When you have a great technician or service advisor, you will do anything to keep them. But throwing money at them is not the way to go. Instead, says Bob Cooper, you need a well-rounded compensation incentive plan to keep employees from looking elsewhere in the first place.
Cooper, founder of Elite Worldwide, presented “The Best Pay Programs On Earth” on Sunday to CARS and NACE attendees, and taught attendees about keeping employees interested in work by learning about them, not just paying them more.
“My job is to help (you) understand that throwing money at employees isn’t the way to keep employees,” he says. “What you have to do is you have to keep their hearts. And that means you have to work at it.”
Working at communication skills, recruiting skills and incentives all were intertwined in Cooper’s Sunday seminar. And money is one of the last pieces he feels should be mentioned.
“I’m not saying you don’t have to pay your people and you don’t have to pay them well, but there are a lot of things that you have to do when you put together a compensation program,” he explains. “And that’s why it needs to be called compensation, not just a pay program.”
After explaining the six elements a good compensation program covers, Cooper explained that addressing the plans to your employees ages is a key component of a program’s success. Younger employees, like those of generation Y, react to compensation differently than some of your current generation X employees do.
“You’ll need to consider that they’re really not interested in 20 years and a gold watch, they’re more interested in what are you going to do for me this year. And that’s not selfish, candidly that’s realistic,” Cooper says. “That keeps an owner on his toes. It makes him continue to earn the tenure and the relationship with that employee.”
Think in terms of sporting events, health clubs and other activities as ways to compensate and incentivize younger employees.
Taking another step back in the compensation process, during the seminar Cooper also addressed hiring the right people to work in your shop. That makes implementing compensation incentive programs even easier. It starts with putting more focus on attitude, aptitude and ethics, rather than skills.
“Even though skill plays a role, I believe that far too many business people put far too much attention on the skill of the candidate rather than their attitude toward life and toward their career and toward their family and business. And their aptitude, do they have the ability to grow and do the job,” says Cooper.
By recognizing these characteristics in people, not only will you become a better manager of people, but Cooper says the right compensation plans will work better.
“I want to make sure that you’re aware of the fact that no matter how good your compensation incentive program is, if you don’t do a really great job of keeping your guys motivated and focused, you’re going to lose them anyway.”
