August 12, 2024
I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. A tech turns in a spiff form. The owner or the office manager looks at it and decides something doesn’t add up. Maybe the job description is a little fuzzy. Maybe there’s a question about whether the lead was really qualified. Maybe it’s a twenty-five dollar bonus and the manager just isn’t sure.
So they hold it. Or they reduce it. Or they send a long email asking for clarification. And they feel smart about it. Like they just protected the business from paying out money that wasn’t clearly earned.
What they actually did was send a message to every technician in the company: we are looking for reasons not to pay you.
That message spreads fast in a shop. I promise you it does. Within 24 hours, every tech who is friends with the one who got shorted has heard about it. They’re in their trucks texting about it. They’re laughing about your bonus plan. They’re not doing it to be disrespectful. They’re doing it because they’re human beings responding to a signal that tells them the incentive system is rigged.
Once that trust is gone, it is almost impossible to get back. You can roll out a new plan. You can increase the spiff amounts. You can hold a company meeting and explain your intentions. But in the back of their minds, every tech is going to remember the time the company held a twenty-five dollar payment and wonder when it’s going to happen again.
And here’s the brutal math of it: you saved twenty-five dollars. You paid for it in lost discretionary effort from multiple employees over an indeterminate period of time. That’s not protecting the business. That’s destroying it slowly.
The same principle applies to the way you handle ambiguity in your pay plans. If there’s any gray area — who gets paid when two techs are on a job, which pay period a bonus falls in, whether a certain type of call qualifies — your employees will always assume the worst. They will assume you left the gray area there on purpose, as an escape hatch.
The solution isn’t to police your pay plans more aggressively. The solution is to remove the ambiguity entirely. Be so specific in your plan that there is no judgment call for the office to make. And when you do make a judgment call, make it in favor of the employee whenever it’s close.
I’ll also give you a tactic that helped me enormously: have your technicians submit their own spiff forms. They fill out what they think they earned, with the job number and date, and they turn it in by a set deadline. If they miss the deadline, they wait until the next pay period.
This does two things. First, it eliminates the office staff from having to hunt down every possible spiff across every job — they only verify what was submitted. Second, it gives the tech ownership over the process. They’re not waiting for someone to find their bonus. They’re claiming it. That small shift in dynamic changes how the whole system feels to the people in the field.
The bottom line is this: trust is the foundation that every incentive plan is built on. Without it, the best-designed pay plan in the world won’t move performance. With it, even an imperfect plan can produce remarkable results. Guard it carefully. The few dollars you might save by being suspicious of your own people are never, ever worth what it costs you.