Designing Incentives

Paige Bryson

February 4, 2015

MGMT 440

1. Setting a clear goal is crucial for Atlas to reach what they are asking for from their clerks. When setting a goal, managers need to make sure the goal is in their range of success. We don’t want to overload the employees with too much of a reach goal (Slammer). Setting an overwhelming goal can result in long-term issues from employees like customer satisfactory (Slammer). A reachable goal for Atlas is to increase the total collection of past-due bills by 10% each month from the previous years results. This amount is realistic and not overwhelming to complete by the clerks. They way the clerks are constantly decreasing the amount of bills outstanding in a controlled speed to increase the company’s cash available.

2. I would design the incentive to be a team-based incentive. Since there are four total clerks I would have one team with the four clerks. Team-based incentives are good because they create collaboration among the company (Marshall). Since this company is looking for an achievement-oriented goal, a team-based incentive will drive performance and create greater impact on the company in a shorter time (Marshall). When working with teams, employees stay focused in search for that recognition which results in higher performance quality (Marshall). There are some downsides to team-based work but I believe this is the best design for achieving the goal Atlas is setting out to do.

3. The incentive should be given quarterly. The goal is to reach a 10% increase each month in past-due bills received, but if the employees are given the incentive each month they will become bored with the reward and begin to slack off because they reward is given so often. Making the incentive quarterly will force employees to consistently work towards that goal since it is only given two times a year.

4. The incentive will be given publically. In this case the team consists of all the clerks that are employed at...