Swear Jar – Incentivizing good behavior

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12 points·hunterwalk··3 comments

Love the idea, not so sure about the name. Glancing at the title I thought it was an actual "swear jar", not a figurative one. That brought a little angry thought to my head, "What is this? An office for children?", then I saw the actual idea and thought it sounded pretty cool.

You could make a fair bit of money just allowing people to pre-buy a block of fines, then swear/smoke/turn up late all they like until it runs out. Might defeat the point of the jar, but you'd make a good profit!

The story is told in The Boys on the Bus, that Johnny Apple of the NY Times was disliked by other reporters on the state house beat, and that one group who regularly lunched together decided that griping about him had become boring. They enforced the rule of a 25 cent fine per mention of his name. Then one day a regular walked in, through down a $5, and let go his rant.

[Edit: I'd have forgotten this long ago, except that I've worked with people who have that way of getting under one's skin.]

I discovered recently this sort of things works amazingly. At my company it used to be that it would be impossible to hold a punctual meetings (theres was always at least 1 person who would arrive 10+ minutes late).

We made a rule, if you arrive late you invite everyone to donuts. It didn't work. Then we made it donuts + coffee. Boom it worked flawlessly. Every single meeting now starts on time. People make a huge effort never to arrive late and it's had a great impact on productivity.

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