If you want to change what happens on a property, you have to change what the person standing on the property is focused on and rewarded for. This is where front-line incentive programs come in.
“Base pay buys the job,” says Joe Socolof, COO of Landscape Workshop. “Incentives don’t buy effort; they direct attention. A good field manager already cares about fifty things — the customer, the crew, safety, the truck, the schedule. Caring about everything is the same as caring about nothing. We picked the handful that matter most and made them impossible to ignore. That’s not paying someone to care. It’s aiming good people at the priorities that move the business, and making performance transparent for everyone.”
Socolof and Josh Altman, VP of strategic initiatives with Landscape Workshop, will cover how to design and implement incentive plans for field managers that drive performance during their session, “Front-Line Incentive Plans” on Wednesday, Nov. 11 at 8 a.m. at ELEVATE.
“Most incentive plans in this industry are either a discretionary year-end bonus nobody understands or a spiff that games one number and breaks three others,” Socolof says. “We’re going to walk through a plan running live across our branches — what we got wrong the first time, how it’s built, and how we tied it to the metrics that actually drive retention and labor efficiency. If you run field crews, you’ll leave with a framework you can steal.”
Building A Simple Plan
Socolof says some of the keys to creating a strong incentive program are to pick a small fixed set of habits your field managers fully control, make it all-or-nothing and pay it often.
At Landscape Workshop, their program is based on about a dozen different behaviors, including show up ready, run the route in order, work the 13-point checklist, keep labor efficient, and close your tickets clean. If a field manager completes all these, they earn $20 that day. If they miss one of the points, the streak resets.
“On top of that sit a few monthly gates — safety, pad completion, no cancellations — that have to hold or you forfeit the month,” Socolof says. “No partial credit. No flavor-of-the-month. The field manager can recite the whole list from memory, and so can his GM. That’s the point.”
Socolof says while the field manager’s behavior controls whether they earn the extra pay for that day, failures that impact retention and safety can wipe the month clean.
“A field manager can’t grind his daily checklist while a property cancels under him and still cash out,” Socolof says. “Behaviors earn it; outcomes protect it. Work backward from the outcomes you care about, pay on the behaviors that produce them, and gate on the outcomes so the two never drift apart.”
Socolof adds that once your incentive program is in place, it should rarely change.
“The whole point is that the list doesn’t move,” he says. “A field manager memorized these habits; churn them and you torch both the muscle memory and the trust. We watch the results weekly to make sure the metrics still drive the right behavior — but we change the design about once a year, and only when it clearly earns the credibility cost of the change.”
Pitfalls to Avoid
A typical sign of an incentive program that is misaligned is when a metric goes up, but the business doesn’t. If the metric improves but the retention or margin does not, Socolof says someone found the gap between the metric and the intent.
He notes that behavior may also get worse somewhere you weren’t watching because people optimize what you pay them for, sometimes at the expense of what you forgot to measure.
“Always ask the second- and third-order question,” Socolof says.
Another mistake with incentive programs is utilizing too many metrics. This can dilute your field managers’ focus and make it hard to know what matters.
Socolof says you need to make sure your rewards are based on elements field managers can control; otherwise, you’re taxing them on weather and luck.
You also have to monitor the program so employees don’t game the system. Socolof says by making theirs all-or-nothing, this prevents team members from gaming one single metric at the expense of the rest.
Effective Incentives
Another key to an effective incentive program is to use rewards that are frequent and visible. Socolof says their field managers’ reward is $20 a day and it is earned on a streak.
“A field manager watches it accrue and knows a single bad day breaks the run,” he says. “That daily line of sight does more than a fat year-end check ever did, because he can see it, feel the streak, and compete for it. Small, frequent, and visible beats big, distant, and fuzzy every time.”
When you opt for annual discretionary bonuses, it can seem too far off for a field manager and not clear on how they are earned.
Recognition also matters as much as the cash reward. Field managers are competitive, and when you provide a scoreboard and something to win, that is half the motivation.
“If a field manager can’t tell you in one sentence how he earns it, it isn’t working,” Socolof says.
Ready to create your own field-level incentive program? Register for ELEVATE, and we’ll see you in Tampa, Florida!
