much of an already limited bottom line.
This isn’t caused by employer greed as much as the constant memory of the early days, when the typical entrepreneur worked endless hours for a pittance. Now that some of that effort is finally bearing fruit, he or she
is being asked to share a chunk of it to get the workers to do what they should be doing anyway. The most common protest that I hear is “But I am paying them to do the job; why should I have to pay them more if
they actually do it right?”
Of course, if you could be sure that incentives were guaranteed to dramatically increase performance in away that vastly grew your bottom line, you’d have no problem putting them in place for every person in the
company. Why then is there such resistance to creating motivational rewards? The answer is clear. Many and perhaps most employee incentives fail to motivate enough of the desired behavior, and too frequently wind
up becoming a permanent expense with a temporary impact. There are methods of creating and maintaining incentives that avoid becoming an entitlement, and are dynamic enough to change and adapt with current
conditions. We’ll talk about several approaches, beginning with an overview of the types of incentives.
