This hub examines how my organization’s incentive plans relate to organizational objectives. Evaluate how the incentives plans do, or do not, help the organization to achieve its goals and objectives. Your company may want to use similar techniques, or you may want to research your own. Regardless, money, gift cards, and prizes remain the best short-term energizers for most workplaces.

Incentive Plans
Companies use a variety of techniques to motivate employees. Keeping motivated employees is the best way for companies to maximize work efforts, increase productivity, and accelerate profits. Large companies may use a mixture of monetary and non-monetary motivators. Bonuses, pay increases, and commissions are all examples of monetary motivators. An example of a non-monetary motivator would be recognition. Heather’s Crew, though a small company, uses a variety of techniques to motivate workers to work more efficiently and precisely.

Construction is a challenging industry to dominate. Each prospective customer has a unique set of needs, and requires a different balance of quality verses cost. Typically, if a customer deems quality the most important factor in decision-making, they expect the cost should be higher. Similarly, if a customer is looking for the lowest price, they usually expect to sacrifice quality. Heather’s Crew aims to get the highest number of customers possible, and this objective can only be accomplished if it can provide customers with the best quality at the best cost. Beyond that, it must convince consumers that its services are of the highest quality, even though it does not charge the high rates comparable with other companies with perceived quality.

In the same way, every company desires to be profitable and achieve substantial growth. This requires that a company like Heather’s Crew find ways to keep costs low, and to keep a steady flow of new business and customer referrals. The best way to accomplish all of the company objectives is to use motivational strategies, like incentive plans, that reward workers that help achieve company goals. Heather’s  Crew contracts workers on a high per-day wage rather than paying for each job. “In exchange for top performance and working longer hours without job security, employees want companies to provide flexible work schedules, comfortable working conditions, more control over how they accomplish work, training and development opportunities, and financial incentives based on how the organization performs” (Gerhart, Hollenbeck, Noe & Wright, 2007).

Heather’s  Crew also provides workers with a steady amount of work, while most companies can only offer work inconsistently. Using this method, the company is able to secure consistent use of the best workers in the industry. Even beyond the monetary motivator of high pay and the promise of consistent work, the company offers bonuses to workers who attain referral work. These bonuses motivate contracted workers to represent Heather’s Crew with integrity and quality workmanship. “This strategy carries risks, however. If the person providing the service is a contractor and not an employee, the company is not supposed to directly supervise the worker. The company can tell the contractor what criteria the finished assignment should meet but not, for example, where or what hours to work” (Gerhart, Hollenbeck, Noe & Wright, 2007). This presents interesting challenges for a company that has specific appointment times. In order to maximize customer satisfaction and guarantee that contracted workers are not being used as employees, Heather’s  Crew provides a time-period to customers and workers in which the work should be completed.

Though our workers are all contracted, Heather’s  Crew can still use several different methods to motivate workers. Once workers have proven their ability to work efficiently and with limited supervision, they receive opportunities to work on larger projects that result in better pay. Workers are also offered free training opportunities that will help them attain better job opportunities through our company and in other job pursuits. We also work to make sure each person that works on a project for our company feels taken care of, and that he will leave with a desire to work with our company in the future. We bring lunch to each of our job sites and feed all of our workers. We also leave Gatorade and Soda on longer projects. We also ask employees about their feedback, which makes them feel valued and reward them with verbal recognition when projects are done well.

In general, workers respond well to these incentive plans. These workers have often been mistreated by other companies in the construction industry, and often work for days and never receive payment. By providing workplace incentives like free lunch, competitive rates, and consistent work, Heather’s  Crew takes pick of the best employees. These incentives also help the company to meet sales objectives and deadlines. Still, the company is able to offer competitive prices because of the payment terms negotiated with workers. These workers also generate a high level of customer referrals, and we attribute this to the incentive plans that include bonuses paid for referrals that result in a signed contract.


References
Gerhart, B., Hollenbeck, J., Noe, R. & Wright, P. (2007). Fundamentals of human resource management. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.