I was thinking the other day as I was reading how machines are going to be replacing a ton of people when it comes to certain jobs where some of them are things like warehouse work. Essentially, instead of having people running around you will now have machines doing almost everything autonomously. What got me thinking was some comments that mentioned how people often get disgruntled over this kind of work anyways so the sooner the better.
I remember even when I worked at McDonalds there was the job of having to lift out stuff from the truck and then storing them in the storage. There wasn’t actually dedicated job roles for this per se as it was literally just the regular workers who would volunteer themselves to be scheduled for it. I was one of those people and one incentive they gave people to do this was on top of getting their regular pay they would offer all those employees free meals. My thought there nowadays is how it probably costs the company overall very little to do that but morale wise it did a lot I felt.
Sometimes just giving those extra little bonuses can go a long way to keep people motivated while feeling appreciated. That’s not necessarily something you can tell immediately just by looking at numbers too as it would probably be the opposite where you want to save as much. Give a little and receive a lot is what happened in this case in terms of productivity and motivation from the workers.