How a “Pay-to-Quit” Strategy Can Reveal Your Most Motivated Employees

Companies often have a hard time determining how motivated or committed their employees are, because employees know it goes against their own interests to declare themselves unmotivated or uncommitted. The solution to this problem is for companies to put incentives in place that encourage employees to reveal how they actually feel. In this article, the author, a behavioral economist, describes an incentive plan that has been deployed successfully to this end — the so-called Pay-to-Quit program, in which companies offer employees a significant sum of money to leave their jobs.