How does Henkel link rewards and incentives to strategically-important employee behaviors and the company’s targeted outcomes?

Rewarding is much more than what the word implies. It is not just giving people a token of appreciation for doing something.

Rewarding is rooted on the principles of operant and classical conditioning proposed by B.F. Skinner, Pavlov, and a plethora of other social psychologists and researchers. By "conditioning", we mean the molding, contouring and "crafting" of new behaviors.  What behaviors are those? In the case of Henkel's, the behaviors that the company aims to...

Rewarding is much more than what the word implies. It is not just giving people a token of appreciation for doing something.

Rewarding is rooted on the principles of operant and classical conditioning proposed by B.F. Skinner, Pavlov, and a plethora of other social psychologists and researchers. By "conditioning", we mean the molding, contouring and "crafting" of new behaviors.  What behaviors are those? In the case of Henkel's, the behaviors that the company aims to foster and increase among employees are:

1. Increased quality in work performance

2. Attention to detail

3. Focus on quality assurance

4. Keep up the pace of demand/supply

5. Ethical dynamics with co-workers

Why does Henkel do this? According to their organizational culture page, the company pays as much attention and gives as much importance to the process of creating products as to the final products themselves. 

The five indicators mentioned above are clearly process standards. What it means is that these behaviors are entirely based on the process of developing the product, and not on the product marketing or packaging, or even sales. 

When rewards are given for these five indicators, according to the rules of conditioning, employees will increase their levels of motivation. As a result, they will be more likely to shift their usual behaviors at work toward those which reward them the most. This is how motivation plays such an essential part in making a difference between something "good" and something "great".

Henkel also states in the mission and vision statements that the organization wants, indeed, to be the best at what they do. By focusing on the process, rewarding employees at this level, and by motivating them to do better each time, Henkel expects to meet its goals, and they will become better than many of the competitors who may still be abiding by the product-based assessment tools from previous decades.