Question

3. You are the human resources manager for a famous retailer, and you are trying to convince the president of the company to change the structure of employee compensation. Currently, the company's retail sales staff is paid a flat hourly wage of $20 per hour for each eight hour shift worked. You propose a new pay structure whereby each salesperson in a store would be compensated $10 per hour, plus 1 percent of that store's daily profits. Assume that, when run efficiently, each store's maximum daily profits are $25,000. Outline the arguments that support your proposed plan.

Answer 1

The goal of any reasonable firm is to optimize its earnings. Providing incentives to the workers is one of the management methods to induce maximum effort from them in order to achieve the objective of the firm.
In the present structure of employee settlement where the retail personnel is paid a fixed wage of $20 per hour, there's no reward for the retail sales staff to push more difficult for the sales and increase the profits. There is no penalty on them in case the sales go down and the profits are negatively affected.
In the proposed worker compensation structure where each of the retail personnel is paid 1 percent of the shop's daily revenues over and above a fixed wage of $10 per hour, the staff is motivated to work harder to increase the sales and the profits of the firm. Each of the retail staff members then will be motivated by self-interest and devise methods to increase their productivity so that they can maximize their everyday compensation. Hence, by taking care of their self-interest, they will indirectly help in attaining the company's objective of maximizing its daily earnings to $25,000 per shop.