Incentives, Rewards & Motivation

Why do some people push harder at work while others just do the minimum?

In this episode of The Reality of Business, Bob and Jeremy look at how incentives, rewards and recognition really affect employee motivation. They talk about the difference between incentives and perks, why some bonus and commission schemes work while others backfire, and how things like fairness, culture and recognition shape workplace performance.

Using examples from real sales environments, they explore the psychology behind incentives, employee engagement and productivity.

If you manage a team, design incentive schemes, or care about workplace motivation, this conversation will give you plenty to think about.

For more info, free resources,  useful content & our blog posts, please visit realitytraining.com.

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Transcript

Setting The Stage: What Is Incentive

Jeremy Blake 0:29

Good morning. How are you, Bobby? I'm well, sir. How are you? Yeah, fine. You're looking mighty fine in the booth.

Bob Morrell 0:38

And so are you, with your lovely drape over you, which is always such a lovely warm thing to see.

First Jobs And Fair Rewards

Jeremy Blake 0:44

Well, listeners, this is to keep the sound good so you can hear us as you're driving. I don't know what else you might be doing, walking, running. Um, but thank you very much for tuning in. And today we're gonna look at a big topic in a limited amount of time. And the topic is incentives. And the title of this one, if you like, is What Are They and Do You Need Them? So I'm gonna put you straight on the spot, Bobby. If I was 11 years old and I said, Daddy, Uncle Bobby, what is an incentive? What would be your definition of the word?

Bob Morrell 1:24

That's a really good question. Um, I think uh the definition of an incentive is that it's something that engages with your enthusiasm for your work. So something which triggers uh an even higher level of enthusiasm for your work to perhaps get you to work harder, more creatively, more diligently. It's something that spurs you on to greater success, I would say.

Jeremy Blake 1:56

Okay, this 11-year-old is now 16. Stick with this for a minute. Hopefully this works. And I come home to you, you're my dad, and I say, Dad, I've just been offered a Saturday job making coffee. And um they told me the rate of pay. And I remember when I was 11, you we had that little chat about incentives, and you said it's something that and I said, Are there any incentives on top of my pay? And they said no. So I'm just wondering if that's right, Dad, if I should take this Saturday job.

Bob Morrell 2:34

Well, um, it depends how much you need the money. So that's the first thing. If you uh you know want to fund your ridiculous 16-year-old lifestyle these days and get on your phone, then that hourly rate is gonna help you towards that.

Jeremy Blake 2:49

This is what I'm trying to get my head around, Dad. Is yeah, some companies are not gonna give me an incentive, even if I make the best coffee and get more customers, I'm just gonna get the standard rate of pay. Is that what you're saying?

Bob Morrell 3:00

That is true, although there are some companies who might offer you um a little incentive if you were to sell a cake with your coffee every time you sell a coffee.

Jeremy Blake 3:10

No, they don't do that. I've asked all the other people though. Well And and apparently we we get free coffee, but we don't get any cake. I was hoping I could have a nice slice of carrot cake on my break, but apparently not.

Bob Morrell 3:19

Well, you're looking a bit porky these days anyway, so if I were you don't worry so much about that.

Jeremy Blake 3:25

Right, lovely. So let me give you the shorter Oxford's definition, and your yours is brilliant. So incentive is defined as something that encourages, motivates, or stirs. So I liked your triggers, or stirs a person to take action, work harder, or behave in a particular way. And then the next part of it is it often refers to an external reward such as a payment or concession. And this is my favorite bit with in parenthesis, e.g., tax incentives. So we may not give you anything, but we may not take as much away. Well, yes. So as you hear that, and you think back of your 16-year-old self, and I thought back at my 16-year-old self, I don't think I experienced an incentive till my first sales job selling advertising, and that had an incentive attached. And it had also sporadic bizarre incentives.

Defining Incentives vs Perks

Bob Morrell 4:26

Yes, I had the same. I worked for a company uh at a newspaper, and after literally killing myself for a month, uh, on top of my salary, I made about £72 commission. Yeah. And then I went to a company where, for much less effort, I was earning two or three hundred pounds commission a month. That was a much more worthwhile incentive as far as I was concerned. So there we are.

