How to Get the Best Out of Your Workers

By C Jackson

The aim of any manager is to try and get the most out of your workers possible. In technical terms, you want the highest productivity.

From a purely financial point of view (and this is how senior management will often view you), you need to get the most output for every input i.e. spend the least amount on salaries and produce the most money.

So what approach should you take?

Revenue Generating Team
If your team is actively generating revenue such as a sales force or does work with clients, then money should be the main motivator.

In a purely sales driven team, you will probably already have commission in place and this should be motivation enough. One thing that you can try doing is to tweak the basic pay to commission ratio. Increase the amount of commission payable and reduce the basic gradually.
This way, your best workers will earn more and the worst will earn less. You will also motivate those in the middle to succeed.

Support Team
Many job functions are support functions. The workers get paid the same as long as they meet some minimum standard. So how can you increase their output?

One way is to try and incentivize financially in other ways. For example, having a limited bonus scheme based on performance. If your company policy does not allow this then you may be able to do a deal with your partners to obtain coupons or vouchers at some discounted rate and offer them monthly to the star performer.

Non-Financial Incentives
If you cannot offer any kind of financial incentives then you will need to motivate your workers in other ways.

The best way to do this is to formulate a personal development plan for the worker. This is nothing more than an agreed plan of development - you agree to fund training and development (a relatively low cost) in return for their commitments to take on additional responsibilities and achieve set targets.


This carrot and stick approach can work very well and costs very little.

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