Research Proves Pizza Is Highly Effective in Making Employees Productive at Work

Here’s another reason to love pizza more. In a study by psychologist Dan Ariely, published in his new book Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations, he proves that pizza can help make employees more productive at work. Pizza, early in the study, bested other motivators, like cash and a compliment from their boss.

For the research, Ariely took four groups of workers who assembled computer chips in a technology company in Israel. Each group was given a different motivator to hit their daily targets.

One group was promised pizza, while another was promised a cash bonus of $40.

A third group of workers was promised a compliment from their boss via text, and the last group (the control group) was not promised anything. The groups of workers were monitored to see how they performed at work given their respective motivators.

Initially, the winning motivator was pizza.

According to the study, the productivity of workers that were promised a slice of pizza increased by 6.7 percent in the first day.

This was an impressive results, as the food item did a lot better than the cash offer.

Compliments from the boss was the second most effective productivity motivator early in the experiment.

The promise of compliments from their boss came at a very close second, and it helped increase the employees’ productivity by 6.6 percent.

The cash bonus group, however, was behind with an increase of only 4.9 percent. The cash offer did not seem enough to significantly raise their productivity.

By the end of the study, compliments from the boss won and pizza took second place among the different motivators.

Over the course of the week, compliment as a reward was able to overtake pizza as the best motivator for the workers. The group of workers that was promised cold hard cash actually ended up 6.5 percent less productive than the control group.