Jeremy Blake 4:54

I suppose the difference to me, I left with low incentive. I sold a national advertising campaign into every single publication they had. And when they handed me my new salary, it was 14,500, and I'd sold a campaign for over 100,000.

Bob Morrell 5:14

Well, that's often the case, isn't it? And so I thought, right. Yeah.

Jeremy Blake 5:17

But the difference between my next job was I worked much harder, but the rewards were much greater.

Bob Morrell 5:24

I heard about a chap who in his first job he was working in a shop that sold lights. And uh he did a month's probation where he learned how the thing worked, learned about all the products, um, learned how to process an order and various other bits and pieces, and did quite well. At the end of the month, they said, Right, you've passed your probation. Um and he said, Look, I'm wondering whether you'd be interested in giving me some kind of incentive. And they said, What do you mean? He said, Well, if I sell a lot, it might be nice to get a little bit of something back. And they said, Okay, well, we'll tell you what, we've never never done this before. We'll we'll give you one percent. Um, two months later, they had to sack him because he'd sold too much.

Jeremy Blake 6:10

Brilliant. Well, uh, and the question is, haddy, haddy. And they could afford the one percent because the orders were paying for it, weren't they? They just didn't want to pay it, which is another point of incentive. So, in the bigger scheme, what we're often talking about when I looked at a few reports, so quite interesting, a few big of the big accountancy firms put out reports on incentives and try and measure the sort of pulse of the workforce. And the general trend is deferred payment is not in vogue currently. Now, if you deferred, meaning if I do well, you'll give me money. What people are happier to take, and this is at the executive level, and we'll come into the other levels, at the executive level in in inverted commas, deferred payment, meaning if you achieve this, we'll pay you more, is kind of less preferred to actually just pay me less up front. And if I happen to do well and reach this thing you were thinking and hoping for, don't worry, I want to agree what you pay me now. So that's that's not even an incentive, is it? That's not no, no, pay me less and I'll do less. Well, that's really interesting you say that. Pay me less and I'll do less, because this comes out of quiet quitting and these sorts of things. So, what I'm basically saying is when a company dangles a carrot and says we all want to hit this tremendous goal, and if you do it, folks, we'll give you X. Some people are saying I don't want to work on the potential. What do you want to pay me now? Let's agree that. And as long as it's enough, I'm not so bothered about these deferred payment schemes that you're promising because we didn't make them last time. Why would we make them now?

Bob Morrell 7:50

I don't think that will work with a public listed company. I think with a public listed company, you will have quarterly targets. One of the things that we're gonna do. Oh, no, no, no.

Executive Pay And Deferred Bonuses

Jeremy Blake 8:00

Not changing targets, you're absolutely right. But what I'm saying is grand outlandish schemes of big bonuses, big deferred payment. Yes. So according to PWC, Cornferry, various sort of headhunting firms at that elite level, people are just sitting down saying, look, just agree what you want to pay me to do the job to the best of my ability. I'm less interested in your deferred payment schemes.

Bob Morrell 8:26

Well, that won't help public companies that are interested in growth because they absolutely must deliver quarterly uh increases which will support the share price.

Jeremy Blake 8:40

So, what what you have going on is you've got employees of various pay brackets levels having greater discussions about balance of lifestyle and income required now rather than accepting a lower salary for potential rewards. Now, we could name any number of quite well-known organizations that are not in growth mode and have not paid out tremendous targets, uh bonuses. So that's so the point of incentives, uh uh sort of this early point in this recording is it it's the offer of an external reward, something on top of your fixed salary that encourages, motivates, or stirs a person to take action, work harder, or behave in a particular way. Now, you and I are bound to default to sales and sales people and sales organizations. However, there is a a growing um interest in organizations to look at everybody to work harder, be motivated, stir their employees to take action or behave in particular ways. So some of the research that I did showed about things like how that might lead to job security and so on.

