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:
An unparalleled capability to determine the production needed to achieve your target profit goals.
The ability to protect the doctor's profit from erosion due to inflation, increases in fixed expenses, and overtime costs.
A complete set of tools to automatically monitor productivity in both the production and collection areas of your practice.
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.
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.
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.
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The
History of Incentives - from the club & the whip to motivation management