (the ABA term for decreasing behavior), decrease in frequency in the future.
So, to create an efficient workplace with productive and happy employees, we need to make sure that behaviors that indicate these types of work environments are being reinforced and carefully ensure that other behaviors are not being reinforced.
One of the important steps a supervisor or manager should take is to specifically identify the behaviors that are desired in their employees. Without knowing the exact behaviors you want to see, it will be very difficult to reinforce the correct things. So, step number one is to objectively identify the behaviors you desire in your employees.
According to Daniels (2000), the only and best way to maximize performance is to use positive reinforcement. This is a concept across the ABA field that is recognized as creating the most optimal behavior. The use of positive reinforcement in the workplace results in employee’s going above and beyond what they are minimally required to do. This is in contrast to using negative reinforcement which results in employees doing just what the need to do to escape or avoid some undesired consequence (such as getting written up).
Another important concept to consider in the workplace is extinction. Extiniction is removing reinforcement from previously reinforced behaviors. A common example in the workplace is ignoring employee’s efforts. Employees often feel unappreciated or invisible in this example. Doing nothing is basically using extinction, so be careful about this in the work setting. Additionally, ignoring can lead to undesired behaviors being reinforced by other contingencies that may develop, such as the reinforcement that may occur from doing a job “the easy way” or doing a task with less effort than is desired.
So, the summary of this is for supervisors or managers in the workplace to be very aware of the behaviors they want to see in their employees and to provide positive reinforcement for these behaviors. Reinforcers are determined by the employee not what the boss thinks will serve as positive reinforcement.
[image credit: Denise Krebs via Flickr]
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