Bob Morrell 9:54

So I think one of the problems with that is that if you have a lot of people who are earning, let's say, minimum wage, whatever, whatever that may be.

Jeremy Blake 10:05

Yep.

Bob Morrell 10:05

Okay, that's the vast majority of your uh staff who are earning that amount of money. If you want them to try harder, try and sell more, try and work a bit more and uh put a bit more effort in, okay, um without an incentive, yeah, that also indicates you don't think they're perhaps working hard enough already for the money. Very interesting psychology. Yep. So that's a f the first thing. Secondly, if you then say to them, we'd like you to do this additional work and extra effort, but incidentally, we're not going to give you any real incentives. We might take you out for a pizza occasionally, but that's gonna be it. The majority of people on minimum wage will think, well, why should I? And I think that's the difficulty here is that lots of brands expect a certain level of enthusiasm and effort from their people. And I think they have a right to expect that, by the way. I think that's really important. They have a right to expect you've got the job, we expect a certain level of enthusiasm. Yeah, but that push, that little bit extra, without any kind of financial reward, I think is an extremely tough sell.

Motivation, Job Security, And Culture

Jeremy Blake 11:16

It is, and I and I thought what would be fun is if we go through some of the research points I've taken and then we might debate them. But I tell you what I thought of linking to exactly what you've just said. If you think about the very popular, I don't know if it's a European expression, but it might just be English, to go the extra mile. What most companies might be happy with is you go the mile. You go the full mile. Yeah? Yeah. But to go the extra mile may be a bridge too far in that there is nothing for me to go the extra mile. I'll go the full mile and do the mile well, but I'm not necessarily going to go the extra mile. So this is the balancing act. So the other thing that we should talk about at the same time, which you're also connecting to, is this word motivation. So if you feel motivated in your work, um, you may be more likely to feel more purposeful and just do the work anyway, because you're just saying we should expect a certain level of commitment and purpose in our employees. Yeah. But what's interesting, which is a current stat from Corn Ferry, sort of big executive search type business, is in the UK right now, they claim that 40% of the entire workforce lacks motivation. Um, whereas um in the US it's 75% are motivated, and in India, 84% are motivated. So a worldwide motivation research program. Um we we lack in the UK motivation in our current work.

Bob Morrell 12:54

Do you think that that is cultural, political, or do you think it is uh a sort of mindset that has developed over many years?

Jeremy Blake 13:06

Well, that's a m I don't know which one to take first. I think it's partly uh historic, yeah, uh uh slash cultural. Yeah. Um, but I also feel um there's a quite a lot of doom and gloom and a lot of spiral thinking at the moment where generally people are a bit flat.

Bob Morrell 13:25

Yeah, I agree.

Jeremy Blake 13:26

Um, in the UK. Um, but the other thing that is interesting is if it's an employer's market, and I'm not saying it is, by the way, it's not really an employer's market or an employees' market currently, the classic job security argument is the employer's argument saying pull your finger out, work harder because you're lucky to be here. Um, but in the UK right now, the stat from BCG organization is that 46% of employees are worried about their job security. So nearly half the people going into an office, a factory, a building, a shop, whatever, are worried that they might lose the gig.

Bob Morrell 14:05

Yeah.

Jeremy Blake 14:06

So that that's that's huge. But that this is where it gets interesting. So Gallup, probably the most famous polling organization ever, um a highly engaged workforce is 21% more profitable than a non-engaged workforce. 21% 1% more profitable. So that's the size of the prize. Exactly. I wanted to start with that. So if you're if your employees love working there, and and that is not even necessarily with an incentive. So there isn't a secondary stat underneath that saying these highly engaged workforces are also incentivized, it could be other things. Because what I'm gonna play with now is what represents a company's organizational culture, and there's a number of points here. This is a great bit of research, and incentives plays into this. But the the the stat from Harvard Business Review is even more crazy. That engaged and profitable, engaged equals profitable. What they also say at HBR is engaged equals more productive. You actually just do more. And Harvard Business Reviews say a highly engaged workforce can be up to 400% more productive. Now that leads with our argument that you and I have often enjoyed saying is you don't need 20 salespeople, you need 10 good ones. You don't need a contact center with 100 people on the phones, you need 50 brilliant ones who will probably be more productive, work harder, and be more profitable. So we're going to take a little digression here. And if you think about a company, you turn up to work, maybe this 16-year-old self, and the mission and the values of the company is one thing. And there's a lot of research that says that Gen Z are definitely keen on what are the values of the organization that can make me feel motivated. That's one thing. Okay, so just keep these in mind and then I'll ask you some questions. You're gonna have a little question on this. Are you ready?

