Incentive programs usually provide performance feedback to DC employees when they get their incentive pay—once or twice per month. Researchers David Goomas and Timothy Ludwig guessed performance would improve if employees received more immediate feedback and designed an experiment to test the theory.

The researchers configured the handheld units of 23 stock replenishers to show them their performance against engineered labor standards at the end of each task.

The result: Employee performance immediately increased 24%, and performance was maintained for the 10-week duration of the study.