Should I Share the Weekly Numbers with Employees?

[cshann19]

We are staring an incentive plan to increase team work between the techs and the office, increase use of the Bolt On Tech system and increase employee pay.

 

We have a tech who seems to be dissatisfied lately. A lot of moaning and groaning. A lot of CYA diags. He does good work and bills good hours, but he's just been passive aggressively making me crazy. He really seems to be in disagreement with the way I run my business.

 

So this tech wants to see the weekly number the incentive will be based on. Do I show him? Do I show him the weekly number and the weekly expenses? I feel that this would lead to further discontentment. What do you think? How much do they need to know?

 

 

[stowintegrity]

No. Don't be tempted to show your staff, especially someone disgruntled, those figures. You are NOT a co-worker with special access to that information...you are their boss.

There are plenty of ways to "show the numbers" without really revealing the specifics. For example, if your incentive was based on sales growth, you could establish what your sales increase goal (week to week, or monthly) is with your staff, and plot it out as an indexed figure. If your sales growth goal is a 40% increase in sales over the previous year, your data would look like this:

SALES 2014 SALES GOAL (40%) SALES 2015 RATING
Week 1 $1000 $1400 $1400 0
Week 2 $1200 $1680 $1550 -11
Week 3 $2100 $2940 $3100 +8
Week 4 $1800 $2520 $2800 +16

Monthly $6100 $8540 $8850 +5

 

In ALL weeks, you beat last year's sales, but:

In this case, a rating of "zero" means that your company has done very well, and has exactly met it's sales goal.

Any rating with a positive rank is AMAZING, and should be an exciting thing to discuss with your team.

Any rating with a negative rank means the company did NOT meet it's sales goals, so bonus/incentives would be lost, or at least diminished.

 

(In this example, even a rating of -10 still means that your company experienced a growth of 30%...a fact that your staff does NOT need to be made aware of unless you have another bona fide reason for sharing, but since the goal wasn't met, you're not compelled to have to invest in as much of an incentive bonus)

 

Always share PERFORMANCE NUMBERS, not sales/profit specifics, unless it's somehow integral to the employee's success, such as with a service manager in charge of a staff of service writers needing to assess opportunities for improvement in selling work profitably or seeing who's more challenged.

 

I can't stress this enough...your goals MUST be both REALISTIC as well as CHALLENGING. If they see impossible...no one will work toward them. If they seem too easy, no one willl care about exceeding them.

 

Tell your whole staff that you just had an $XX,XXX week, and they'll think you're sitting on a pile of money in the back office. They soon forget about the A/C machine you just bought, the lunch you bought for the staff twice last week, and the advertising attempt that was ineffective, not to mention they won't understand that they may have been the cause of one or more comebacks, there was a big warranty job, a competitor opened up across the street, and the shop's efficiency rating was only 20%.

 

They'll tell you that none of that stuff is any of their business, and I'll tell them that neither are YOUR sales numbers.

 

Just one man's way of engaging the staff

Edited August 27, 2015 by stowintegrity

[dfrisby]

I totally agree with stowintegrity. Only one thing to add as I've been struggling with this issue as well. Employees do have a right to know how their pay is calculated and the numbers involved in calculating that pay. Don't calculate bonus on profit. That opens your books to them or causes trust issues. Hourly is simple. employee comes to work for x amount of hours and get's paid for x amount of hours. Same with flat rate, but then they have a right to know the hours charged on the invoice. I started out paying flat rate paid as jobs were paid for. Some weeks not many customers were in a hurry to pick up their vehicles or we did commercial jobs that were net 30 or whatever, and I'd over pay my employees because I couldn't expect them to be here all week for $100. The other problem I had was the constant need of them to take off early or show up late. I changed to an "hourly" base pay, that covers the first 15 hours of booked time. Then a percentage on the book time over 15 hours. They have incentive to be here and produce hours. I take the risk if it's a slow week and they are here but don't book many hours. Also, I now pay them for all work completed, whether it's paid for or not. It's not their problem if I have commercial customers that take a couple weeks to collect on or a customer that decides he can't afford the work we have performed.

 

I thought about doing some sort of profit sharing plan based on profits, but I don't want to open my books to them. If they want to see the profit and loss statements, they can earn that right by opening their own shop or buying me out.

[cshann19]

No. Don't be tempted to show your staff, especially someone disgruntled, those figures. You are NOT a co-worker with special access to that information...you are their boss.

 

There are plenty of ways to "show the numbers" without really revealing the specifics. For example, if your incentive was based on sales growth, you could establish what your sales increase goal (week to week, or monthly) is with your staff, and plot it out as an indexed figure. If your sales growth goal is a 40% increase in sales over the previous year, your data would look like this

 

Always share PERFORMANCE NUMBERS, not sales/profit specifics, unless it's somehow integral to the employee's success, such as with a service manager in charge of a staff of service writers needing to assess opportunities for improvement in selling work profitably or seeing who's more challenged.

 

I can't stress this enough...your goals MUST be both REALISTIC as well as CHALLENGING. If they see impossible...no one will work toward them. If they seem too easy, no one willl care about exceeding them.

 

Tell your whole staff that you just had an $XX,XXX week, and they'll think you're sitting on a pile of money in the back office. They soon forget about the A/C machine you just bought, the lunch you bought for the staff twice last week, and the advertising attempt that was ineffective, not to mention they won't understand that they may have been the cause of one or more comebacks, there was a big warranty job, a competitor opened up across the street, and the shop's efficiency rating was only 20%.

 

They'll tell you that none of that stuff is any of their business, and I'll tell them that neither are YOUR sales numbers.

 

 

This is my feeling as well. I appreciate your confirmation. I think we have an authority issue not an information sharing issue

Edited August 28, 2015 by cshann19

[lmcca]

hell no.

This guy needs to know his place. I would sit him down and find out what his problem is. If he wont tell then i would tell him his attitude is not appreciated and toxic to the other employees and that if it continues he will lose his job. There is nothing worse than toxic employees, some you can fix, great! and some you wont, such is life.

[lmcca]

an added note, you could base a bonus of THEIR performance. If they reach a certain number of hours then a bonus. Allot of times techs are given bonuses based on the overall shops performance but if one tech is not pulling his weight then he still gets a bonus because the shop did great or the other techs picked up the slack and the service writers did good, so why reward that person??

 

We use a bonus for techs based on hours, they reach 45 hours in a week and we start to bonus them, its simple and straight forward, we dont show them our p&ls as their is no need and its not their business. I know successful shops that dont pay any bonuses too.

[cshann19]

Well the meeting went pretty good. We advised the employees that we wont be sharing business numbers but that we want to see them achieve the bonus. Everyone is kinda hanging their heads around here though. We need to boost moral. I'm sure that comes from the top but I have been fully overwhelmed lately are I'm in Don't Have a Heart Attack Mode. How do I bring the fun back to work?

[alfredauto]

I pay bonus based on total gross sales, tax included. Its easier for the tech to see how much he's going to get. If he's sweating on a $2500 job he knows he's going to get a reward at the end of the month. Bonuses based on profit opens up a bad can of worms including officer salaries, marketing, depreciation, donations, and a host of other things employees don't think should reduce their bonus. Basically if he works hard he earns an extra paycheck every month.

[cshann19]

 

 

I pay bonus based on total gross sales, tax included. Its easier for the tech to see how much he's going to get.

 

 

I like that idea. Do you find that your techs resent the money YOU make