I often kid with my cooks about giving them gold stars and demarits
sheb
Wow… very interesting.
I bet your town has a McDonalds in it and I bet it has plenty of minimum wage employees that work hard, and their not getting marbles, movie tickets or pats on the head everytime they sweep the floor. You have to be constantly recruiting, always hiring and firing. This will do two things for you, one it will give your current employees the sense that they are expendable, which they should be, and two it will give you a bigger pool of talent from which to pull from.
I don’t have a problem with incentives, but for reaching beyond goal, not for just doing what you are doing. Your people are either motivated or their not… don’t get married to an employee, if they are not pulling their weight, cut them. All the incentives in the world aren’t going to make some one sweep the floor faster, unless they have pride in their work, you can’t buy that.
Spend the money you’re going to spend on movie tickets and run a regular ad in the local paper, buy a help wanted sign, have a “Hiring event” giving away free pizza. You’ll soon find that you’ll have plenty of people that want to work for you.
One final thing, don’t be afraid to hire more people than you need. If you find someone good… hire them! Figure out how to pay for them later… or better yet, have as one of their goals to help increase sales to pay for themselves in 90 days.