We expect salespeople to be motivated by more sales. The higher the margin, the higher the commission. “Eat what you kill” is the mentality of most sales representatives. However, operations and accounting employees have different motivators. In most cases, operations and accounting get paid a consistent amount regardless of the volume. This can be cumbersome during the busiest times. So, we instituted a few ways to keep things interesting.
We have experimented and worked on ideas to keep the entire team motivated and I will share a few ideas below.
Lunches by Surprise. After a few solid seven-day August workweeks, a surprise “thank you” lunch does wonders for morale. Even if it is just a stack of pizzas, it is nice for the staff to be appreciated and recognized.
Breakfast Burrito Food Truck. Have you ever had a food truck visit your site on purpose? We order a quarterly Breakfast Burrito Food Truck. The owner parks the truck just outside of our warehouse on a Friday morning to celebrate payday. Not only do the employees look forward to the breakfast, the crews love it.
Roll Tag Bonus. During our busiest month of the year, which is August, we pay our warehouse staff $1 per roll tag for cutting carpet rolls. They simply place the used roll tag in a box for 30 days and at the end of a month, they each collect around $200. It is fun to blow through the rolls of carpet and tally up the bonus each year. Since we do a large concentration of apartments and student housing, we cut carpet by the truckload. $200 in roll tag bonus for the employee means we used 40,000 yards of carpet in the month. I would venture to say we all win with this bonus. Do the math!
Pad Recycling Bonus. I have previously shared how we bale the old padding and sell it back to the pad manufacturer. This pays my mortgage! I share 5% of the pad recycling income with my warehouse staff for helping me catch every scrap of padding and get it back into our system. Like the roll tag bonus, this bonus drives volume and enthusiasm for volume. It creates a “bring on more orders” mentality among my operations team. This bonus is offered all year.
“The pad bonus is great,” says Mark Shelton, warehouse manager, Got You Floored. “It shows our boss cares about us for all the hard work we do.”
Birthday Celebrations. Each employee is celebrated with a card signed by the entire company, a cake, and a gift card to somewhere they like. This recognition is appreciated by our entire staff.
Community Involvement. Each year we put on a 10K race called “Matt’s Run to Fight Hunger.” Two-hundred runners show up and donate to the local food bank and we provide refreshments and a free dri-fit t-shirt for each participant. Employees volunteer at the race and some even run in the event. We also make a quarterly contribution to the food bank based on how many on-line orders we sell. All employees work hard to help push online orders so that we can help more people. This process keeps us motivated since we are fighting for a cause larger than we are. We donate more than 100,000 meals to hungry families each year. Talk about motivation!
As always, feel free to email your comments, ideas and suggestions to me at mketterman@gotyoufloored.com.
