Free Happy Hour is 9 to 5 by Alexander Kjerulf Page A

raise or a bonus there is a brief spike in happiness at work, but this happiness quickly settles back to its previous level. This does not mean that salaries don’t affect our happiness at work. If you perceive your salary to be unfair, that can definitely make you unhappy. As we will see in chapter 4, being treated unfairly can make us desperately unhappy.

    You should definitely fight to get the salary you deserve. If you’ve earned a bonus or a raise, you should get it. Also, if your salary is so low that you and your family cannot comfortably live on it, that can definitely make you unhappy.
    But once your salary is fair and enough to live on, further increases in salary do not lead to an increase in happiness.
    Alfie Kohn, author of the excellent and provocative book Punished by Rewards, has this to say:
“The idea that dangling money and other goodies in front of people will “motivate” them to work harder is the conventional wisdom in our society, and particularly among compensation specialists.
Rewards are not merely ineffective but actually counterproductive. Subjects offered an incentive for doing a task (or, in some of the studies, for doing it well) actually did lower quality work than subjects offered no reward at all. As University of Texas psychologist Janet Spence put it after discovering this surprising effect in an early study of her own, rewards “have effects that interfere with performance in ways that we are only beginning to understand.”
    Kohn’s book is meticulously researched and collates results from hundreds of psychological studies. This thoroughness is essential in order to communicate Kohn’s message, which is totally at odds with the way that businesses traditionally motivate employees, by throwing money and rewards at them.
A small town in the US wanted to promote reading among school children, so during the summer vacation they set up a program where children earned points for checking out books from the local library. Those points could be redeemed for free pizza at the local Domino’s Pizza.
While the program ran, it was a success and the children who participated read a lot of books — and presumably got very fat on pizza. But after the program ended, these kids now read fewer books. Their own natural motivation to read books had been replaced by the external motivation of free pizza, and when the promise of pizza went away, so did the motivation.
    Kohn’s research found that rewarding people reduces motivation. This seems counter-intuitive at first, but Kohn’s explanation is simple: every time you reward people for doing something, you motivate them externally, an act which inevitably reduces people’s inner motivation. Inner motivation is the only guarantee of quality and performance in the long term.
    Businesses and leaders struggle so hard to motivate their people using the promise of rewards like titles, promotions, larger offices and other corporate status symbols — but this actively lowers people’s motivation.
    If rewards don’t work, what is the alternative? Kohn’s advice is to pay people fairly and then do everything possible to not focus on rewards. Incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance plans, and other reward systems violate that last principle by their very nature. Businesses need to stop focusing so much on offering rewards, and employees need to stop chasing them.
    In summary, the truth is this:
The salary just makes it possible for us to show up at work every day.
It has no lasting effect on how happy, motivated or productive we are.
    Job security
“I work in the government sector in Denmark as a tjenestemand , a type of civil servant, virtually immune to being fired. No matter how incompetent or obnoxious I get, I can’t be fired without a huge hassle for my government department.
Though the public sector is moving away from hiring people on these terms, many people still have them. No matter what they do, they won’t lose their jobs. It’s the