Bob Morrell 16:14

Yep.

Engagement Data And Productivity

Jeremy Blake 16:14

So number one, mission and values. What does this company do and why are they doing it? Number two, recognition, recognition, sorry, and celebration. Am I recognize my work? Do we celebrate as a business? The next thing is approach to employee performance. How does this company handle my performance? The other one is rituals and norms, which is really interesting. What are the rituals in this business? We open up, we do this, we lock up at this point. The other one is our world, onboarding and training. How was I inducted into this fold? And what's my training program like? And then finally, and this is very this is the lowest, so that will give you a clue. The others I've changed the order of saying them. The lowest that even makes a company's organizational culture is the physical workspace. That's because we work from home. Now, if you go back 30 years, the building you worked in, the proximity, the cafe, the walls, the labs, that was much higher in the ranking. Now it doesn't, it's the lowest ranking of what represents a company's organizational culture. So if I give you these again, so we can put them in any order, the approach to employee performance, how we recognize and celebrate things, the mission and the values of the organization, the rituals and the habits and the onboarding and the training, those five. Which do you think is the strongest that that represents a company's culture and has the biggest impact on training?

Bob Morrell 17:39

Oh no. Onboarding and training, I would say.

Jeremy Blake 17:41

No, it's the second lowest.

Bob Morrell 17:44

Wow. So go up on one, what are the top one, two?

Jeremy Blake 17:47

I'll give you the mission and the values of the business. Where is this company? Yeah, number one. Really? Yeah. So if a if an employee thinks, God, this company is brilliant, it really does great work in this space. This is this is on a mission to change the world in this way. And I love the values at this company, that has a huge value in keeping people there and keeping people happy.

Bob Morrell 18:11

Okay, so I get that, but I don't know many companies where that would be the case. You know, I don't know many companies where you'd go in and say, hi, what's your biggest thing about uh biggest incentive for working? Oh, I love the mission and the values. I don't know any companies I've got to do.

Jeremy Blake 18:29

I don't know if they'll use that language, but I also think it is something we experience with our clients. We have a number of clients where everybody's quite nice. It's quite a nice place to be, the values are quite caring, and so on and so forth. That makes it an okay place to work. But in second place is recognition and celebration. So this is really interesting when it comes to incentives. Part of an incentive scheme can be, should be, tied into recognition. I want to pay you more and say thank you, and I want everyone to hear how proud I am of you. So you and I have worked in organizations that had awards ceremonies and recognition and cheap plaques and uh frames. And cheap bonuses. And cheap bonuses. So back to incentives. Um if we are recognized for our contribution and paid for our contribution, it is likely we will be 2.7 times more engaged in the work we are doing. 2.7 times? Yeah. It's enormous. Wow. So if you not only recognize me for the hard effort I'm doing, but you also pay me a bit more for it, I'm likely to be in a considerably better place performance-wise. So if we now think of trying to write a plan for Gen Z. So let's just say you pick a company, any kind of company that you could start now today, and you would love to have a company doing. And I'm just gonna start theorize with you. A travel company. Okay, we start a travel company. Okay. So the first thing you work out, um, you and I have got a travel business, right? Okay. And so the first thing we now know is the position of its physical workspace is no longer gonna be essential in recruitment. Most people might want to work from home. We may not even need an office. The second thing that's fairly extraordinary is even if they don't want it, we're gonna do good onboarding and training, but that isn't really gonna represent the culture. In third place is the approach to employee performance and how we manage them. They're more interested in how they're recognized and celebrated and what our mission and values are, Bobby. Fine.

