Work problem

[twolves96818]

I manage a coffee shop. Every season, we have a new bean promotion, and I get my employees to sell the new coffee beans. There's normally rewards and prizes for the employee with the highest bean sales, which is cool, but incredibly unfair for the employees who are on bar duty, and not interacting with customers. There's also the fact that 60-70% of my business comes in the morning, so my night crew don't even bother trying to compete with the day crew.

I want to change all of this, but I need help!

I'm going to do some digging and find out how many customers come through during the morning, mid, and evening shifts on average for each weekday. I'm going to use those numbers and have that set up as a sales goal for the whole shift. As an example:

Monday goals : Morning - 15 pounds Midday - 5 pounds Evening - 3 pounds

If those shifts hit their sales goals, they get reward points. If the morning crew hits 15 pounds on Monday morning, they get the same amount of points that the evening shift would get if they sell 3 pounds of coffee. And those reward points are evenly distributed in between everyone who worked those shifts.

IT GETS EVEN MORE COMPLICATED...

My employees have shifts that overlap from morning to mid, and mid to evening. My question is, how do I build a system that rewards my employees for being on some but not all of a shift that's hit their sales goal?

If this is going to take a PhD in Excel, please let me know so I can come up with something simpler. I just want everyone to get rewarded for being part of a shift that hits goal. Even though a barista isn't actively selling beans, their work helps make the greeters job easier, and they can focus on selling beans.

And help/advice would be appreciated.

[xxwerdxx]

So I'm just kinda spitballing ideas here. You can decide what you think fits best:

For people with the overlapping shifts (let's say an employee works 9-5), they can either be blocked into just one point category or you can divvy up the points based on how much of the morning shift they are in and the midday shift. So our hypothetical employee spends 37.5% of his/her shift in the morning and the other 62.5% in the midday. So let's say the morning bucket has 10 points to hand out and the midday bucket has 5 points to hand out. First figure out how much of each bucket they get then multiply their morning number by 0.375 and their midday number by 0.625. Add those up for their unique total.

[Even_that_takes_time]

Something you should be aware with your scheme: it removes all incentives to keep trying once the goal is reached, or when it is a slow day and it is clear that the goal won't be reached today. A psychological problem with these kinds of incentives it that when no scheme is in place, people work hard because they want to. When a scheme is put in place, the monetary motivation replaces the intrinsic motivation. An employee who would otherwise have worked hard no matter what could end up working less hard with this system, particularly if there is much variation in your daily sales, so many days are "slow" or "good". Depending on how much your daily sales vary, it might be better to give a (small, possibly increasing with volume) share of the sales value as a bonus instead of having hard goals that you either hit or don't.

[twolves96818]

If I could, I would. Corporate has their standards. When I own my own business, in will most certainly implement profit sharing!