Incentives & Planning

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Welcome back again, I’m Marty here at warehouse and operations as a career.  Last week we talked about short on trucks, mis picks and damages and we mentioned incentives that may be offered to selectors and loaders for improving error ratios within the company.  Well, over the last week I heard about a couple of other incentives or bonuses being offered or being considered at different facilities that I’d like to share with our group.  The first one, and I really like this one because its easy to achieve is just showing up to work on time.  This one is offered to Unloaders or Lumpers at a distribution facility.  Simple, measurable and we can figure our incentive throughout the week.  Basically, an unloader that shows up for his or her scheduled shift on-time, and I’m hearing there is a fifteen-minute grace period that counts and stays until the entire day is finished or until the supervisor dismisses them will have an additional amount per case added to their piece rate pay.  What a great incentive or motivation to get up and ready to walk out that door 10 minutes early every day!  Another thought that was brought up somewhere else is a Error incentive pool.  The way I understood it was a set dollar amount is offered each week.  Monies are deducted from that dollar amount for each short or miship that occurs each shift and at the end of the week whatever’s left in the pool is paid out equally to each employee that reported each shift to work and on-time!  One facility that works off of an activity-based compensation program has as one of its component of pay a dollar amount that is awarded for each day an associate is on-time for work.

I did a little asking around for different bonus programs and incentive structures out there and found almost all of them do have an attendance or on-time kicker built into them.  I know here at WAOC we stress to the point of being on-time and reporting to work for every assigned shift and its interesting to see how much value employers place on just that!  Of course, there’s something in it for our companies, they need the man hours available each shift to ship their products, and I believe its great how they’ll share those savings of not needing the additional O/T to ship their products because the shifts whole and on-time every day!  The same holds true for error incentives.  With reduced error ratios they may have recovery savings to share with us employees.  I often see even better wages at facilities that already have errors under control because they’re not out those expenses to begin with.

If you have or know of any other examples I could share shoot me an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com and I’ll pass them along to our group!

Another thing we talked about last week was damages, both product damage and equipment or building damages.  Those subjects sparked a bit of conversation to say the least.  Damages are another one of those expenses that really must be controlled.  I was told by one individual that there’s just going to be damages, when you deal with glass your going to break it.  I understand what the gentleman was saying but I feel we must look across the table here too.  We know its possible to pull every item without damaging it, we do it throughout every shift.  In my experience, see how I said experience instead of opinion, We, employees can control the damages.  I mean we’re professionals, if we handle the product correctly at every station or task, stack it correctly and follow all our preferred work methods, and really care about what we’re doing we’re not going to have damages!  Product or equipment or building damage.

I think I’ve mentioned it before but one of the best Safety Posters I’ve ever seen was a gentleman standing in front of a judge’s podium and saying, “My brakes failed” and the Judge replying, “tell a mechanic not a judge”.  I know myself I’ve known my forks wasn’t evenly spread throughout a pallet before but in that split second decided to go ahead and retrieve the pallet of product allowing it to tilt too much to one side and lost a case or two.  Or maybe taken that turn out of the aisle and knew my second pallet wasn’t stacked tight enough and watched that 5-gallon bucket of pickles come crashing to the floor!  What a mess I created there, and the time and money I lost cleaning it up!

Everything’s in place to prevent shorts, misships and damages of every kind, we’re trained professionals, know what we’re doing, have SOP’s, GMP’s preferred work methods etc. to follow AND in many instances we’re incentized, not sure that’s a word, or bonused to police ourselves.  Simply put I feel if we’re the ones taking it seriously we’re going to be making that money and being noticed by our management team!

So, I’ll try and get to a few other of your comments over the next couple of weeks, If you’ve got any ideas send them in, I’m going to be following up on a couple of incentive programs I’m watching and I’ll let you know how there going.

Today I wanted to get to a question that came up over the weekend.  I was asked by an order selector where else could he go from here.  His first warehouse position was in sanitation, he was hired on 23 months ago and has now held the positions of sanitation, unloader, pallet runner and has been a selector for the last 6 months!  After getting over the shock of how many opportunities he’s cruised through in just 23 months I asked him what he wanted to be doing.  His answer was he didn’t know.  I pointed out he started out in sanitation and asked him how he moved on to unloading.  He said he’d asked his boss if he could go unload trailers because it paid more and in about 2 weeks his boss moved him.  I guess he caught on to where I was heading with my questions because he said that’s how he became a selector too.  So, I again asked him what he wanted to do next and he said he wanted to move into helping route the trucks.  I think many times we know what we want to do but maybe we just don’t say it out loud to ourselves, so we get frustrated or bored with our positions.  I feel its so important that we go talk with someone when we’re frustrated, a lot of times that simple communication can get us started again and push where we want to go but just didn’t know what we wanted.

I gave him several Logistics articles to visit and recommended a couple of Supply Chain websites for him to check out and I do believe he’s off on another quest now.  I spoke with him yesterday and he’s signed up for an on-line logistics course of some kind and really excited about it.  He’s already talked with his Manager and let him know what he’s learning and to keep him in mind when there’s an opening in the transportation department.

Men and Women, its so important we recognize that there are so many opportunities in our fields, if your one of the lucky ones and already doing what you love to do Outstanding, but if you only like what your doing or are still looking around at the tasks that touch your present one, plan out your next step and never hesitate to tell someone what you’d like to do! This guy likes order selecting and he’ll be doing it a bit longer, but he has a plan now and his company knows what that plan is.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t end up getting help from his company to reach his next goal at all.

Well, I’m packing for a quick trip to Bolingbrook Illinois, oh, maybe I can grab our old friend Phillip and get a mic in his hand while I’m there, he’s always good for some Op’s advice.  Thanks for listening today, I hope you’ve checked our Warehouse Equipment Operators Group on Facebook, Like it if you would, we’re having some good conversations there!  Until next week be Prosperous, be productive and above all be Safe doing it!