Worker Incentive Schemes
Worker incentive scheme, especially timely encouragement, for high quality products, high productivity or new creative ideas is a good way of improving an enterprise’s productivity and quality. Timely encouragement is very important in ...
Worker incentive scheme, especially timely encouragement, for high quality products, high productivity or new creative ideas is a good way of improving an enterprise’s productivity and quality. Timely encouragement is very important in encouraging workers and employees to work actively, be more involved in quality control, improve productivity and create new ideas which can save money, time and human resources.
Prospective users:
Management needs to develop encouragement policies and supervisors will be involved in implementation.
This practice can be applied to all kinds of factories.
ProblemS addressed
- Increasing or high frequency of product faults
- Large amount of time and resources used to repair defective products
- Low productivity
- Poor workplace relations
- Worker dissatisfaction with wages and/or bonus systems
Process
To provide timely encouragement via worker incentive schemes, the company should have a well-written incentive policy which clearly indicates the conditions of applying the incentive scheme. This incentive policy should include incentives for new ideas to improve quality and productivity, high productivity and better quality. Then, when each scheme is applicable, write the decision quickly, announce the decision for appraisal in the factory bulletin board and give the bonus as soon as possible in front of the crowd of employees and workers.
- Develop an worker incentive policy for new ideas to improve quality and productivity, high productivity and better quality
- Communicate the worker incentive policy in the bulletin board and announce to the whole factory
- For creative ideas, hang a box for inputting creative ideas next to the announcement
- Every week, open the box to check for the new ideas.
- Organize meeting to discuss all the ideas. This meeting should be among a group of employees who are responsible for innovation or improvement of the factory operation such as technical staff, QC staff and production managers.
- Select a short list of the most applicable ideas to have a more detailed discussion
- Organize a second meeting to discuss the short list of ideas in details. This meeting should include all the people in the factory who may be related to the application of the ideas.
- Select the applicable ideas to apply into reality.
- Issue a decision to apply the idea in a pilot application program.
- Form a team to enforce the idea application. This team should include the idea’s owner.
- Announce to the whole factory about the applied ideas and the names of ideas’ owners with illustrated pictures on the bulletin board or at the quality and productivity newsletters.
- Give presents or gifts in combination with appreciation to the workers who have the creative ideas applied
- In case the application of the new idea fails, do not blame the idea’ owner.
- Use productivity bulletin board using user-friendly symbol to record the achievement of the production line in terms of productivity and quality
- Based on the information from the production monitoring system, identify the most productive lines/quality achievement
- Announcement of high productivity line of the months or the one achieve high quality level.
- A creative ways of presenting the productivity of the lines using special color and shapes on the board is a good way to visualize the achievement of each team.
- Issue decision for appraisals and give bonus for the workers or line with high productivity lines or quality achievement
- Money and spirit prize should come together
- Giving the bonus and prize for the high quality achievement of the workers to make employees feel to be recognized and appreciated.
- All the achievement in quality and productivity of individuals and teams should be recorded in the factory data system. All the quality or productivity achievement should be considered as an input for the salary revision periodically.
- Appraisal policy
- Bulletin board
- Production monitoring system
- Involvement of the line managers, QC and HR department
- Budget for bonus
- Monitoring system need to be well set-up
- Additional work
- Encouragement for not applicable ideas
- Worker encouragement
- Better and more competitive working atmosphere
- Appraisal policy approved
- Bulletin board setup
- Production monitoring system setup and used
- Periodically implementation of appraisal and presenting bonus for better implementers
Funding for the Factory Improvement Programme is provided by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs and the United States Department of Labor.
