These tools let you put money on the line for productivity

Protocol Workplace

Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. Today: Lizzy Lawrence on punishment productivity, why it’s OK to cry at work and how employees feel about corporate giving.

— Michelle Ma, reporter (email | twitter)

Put your money where your to-do list is

Think about the goals you’ve procrastinated on forever. Something is holding you back. The thought of completing them is overwhelming, or the task is wholly unpleasant. You need some sort of push to follow through. But how far would you go to hack your motivation? For some people, the answer is risking money. Write 20 lines of code, or lose $20.

Online “commitment contract” tools have capitalized on this idea, providing a structure for people willing to put money on the line for productivity. They’re popular in a niche corner of the internet, and the tools have built up loyal followings of people who find the extra motivation effective.

Beeminder and stickK are the most dominant tools. If you fail to achieve your stated goal, Beeminder gets your money. StickK, another commitment contract tool, lets people pay up to an individual or a charity they either love or hate — and takes a cut of the money that's forfeited.
StickK launched in 2007 and Beeminder launched in 2011: Both in academic contexts. Beeminder’s CEO Danny Reeves studied algorithmic game theory and used financial incentives to help finish his thesis. StickK was founded by two Yale behavioral economists, one of whom had made a bet with a friend in graduate school to lose 30 pounds or pay the other $10,000 (he lost the weight).
Beeminder’s community has stayed small, composed of mostly “super techy nerd types” who are into integrating Beeminder with hardware like Fitbits. StickK is a more traditional corporate startup, offering versions of its product to individuals and to businesses.

It’s not for everyone. The method often requires specific, numeric goals that could feed into unhealthy behaviors.

“You’re essentially blackmailing yourself,” said Breanna Robles, a tech worker who’s been struggling with productivity while working at home. “That can’t be good for your anxiety and your mental health.”
Art Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, told me he doesn’t think the method will work forever. Particularly if it’s for a task you truly hate. Eventually, the pain of completing the task will outweigh the pain of losing money.
He advocates for trying to make the task more pleasurable, that way focusing the experience on joy rather than relief. “When I am under threat, the emotions I experience are stress, anxiety and fear when I haven’t yet avoided the calamity,” he said. “When I do avoid the calamity, I experience relief. Who wakes up and thinks, ‘The pinnacle of my emotional existence is relief?’”

The ethics of commitment contracts are sticky in the workplace. Beeminder’s CEO is anti-workplace-commitment-contracts, because he thinks goals lose all meaning when they come from a boss. But stickK sells to businesses all the time.

StickK’s enterprise plan focuses on rewards over consequences and, for obvious reasons, does not make employees fork over their cash. StickK works with employers to create a list of wellness campaigns and assigns a certain number of points for each campaign that employees start to accumulate.
Elizabeth Tenison, assistant professor in nutrition at Rowan University, said people loved the “rewards and accountability” in the stickK-based health and wellness program she ran for colleagues.
But it’s best to keep that kind of program voluntary. “There are ethical issues that need to be considered more specifically; you should consider work-life separation and how much your employer gets into your personal lives,” University of Chicago social psychologist Ayelet Fishbach said.

The question of what motivates us is complicated, messy and highly individual. Do commitment contracts sound helpful to you? Or totally horrifying? Let me know about your comfort level when it comes to behavior hacks.

Read the full story.

— Lizzy Lawrence, reporter (email| twitter)

Cry me a river

Real talk: Have you ever cried at work? According to reporting from my colleague Sarah Roach, it’s OK! She talked to workplace criers and experts on why we’re not crying enough at work, how that’s been changing with new workplace norms and why (and how) companies could make it easier for workers to bare their emotions in the office (or on Zoom).

Read the full story.

A MESSAGE FROM TRUSTED FUTURE

At the same time that the pandemic demonstrated all that is possible in an interconnected world, we saw in new and increasingly stark ways how certain communities continue to be marginalized and harmed by a persistent digital divide and how effectively that divide exacerbates our society’s other inequities.

Learn more

Give, and you shall receive

Employees care about corporate philanthropy. And they want to have a say in how their companies give. At least, that’s according to a new survey of 1,000 American adults from charitable donations platform Benevity.

85% of employees surveyed say they frequently have no say in the organizations supported by their companies.
86% of them believe that employees and customers should have a say in how businesses allocate their charitable funds.
It influences retention: 78% of employees are likely to work for a company that provides transparency into how it allocates its charitable donations.