Bob Morrell 20:54

Yeah, so you'd have to give them a fair chunk of commission for the bookings they make.

What Really Builds Culture

Jeremy Blake 20:59

Let's move into that. So now you're gonna write an incentive scheme, you're launching a travel business, we we agree the rate of pay. Yeah. How do you go about designing the incentive scheme?

Bob Morrell 21:09

If you're in the travel market, it's really simple. You give them what looks like a fair percentage of commission for each booking that they make, and you guarantee one or two paid-for little holidays every year. If you do that, then they've got both.

Jeremy Blake 21:31

Okay, beautiful. Okay, so what you're doing here, and we'll see if it works on the next business, but we'll apply it to another. You've gone for recognition of payment.

Bob Morrell 21:39

Yep.

Jeremy Blake 21:40

By by paying a commission. Yep. We won't work out the exact amount now, that's kind of irrelevant. But you're also throwing in some form of recognition celebration, which is almost public because social media will carry the photos of the trip, other people will see where they didn't go to, and that might spur performance. Okay. Now I go to something more. Much more mundane. You're launching a company that's going to go national in its field and you're going to have a lot of young people working for it. What are we doing? Uh let's sell um uh solar panels. Okay. So competitive market uh rate for the people selling, but also everybody else. What's your incentive scheme?

Bob Morrell 22:24

Uh firstly, commission on sales, absolutely 100%. And um you would uh offer for your top performers um some kind of um uh elite package of prizes that they're gonna do.

Jeremy Blake 22:45

Okay, so you create a gold club, a president's club, yeah, and what do you do with your lower performers then?

Bob Morrell 22:52

Develop them, get them up to a middle level, and you do what the old guy said years ago, the bottom 20% every couple of years, you let them go. Mr. Welch. That's it.

Jeremy Blake 23:02

Jack. Okay. So what guidance would you give, or could we give on how to go about designing an incentive scheme? And I know we've got people who run large corporates listing as well as small businesses. What do you think is the secret? Because there are a couple of secrets of designing a powerfully effective incentive scheme.

Bob Morrell 23:24

We have seen hundreds of incentive schemes over the years. Some of them are inordinately complex, and sometimes that's simply to confuse the employee. Okay, that's the first thing. They'll make it complex so that the it's not easy for the employee to work out how it works, how it works, and what the actual incentive is. Whereas what you can do is look at that scheme, whatever it may be, work all the maths back so that the employee knows what they get for that element of production, whether it be sales or manufacturing, whatever it is they can do, they get an element, they get an element of each thing that they do. So if it's sales, you get you work the whole thing back and you go, so that's worth roughly 200 pounds of sale to me. Or if it's production, I have produced this amount of work and I'm gonna earn this much more, so I know I'm getting maybe five pounds more an hour for the work that I'm doing and that's okay. So now you're an accountant.

Jeremy Blake 24:27

It needs to be simple. It needs to be simple. So now you're an accountant. What this actually comes back to in the design is what is our profitability?

Bob Morrell 24:36

Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Blake 24:38

Do we need to run at 35% gross profit, or can we afford to run at 30% gross profit by sharing some of the profit with the people you've helped achieve it?

Crafting Incentives: Travel And Solar

Bob Morrell 24:52

Well, that doesn't really matter because you need to um train your people how to negotiate effectively so that they know what their parameters are, so that there's there is a baseline by which no one goes beneath. Exactly. But that's only in sales. I'm also thinking about other companies that have various units of production. You can work out what each product you produce or which service that you deliver, what the cost of that is, and in terms of the profit, what you can afford to give, and you can still give people a baseline level of negotiation, which allows you to then choose the incentive.

Jeremy Blake 25:30

Yes, but but ultimately one of the reasons when we are working, we feel that incentive schemes are limited, is there's a possibly a belief from the people in charge of profits that they can't afford it.

