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Hi everyone, I've found myself in an unusual situation, and couldn't find anything online relevant to this particular scenario so I thought I'd turn here to see if anyone has experienced something similar. I work for a small company (15 people) and I am head of my department with three people under me. Two of them only joined us 5 months ago and are in entry-level positions that are essentially just research and data entry. The two new people were hired to basically just churn through data in preparation for a big project we’ll be releasing soon. One of them is only here until the end of November, while the other is staying permanently (I was aware of this when hiring, and it fit within our timeframes for this project). Their bonuses are $5,000 each, and based around a pretty simple structure of “Complete X by this date for 15%, Y by this date for 20%, etc” with everything being able to be completed by the end of the year and then paid out. Due to unexpected reasons outside our control, the release date of this project has been pushed back by several months. The tasks in the second half of my incentive structure can’t be completed until after this project has been released. For most of us this isn’t an issue, we’ll simply renegotiate the due dates of the remaining tasks to something reasonable given the delays. However, for the person that is leaving in November, this is a bit of a problem, as they won’t be here to complete half the incentivised tasks. What are my obligations to this person in this situation? When we first set these out, I was confident they would be able to hit at least 80% of the targets/payout, and I can see it being lovely from their point of view that they don’t even get a chance to achieve them now due to no fault of their own. Do I just say “Sorry it didn’t work out, here’s your payout for what you did manage to achieve”? They are a good worker and I’m confident they would have hit these targets had this delay not occured. On the other hand, it seems weird to be like “Hey here’s money for the work I’m sure you probably would have achieved”. It’s not a huge amount, but for someone fresh out of uni and about to move to a different city, the difference between $3k and $5k can be significant, and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t feel a bit lovely about hardballing them. Any advice appreciated, thanks
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Sep 27, 2018 07:17
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 22:29 |
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Bonuses only make employees angry. I think your complicated scam to pay people less then they are worth is evil. I am jealous. Did you pitch this bonus as something when you hired? If so it is not really a bonus.
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Sep 27, 2018 11:23
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Sorry you feel this is a scam. This was not brought up during the hiring process, so it's on top of their normal salary, which is honestly above average for the position and industry. It's not like I'm personally paying them from my own pocket, so I have no reason to want to prevent them getting the whole thing, and we have obviously budgeted for it. I just don't think that would get cleared by my boss. My own standpoint is that I would like everyone to get as much money as possible because I like them all. I just don't really have a way of justifying that to the people I answer to. If it was up to me I'd just say "Here's the whole thing, enjoy your christmas, it was great working with you." Sorry if that wasn't clear from my post.
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Sep 27, 2018 12:32
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why don't you just... do that
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Sep 27, 2018 12:40
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I would say something like “have you considered not working for thieves?” but lol, might as well advise digging up a safe stuffed full of $100s from your back yard and retiring 
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Sep 27, 2018 12:54
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Yeah companies pull this bullshit scam all the time, hit X by Y date then delay or "cancel" the whole project. (all projects get delayed, everywhere, all the time) Don't act surprised and don't act like it's not a scam, it's one of the oldest scams around. Ideally you'd pay them out the maximum allowed amount for hitting 100% of everything, but you won't be allowed to do that because it appears you're the powerless fall guy in this scam. "but we already pay you a good base, don't worry about the scam" is loving precious. Pryor on Fire fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Sep 27, 2018 |
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Sep 27, 2018 14:50
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To be honest though my sympathy for the employees is limited, they really should have understood when they signed up that they would never see the promised bonus. It's a bog standard way of preying on the naive, but, as they say, fool me twice...
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Sep 27, 2018 14:53
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So what's the problem with paying out per the new schedule? Obviously it's not going to be the full amount, but they're not doing the full amount of work. I mean, that sounds like a dick move but hear me out... It sounds like they were hired not knowing about this bonus, right? These bonuses are strictly project-based performance incentives that they knew nothing about until they were assigned to the project...? If that's the case, I think the fairest thing is to adjust the bonus schedule based on the new project schedule, and then pay out per that schedule. You're still giving out bonuses for work performed on time, it's just that the temporary person will leave before the schedule permits them to earn the full amount. Honestly they could leave tomorrow, right? If they did that, you wouldn't pay them the whole thing would you? Also what is the temporary person doing now? Aren't they working on other projects that have their own incentives? I think the biggest thing to think about is that you're likely going to hand this work over to someone else after the temporary person leaves, so what happens to that new person? Do they now get nothing because the first person took all the incentive money that wasn't really earned? Don't forget that there's no guarantee that the first person will actually complete the work by the milestones. So whoever comes after would have to work extra hard to have a chance of getting ANY of the bonuses. It wouldn't really be fair to punish them for their predecessor's mistakes. I mean, I work in engineering... our performance bonuses are never promised, nor are they project based. They're assumed, but in the end they're based on how well the company does. If I do awesome but the company overall does poorly, I get a big fat $0 bonus. I've never seen this sort of incentive structure... but it kind of makes sense if this is just a data entry sort of thing I guess.
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Sep 27, 2018 15:10
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infuriating. your company is stupid and if you really thought this was the only way to get your employees bonuses, you may as well not have bothered.
