| >Personally, I prefer the safer route of skipping any tit for tat scenarios (e.g. "if you do X you might get Y at some point in the future"). Well, you can pretend that employment is not a tit for tat scenario... but it is. even with a flat salary, you do what I want, and I might give you a raise. You don't do what I want, and I might fire you. There is really no getting around that. Now, the discussion here is "should we maximize or minimize those tit for tat aspects of the employee/employer relationship" >With the semi-random schedule there is the additional risk that the employee completed something they thought was a big deal, but you didn't or didn't even know about it. Disappointment by not acting on something you weren't aware of. This seems like a very important concern that any bonus system would have to account for in order to be successful. One way to approach it is to tie the bonuses to company revenue, which is easily measured, and in a company this small, fairly easily moved by even one person. (now as we add more people, it might work less well, as one person might feel like they are carrying other less productive employees... but right now, it's me, the owner, and one full-time employee, so I don't think I'd have those problems.) I think tying it to total company revenue performance (maybe with a random multiplier or on unpredictable dates? that would be the manipulative part that may or may not be insulting and bad.) would mitigate a lot of the problems you mention of feeling jilted... I mean, you can argue about how hard you worked, or about how brilliant you are, but you can't argue about how much money came in. |