Bob Morrell 25:45

Well, I suppose that depends on the on the type of business. Um but I think and you could argue that not all employees need an incentive because they might have repetitive, straightforward tasks that just need to be done effec effectively and on time. And the question is, why would I need to uh incentivise that? Now you could argue you do need to incentivize everything, there should be a little something in it for everyone. Um, but of course, that can also be reflected in annual reviews and uh cost of living pay rises and that sort of thing. So as long as you're keeping on top of your employees fairly, then I think that's that that's fair enough. But I suppose the other point is that if you are um an employee that doesn't understand how the business works, you don't really understand. You turn up, you do your job. How it makes its money. Yeah, you don't know all the different elements, you don't know, even though you're in a big building, it doesn't occur to you for ages that this thing must cost a a fortune to run and that there's various other facilities costs and employee costs and national insurance and all these other elements. You don't think about that. And I think that's and I think that contributes to this idea of fairness. As an employee, if I think what you've calculated seems fair, I'll run I'll run with it. Yep. If I think it seems slightly weighted, or I don't really understand how you've arrived at these figures, I can spend years feeling resentful about that incentive structure, whatever it may be.

Jeremy Blake 27:20

And I want to bring in one more point, which is customer numbers versus actual revenue. So if you're designing a scheme and you want more new customers to buy your cars, whatever, your suitcases, whatever it is, one of the problems you can have with your incentives scheme is you reward customer numbers at any revenue level. But then you have other schemes that don't worry about customer numbers, they just look at the revenue coming into the business. In my experience, I would always look at revenue, not customer numbers, because that is real money and the future isn't guaranteed from these customers. So where I've seen it go hilariously wrong in my own working time was there was a scheme with an organization I worked with where we were paid on customers. Every new customer we got, we were paid an amount of money, not revenue. And somebody who brought in a certain number of customers earned more than me and a colleague did, even though we brought in a higher overall revenue. In fact, they earned three times more. And when we added up what their customers had spent, it didn't even pay for their commission. So this is another sort of extraordinary thing with incentives. But what I wanted to make very clear is that an incentive should only really ever be a form of extra income, extra monies, not to be confused with what a lot of companies talk about incentive schemes, and then they start talking about things like health, uh, wellness, um trips, theatre trips, whatever it might be, um gym membership. Those are perks, and we're not we're not talking about that at all today. And they can be managed very differently and be bought at quite fantastic rates by companies because of extra income that the employee might spend when in the gym, etc. You wanted to come in on that?

Keep It Simple And Fair

Bob Morrell 29:15

I do know uh a number of people who work for companies that have you know lunches provided and all that sort of thing, and that and that's great. I think there is a danger with messing around with your incentives too much and too often. And I think uh quite often incentive schemes are introduced and the leaders and managers who are there to administer those schemes for their people don't really get it either. And that also leads to some dodgy choices as some sometimes.

Jeremy Blake 29:53

And that was really going to be my final point is that incentives shouldn't be worked out as what they can be called as schemes. Even the word scheme, an incentive scheme, doesn't sound quite right. You're better with a long-term incentive program, it runs. Everybody knows where they stand. And if you come back to, of course, the work that Bob and I do the most, which is training leaders who are running sales organizations, if it was a commission-only world where you only were rewarded through through income for the behaviors that were stirred in you to perform, you would be paid a fixed amount of money or a fixed percentage of revenue each and every sale you made. You'd get to a certain point after a certain amount of months where you would then have covered your ex your potential salary, and then everything else would be a bonus. What most companies do, of course, is they look at paying you a certain amount of money and then building incentive on top for greater performance. But my tip would be to look at a much longer-term program, an incentive program that runs and runs, rather than a short-term scheme, because what then happens is people work out how to cheat to hit them in a short-term capacity, and that's when your incentive scheme becomes fairly disastrous, and your accountant and FD is bound to pull it.