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Sep 27, 2018 15:16
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If you actually want to incentivize people with money then make it a surprise and make it retroactive. It has to have happened in the past, not the future, and not as a conditional in some convoluted contract that the company can unilaterally bail on at any time by delaying a project. So when I give an employee a raise we do the raise at the start of the month, and then don't tell them for a week or two. Then when we are doing the performance review or just a check-in I can say something like "you're doing great work, we love you, we're bumping your pay by 10% and this is retroactive so you've already been making $110k for the past two weeks and you should notice this in your next pay stub". People LOVE this. It's like a bonus and a raise in one. Sometimes after a particularly grueling project we will backpay a raise too, so then the employee gets their raise and we pay a bonus of 10% base for the past three months as well in their next paycheck. If it's a built in future bonus baked into an employment agreement then it's not a carrot, it's a stick. People hate sticks.
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Sep 27, 2018 15:46
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in order for a bonus to be properly incentivizing you do need to tell people about it in advance and have clear criteria by which it is achieved
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Sep 27, 2018 16:03
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:in order for a bonus to be properly incentivizing you do need to tell people about it in advance and have clear criteria by which it is achieved Yeah, Pryor's method sounds like a way to trick people out of a bonus. You give them a raise and say "Hey since we applied this 2 weeks ago it's like we gave you a bonus!" I mean, you could just do the performance review 2 weeks sooner...clearly you've already completed the review and decided to give the employee a raise, so you're just arbitrarily delaying it. edit: also if we assume a 5% raise, you're really just giving them a 0.20% salary bonus. That's 2 weeks of earning 5% more salary than you expected. edit: OK he said 10% raise (holy poo poo), so that's a 0.40% salary bonus then...still not really much. I guess if you're getting a 10% raise that's a big deal, but now you're arbitrarily raising the company's long term operational costs for short term performance. DaveSauce fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Sep 27, 2018 |
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Sep 27, 2018 16:10
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What do you lose from paying them bonuses, or what do you gain from not paying them? Are you incentivized to not to pay them? Wouldn't it be the best business decision to just say gently caress it and pay them 0?
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Sep 27, 2018 19:51
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Veskit posted:Wouldn't it be the best business decision to just say gently caress it and pay them 0? Well, no. People will find out pretty quickly that you're a lying rear end in a top hat and nobody will want to work for you. You'll end up only able to hire the people who are willing to work JUST hard enough to keep their job. If that's good enough for you then congrats on your short-sighted business plan. I'm not saying this is the best incentive structure, but if you don't keep your promises people will find out. Even if it's a lovely structure, if you do your best to pay out, you'll have a much easier time finding and retaining reliable talent. If you rely on technicalities to screw people out of money they thought they were working hard for, then you'll lose productivity and/or people. Or you'll find one person crazy enough to try to sue you to try to get the bonus money you screwed them out of. They'll lose, of course, but not before you spend a lot of money on lawyers. Hiring people is expensive, and high turnover is bad for the company. Yes there's probably a number you can put to it, but it'll take a lot of time and effort to find that number. If you're not going to go through that time and effort, then it's probably in your best interest to put effort in to keeping people, rather than treating them as disposable commodities.
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Sep 27, 2018 20:54
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DaveSauce posted:Hiring people is expensive, and high turnover is bad for the company. Yes there's probably a number you can put to it, but it'll take a lot of time and effort to find that number. If you're not going to go through that time and effort, then it's probably in your best interest to put effort in to keeping people, rather than treating them as disposable commodities. If you were owner/ceo/coo/director whatever of the company, fine, i totally get what you're saying, but speaking from a director of 3 people perspective, I don't really agree with your assessment of rehireability and all that. I just want to either save money or work within what the company is asking me to do. Assuming I'm acting for only my career's best interst
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Sep 27, 2018 21:05
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Veskit posted:Assuming I'm acting for only my career's best interst That'd be your job's best interest, not your career's. If you want to jerk around your direct reports just so your numbers look good, then that's a good short term plan. Long term, you'll eventually get busted and it'll keep you from advancing. It's a narrow view and it's irresponsible from the big picture perspective. If you demonstrate that you can't trusted to make big picture decisions, then you're going to dead end your career pretty fast.
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Sep 27, 2018 22:29
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Bro, you are talking about the world you wish we lived in. In the actual world we live in, the further up the ladder you go the *more* short sighted and self serving managers/executives get, not less
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Sep 27, 2018 23:12
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Eric the Mauve posted:Bro, you are talking about the world you wish we lived in. I WISH I lived in your world. In my world, the executives are engineers who got promoted because the company was growing and they were the most senior at the time. Rinse/repeat every few years until you have a VP.
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Sep 27, 2018 23:39
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I literally have no understanding of what paradigm you're living
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Sep 28, 2018 00:22
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Veskit posted:I literally have no understanding of what paradigm you're living You would fit right in.
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Sep 28, 2018 00:40
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How did it go OP?
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Dec 14, 2018 00:00
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| # ? Apr 30, 2024 22:29 |
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Good! Thankfully we ended up paying out the whole $5K, which is what I wanted. It didn't end up being an issue at all, I was worried about nothing 
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Dec 14, 2018 02:48
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