Once an aspect of chain restaurants and bars only, a well thought out, strategic incentive plan for your managers and staff can improve the bottom line, improve job satisfaction among staff and allow for “buy in” from your managers/staff into the overall success of your independent business.
There are many types of incentive plans you can introduce, however most will have the same basic principles. We have described these here to help you create an effective programme:
- Make the incentive programme simple and easy to understand. Don’t overcomplicate the programme by having it tied into so many areas of the business that its both hard to measure and equally hard to achieve. Determine the key areas you want results on and work these into your plan. For example, increase average customer spend by 10% or Eur 5.00.
- The incentive program should be designed in a way that allows your staff to work smarter and not necessarily harder. After all, if you implement a programme that requires staff to work longer hours to achieve it, you may end up paying for the extra hours labour as well as any reward earned by the staff so encourage and train staff to work smarter. Increasing the average spend per customer requires smarter thinking so would work well in the programme. Serving more customers in the day wouldn’t as staff might stay later to serve them.
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September 25, 2008 at 3:45 pm
I always find that if you get to know your staff, then you will have no problem motivating them.
In a housekeeping department for example, most of the time a simple ‘thank you, you did a good job’ will suffice, people just want feedback, to be made to feel that they are needed.