Bob Morrell 31:19

I've never seen an incentive scheme that wasn't uh cheatable in some form. Yeah. Yeah. And what I mean by that is A, for really good performers to absolutely milk it. So that's the first way they'll they'll cheat it. The other side is people who will use the limitations of that scheme to uh to sort of suffocate performance. So you've got to be very careful either way, in terms of how you allow the individuals to manage that scheme themselves.

Jeremy Blake 31:52

Well, are you now curbing into the Engels research I was sharing with you, the economist who noted that managers more than anyone else will limit production because they're in charge of the team to hit the target. If the team overperforms, the manager will have more work to do the following year with a greater productivity requirement and a greater output requirement. Therefore, let me limit production. Not no one should go over too much, because otherwise I'm going to work much harder the following year. That's kind of what you're hinting at, isn't it?

Bob Morrell 32:24

Yes, but I think I just think you've got to think about the fact that Engels was coming at it from a particular communist perspective.

Jeremy Blake 32:30

Well, in well, also industrial revolution and output of things being made, you know.

Bob Morrell 32:35

But that's slightly different to an individual in a sales team or a contact center thinking, right, if I go more than 10% over target, I'm going to be clobbered this time next year. So I'm now going to hide a few orders in order to make my life easier. And that is the that is the issue with incentives. Um, or I'm having a dreadful month, there's absolutely no point in me selling anything else. I'll I'll just hoiker over into the next one.

Revenue Over Customer Counts

Jeremy Blake 33:04

And that's that's the other problem, is most intentive schemes make us have to reach a certain level before it kicks in. Yeah. Whereas what you said earlier, if you designed a scheme where everything I sold or everything I did, I knew exactly what I'd get for the production of it. It might tempt us to just do more of that because I know what I'm going to get.

Bob Morrell 33:25

You can do that with all of them if you can be bothered to do the maths.

Jeremy Blake 33:28

If you can be bothered to work with the maths.

Bob Morrell 33:30

There will be a system whereby you'll go, okay, provided I hit this, I will get X per sale. Even that it gives you a measure, you know.

Jeremy Blake 33:38

I think also resetting the clock is an interesting other further debate we could have. Is it quarterly and then we zero back to the board again? Or does it just run and run? I remember working with a bunch of Italians who were encouraged to make sales in September. The way that Italian universities they were selling to worked is no order would ever be placed till October. So they could not hit the September incentive because they couldn't change the fact that the universities didn't sign.

Bob Morrell 34:04

That's bad management. You you give your you give your people other things to other people to sell to in that period. If that's the same, well, they they didn't even have that. That's poor management.

Jeremy Blake 34:12

Oh, totally, totally. But I suppose what what we're saying is if you are in the incentives programs world, you need to look very carefully at it, but also try not to make it so hard that nobody understands it, and be very careful of how long it runs for, does the slate have to keep wiping clean? And I would also, in this current marketplace, current world, I would look at revenue uh more than perhaps customer numbers, because who knows what the future brings. And somebody bringing in a higher order, why not a fixed percentage of what they do right now? Now, of course, we haven't broadened this discussion to people making the cars, cooking the food. You know, it's very easy to look at incentive schemes for the revenue creators or the fee earners or whatever you want to call them. And that's again where our thinking goes.

Bob Morrell 34:59

There are organizations that offer a straight profit share to all of their employees. They're very rare, but they do exist. But the issue there is that uh that that then places a slightly difficult burden when things are not going well, because no one's gonna get a percentage, and it's it's much harder to maintain motivation, which we talked about earlier, when that is the case. So again, it's worth having that uh deep thought about what is it that's going to really motivate people, regardless.

Jeremy Blake 35:34

But the point being is all the research shows us that if your if your workforce are engaged, they are recognized, rewarded, and paid for the extra work. They'll give it to you again. If if they're not paid enough, then they won't necessarily go that great distance for you or go over, and performance will probably be limited. Well, thank you to those who um contributed to the research of this program, and hopefully we've given you the names of the people with bits of research. Thanks for tuning in and cheers for that, Bobby. See you on the next one. Bye for now.

Bob Morrell 36:10

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