The
History of Incentives -
from the club & the whip to motivation management
As a
practice owner, you are probably looking for an intelligent, honest and fair method to
motivate your employees to higher levels of productivity while increasing your profits.
Employee motivation programs have been
around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They started with the club, progressed to
the whip and have been becoming increasingly more sophisticated since we abolished
slavery.
Over the last 30 years, a highly
sophisticated billion-dollar industry has arisen from research by behavioral psychologists
and management science gurus on how to economically motivate employees to increase
productivity and hence profit. The problem is that the motivation industry, or as it is
called in the trade, the "incentive" industry, focuses almost exclusively on
large-scale corporate America.
The incentive industry works almost
entirely with the 2,000 largest corporations in America. They work with companies like
IBM, American Air Lines and Ford Motor Company to get the most from their employees. The
classic motivation programs were originally developed for the automotive industry.
"Sell five cars this week and win a trip to Hawaii. Sell three more and take your
wife."
The reason for the incentive industry's
neglect of the "small" business enterprise is very simple. It doesn't pay. The
big-time incentive industry can't generate enough profit from designing and administering
a small business motivation program for businesses with fewer than 100 employees. It
doesn't pay for them to send a sales person to see a small practice owner, let alone take
the time to develop a customized motivation program to meet your employee's needs and your
profit goals.
That, in a nutshell, is why Sea Cliff
Software's WIN-WIN Team Bonus program was developed. The challenge was to create a
computer-based incentive program that would offer the advantages of flexible program
design and efficient administration, at a cost the doctor could afford.
The program had to be so easy to use
that even a doctor or manager with no computer training could set it up and manage his or
her own incentive plan. It had to be flexible enough to cover all the employees.
Plus, it had to be sophisticated enough to protect the doctor from making mistakes
that could cause him or her serious economic harm.
Version 1.0 of the WIN-WIN Team Bonus was
designed in 1988 as an accounting and tracking tool for a bonus program that the authors,
Jim & Suzanne Du Molin had developed for their dental industry clients. In 1990,
version 2.0 was expanded to handle the entire health care industry and included a basic
"What If" method of projecting business profits from changes in goals or the
number of days worked.
Version 3.1 is the culmination of over two
years of research and testing. The program is now designed to fill a management gap.
It now provides the doctors and managers with a complete set of management tools
that are normally found only in the large Fortune 2,000 companies. These include:
1. An unparalleled capability to determine
the production needed to achieve your target profit goals.
2. The ability to protect the doctor's
profit from erosion due to inflation, increases in fixed expenses, and overtime
costs.
3. A complete set of tools to
automatically monitor productivity in both the production and collection areas of
your practice.
4. The ability to analyze and compare your
return on investment from each employee in your practice.
When you originally decided to computerize
your practice, you most likely purchased one of two types of software. The first type is a
spreadsheet program that allowed you to construct your own analyses using automated
calculations. Spreadsheet programs were a dream come true for many business minded
doctors. They allowed an unbelievable amount of flexibility in calculating different
"What If" scenarios.
The problem is that you could easily spend
three months learning how to use your spreadsheet program to design a model of your
practice. Even then, there was no way to verify that your calculations were correct or
truly reflected your business situation. Further, these programs were relatively difficult
to use in the actual running of most practices on a day-to-day basis.
More than a few practices almost died slow
and painful deaths while their doctors and managers spent nights and weekends trying to
use their computerized spreadsheets to analyze their problems and run their business. Many
practice owners quickly realized that they needed a completely integrated solution to
computerizing their businesses. They turned to computer management companies who
specialized in complete turnkey systems designed specifically for their type of practice
-- and it worked.
These systems helped you automate all the
routine accounting, insurance billing, scheduling and inventory processes in your
practice. Almost every transaction can now be automated. These systems also supply
you with reams of paper reports to help you manage your business.
However, there was a serious gap. The gap
comes somewhere between your need to process transactions and your need to quickly and
easily monitor your daily productivity and profit. WIN-WIN Team Bonus Pro, is designed to
bridge that gap in two ways.
1. The WIN-WIN approach starts by asking:
"How much more profit do you want to
take home next month and over the next year?"
The program then calculates the required
production needed to generate that additional profit. It then helps you divide the
production requirement among your providers, doctors, auxiliaries, etc.
2. Each day, your WIN-WIN program
generates a simple report, your "Three Minute Monitor," which tells you exactly
where you stand in achieving your profit goal. It's that simple.
The result is Motivation Management.
A sophisticated, yet simple way to motivate and reward your employees while managing your
profit goals on a daily basis -- literally, a "WIN-WIN" solution for you and
your staff.
The WIN-WIN program works on any IBM or
MS/DOS compatible computer systems and can be operated under the Windows operating
environment.
Back to WIN-WIN Directory
