Donna Genie walks through an incentive-pay system for a manufacturing plant with 10 workstations. Teams stay until everyone finishes, so slower workers trigger overtime and time-and-a-half pay. The plan rewards teams that cooperate to finish on time and cut costs.
I've worked on many incentive plans for payroll, and there's always some catches to them. And I found an interesting one recently that I want to share with you. This would be an incentive plan to encourage your entire team to work together to minimize costs and put out the best product. Let's dive in. I was recently visiting a manufacturing plant, and in this plant they had 10 different stations where work was being done. That worker's job, who had to do that skill, had to go down the line to the quality control, fix that product, and then make sure that it passed quality control. Fun part was that that team of workers on that station all worked together. So they started out very early in the morning, and when they finished their quota of what they had to produce for the day, they were allowed to go home. Now, we all know if a worker stays past 8 hours, you're required by law to pay overtime and a half rate. So what they did was all of the team members on that team, whether they were the one who had the output that was incorrect or not, had to stay there on that position until all of the team was ready to be released.
