Technician bonus schemes: why paying for hours sold rewards the wrong thing

Incentive schemes. Bonus schemes for technicians. I’ll be straight with you: I hate them.

Not because I don’t believe in rewarding people. I do. I hate them because they’re nearly always built around hours: how many hours a technician sells you in a day, a week or a month. And that incentivises the wrong thing.

Here’s the deal most of them offer. “I’m paying you for 8 hours a day. Sell me 10, and I’ll give you an hour extra. One hour for the business, one hour for you.” Sounds fair. The technician’s thinking, yeah, get in there, I can’t wait to get into work.

So let me walk you through what actually happens. I tell it as the technician in this short clip.

Forty minutes gone before the first job starts

First day on the new scheme. I clock on, and I wait 20 minutes for my first car, because front of house isn’t ready.

The car finally comes in and I get it on the ramp. I look at the job instructions and half of them are missing. So I walk to the front of the house to find out what they actually want doing. That’s another 10 minutes.

And guess what? The person I need to speak to is on the phone with another customer. So I wander outside for a bit. I go back, and now they’re outside talking to someone else, because it’s first thing in the morning.

I’m clocked onto a job. I’m incentivised to sell hours. I haven’t even started, and 40 minutes have gone.

Do the sums. Forty minutes is a twelfth of an 8-hour day. To hit that 10-hour target, the technician now has to sell 10 hours in the 7 hours 20 minutes that are left, and that’s before anything else goes wrong.

Their hours are only as good as the preparation around them

That’s why it doesn’t work. Some of a technician’s time isn’t controlled by the technician at all. It’s controlled by other people: whether the car’s ready, whether the job card says what needs doing, whether someone at the front desk is free to answer a question.

Then there’s the workshop itself. I’m given a job and I haven’t got the right tools to do it. So I hunt around, asking my mates, borrowing what I can. More time gone, because we weren’t prepared.

So an hours-based scheme ends up measuring the whole garage and pinning the result on one person. If front of house and the workshop aren’t set up to keep technicians on the ramp, that’s a management problem, not a technician problem. I’ve written about one fix, having runners get the next car ready, and about why front of house decides your workshop efficiency.

What I did instead: recognise, don’t incentivise

In my garages, and especially the last one, we never had a set bonus scheme as such. That didn’t mean good work went unnoticed.

I recognised when my team did well. How did I recognise that? Well, the figures told me that in the first place, plus I can see in their demeanour and their work ethic. And that’s the sign of a good leader, that you notice these things.

Andy Savva

So I’d often do little things throughout the year, for all of them. Recognising good work. Recognising loyalty. And making sure everyone got, over the year, what they deserved.

What to do next

• Follow one technician’s first hour. Note every minute they spend waiting for a car, chasing a job card or hunting for a tool. That’s time your scheme is charging to them.
• Check tomorrow’s job cards tonight. If a technician has to walk to reception to find out what’s wanted, the card isn’t finished.
• Look hard at any scheme you run now. Ask how much of what it pays for is really in the technician’s hands.
• Watch the figures and the people. Notice the effort and the loyalty, and recognise it through the year, not just when a number is hit.