This is something I've been struggling with lately – Why should I work harder? The obvious answer is, that if you are a salaried employee in a large corporation, you shouldn't.
Let's put aside the obvious point that hard work is rewarded with more work and look at it from a different angle. In my opinion, the only reason to work harder is to gain more monetary compensation for it – This can be money, vacation days, stock options, etc. (Not pizza parties for fuck sake).
I am a salaried worker in an established industry in middle America – I make the same amount of money every single week no matter if I work 20 hours or 60 hours. So what other things would incentivize me to work harder?
Promotions – At my company, these are time-gated based on years of experience and education level. This means that even if you invent the cure for cancer if you had a recent promotion, you are waiting 2-3 years to be considered for another. I won't even open the can of worms that promotions are largely political and you can work 80 hours a week and never be promoted due to office politics.
Annual Bonus – Our company does a percentage of salary-based bonus system, so while this is where you would expect hard work to be rewarded, the personal performance modifier is negligible. The company's performance modifier is 0% – 200%, while the personal performance modifier is 0% – 20%. Let's do a quick example to highlight the absurdity of this.
Timmy makes $100k a year and has a 10% bonus modifier which means that his starting bonus is $10k. The company had an average year so the modifier was middle of the road at 100%, no change higher or lower, and his bonus is still $10k. Let's assume that the difference between a good year (0%) and an exceptional year (20%) is the difference between working 40hrs/week and 60hrs/week. In this example, if Timmy worked harder every week for 50 weeks during the year (1000hrs) his reward would be an additional $2k ($12k bonus with personal modifier instead of the $10k). This averages out to overtime paying ~$2.00/hr.
So, what the fuck is the point? Would love to hear how other corporations handle this type of thing.