It’s one thing to get off to a good start. But Tom Wagoner wanted to make sure Accelerated Benefits could keep it going.
“Trying to maintain consistent and excellent quality is difficult because you’re bringing new people in all the time and you’re growing,” says the company’s president.
Wagoner decided to provide an incentive to ensure consistent quality would be maintained at the 72-employee HR solutions firm.
“It’s called wildly important goals for your corporation,” says Wagoner, who calls the program WIGs. “It’s different than a mission statement. It’s really my mission and my goals and how you bring it down to the employees.”
Smart Business spoke with Wagoner about how to keep your employees focused on the details.
Q. How does the WIGs program work?
Every person in our organization gets a bonus every month based on what they did to perform excellently as a service component of our company and how they performed in helping us get new clients.
How do you motivate people? Make it a money thing. Once they have their job and they do their job description, I tell them, ‘The only increase you’re going to get every year is consumer price index.’ We’re not going to say, ‘Oh, you did a great job here, you’re going to get a 10 percent or 15 percent increase.’ The only way they get a pay increase is by bonusing every month according to WIGs.
Q. What’s the key to making it work?
It has to be monitored and public every month. You need to post who met their WIGs and to what degree so everybody can see that some people around them are getting points.
When we come up with their job description and their WIGs, the first thing I do is we outline a job description. We tell people that this is their job description and we want their input on things that they want to add or delete to that.
When we do the WIGs, we tell them, ‘These are my ideas on the WIGs. Can you buy in to it?’ You have to figure out something they will do or that person is probably not a good fit. So we do ask them to chime in on the WIGs.
Everybody knows their job security and their future is going to be 100 percent contingent on the company servicing its clients and the company growing our business. It’s a lot easier to get people to buy in to the fact that if we don’t keep our current clients and get new clients, their job is at risk.
Because if our revenues go down 30 percent, guess what? Somebody is going and it could be them. We’ve never had problems getting people buying in to this because they understand how I feel about it. Whether they are patronizing me and saying they understand it and they’ll do it or they do it just because of the money, it really doesn’t matter to me. It’s just that they do it.
If you have people that come into your office and say, ‘These WIGs are unreasonable and nobody can accomplish them,’ I can show them, ‘Well, last month, 14 out of 18 people hit all their WIGs. So you’re one of the four people who, for some reason, it’s not working for you. We either have to figure out new WIGs for you, or maybe you just don’t fit at this company.’