A few years ago, Green Giant had a serious quality problem: Too many insect parts and rodent hairs were turning up in its vegetables. Some compensation expert decided to give incentives to workers for finding these foreign objects, reasoning that it would adequately address the problem. Guess what? Workers began smuggling the offending objects from home and putting them into vegetables.

Unless you’re careful, incentives can come around to bite you in the, um, artichoke, as they did with Green Giant.

In almost every survey, money ranks No. 1 as the reward that most motivates worker performance. The best way to use money as a reward is to design an effective individual incentive system. But how can we harness this power for crew members without running into the problem Green Giant faced? Further, how do we use incentives without having a huge cost run-up? The answer to the first question depends on your people strategy, which, of course, depends on your organization strategy.

If customer service is the way you differentiate yourself from other quick-serves, then your incentives should promote better customer service or, at a minimum, be customer-service neutral. Run a test program to see if this goal is met before a widespread rollout.

The second question is a bit tougher to answer. Recently, I’ve been working with a carwash company that faces labor-cost constraints. We decided to implement what I call a lottery incentive system (lis). LIS solves a cost problem and introduces three hugely effective motivators. Let me explain.

We wanted to introduce an individual incentive to relatively low-paid employees. We knew from studies that individual incentives—like bonuses—are the most powerful motivator we have in the compensation arsenal. On average, individual incentives increase productivity by 30 percent, studies find. As a comparison, profit-sharing only increases productivity about 5 percent. Logic says to go with the individual incentives.

But then we faced the cost problem. I made an economic argument to the president of the company: As long as the pay increase was smaller than the productivity increase, the cost per carwash would be lower. He understood that argument, but was still concerned, legitimately, about plunking down a monetary incentive on the hope that productivity would increase. That’s when I introduced him to a lottery incentive. Instead of giving a monetary incentive for improved performance, we proposed to give internal (company printed and distributed) lottery tickets as rewards for good performance. Employees would choose a unique 4-digit number for each lottery ticket they received. The Win 4 number for our state lottery would determine the winner. If no numbers matched the Win 4 number, the money would roll over to the next week.

I'm wondering if any of the fine folks here have had any experience with concept development without ownership stake -- that is to say acting in the role of a consultant.

Can anyone recommend a supplier/manufacturer of a wood fired grill?