46 Incentives for saving money and making money
Sadly it’s human nature to constantly be thinking “what’s in it for
me?” But you can, and should, use this to your advantage. So after
all your training and utility bill posting, often the best way to get
staff to really help you make profit is to create incentives. If you
provide some incentive for actually saving money or even making
more money, then you’ll very easily be able to keep them focused
on the problem.
Make sure your incentives are both for saving money and
making money. Don’t forget every pound is not equal (number
17)and you need the people who are using your systems every
day to keep reporting back. They will notice a lot of things that you
don’t and you shouldn’t underestimate just how much knowledge
or how many ideas they have picked up in previous jobs that simply
haven’t occurred to you yet.
The way to operate incentives can vary and there are no hard and
fast rules. You can offer an incentive for every idea (good or bad)
just to keep the process going, but this is open to abuse so you
must try and ensure that there are some basic rules covering the
usage. But, as ever, if you complicate it too much you’ll lose
momentum and they simply won’t bother with it.
86