D5

Motivation to Work

Each week, you will be asked to respond to the prompt or prompts in the discussion forum. Your initial post should be 75-150 words in length, and is due on Sunday. By Tuesday, you should respond to two additional posts from your peers. 

What motivates you to get up every morning and do your best? Do you work hard for your family? For personal satisfaction and to meet personal goals? To earn more money? To be recognized by your peers and the community? There is a wide variety of elements that motivate people to work hard. Successfully managing a workforce requires managers to understand, acknowledge, and carefully implement rewards to motivate their employees to perform to the best of their abilities.

Research the total compensation plan for the company you have chosen for your final project. Very briefly describe the elements they use to reward their employees (base pay, bonuses, time off, daycare, flex time, benefits, etc). Is their approach the best that it could be? If you were leading the company, what would you do to ensure their approach to motivating employees was fair and equitable? Is your approach financially feasible? Would you choose to be 100% transparent in your approach? Why or why not?

Review a minimum of two of your classmate’s posts and respond with additional insights, information, questions, or links to more information on the reward and motivation system they shared. Would their approach to motivating their employees work for your organization?  Why or why not? Your responses should be academic in nature and linked to research and management topics discussed this week rather than personal stories of shopping with the company they chose for example.

Jeffrey Dufrene 

Delta offers an extensive compensation package for it's employees.  Delta prides itself in how they treat their employees and has been a crucial part of their overall success.  This list is not all inclusive, I chose to highlight what I thought are the more significant benefits: 

• Free or extremely low cost travel for you and your family members.  
• Extensive health insurance coverage including dental, medical, vision, and life.
• Retirement plan which automatically pays 2% of your base pay and, in addition, Delta will match up to 6% of your contributions.
• Profit sharing with undisclosed amounts of payouts.  However, Delta states that in 2007, more than 15% of the company's pre-tax income was distributed to it's employees.
• Paid vacation, holiday, and personal time.

Delta's approach as to how they motivate employees is one of the best in the the country.  Delta made the "100 Best Companies to Work For" for two years in a row (Davis, 2018).  Therefore, it's hard for me to say that Delta isn't doing things the best way they can be in terms of employees.  Delta paid out over $16000, on average, per employee in 2018 from it's profit sharing model.  Profit sharing is a great way to motivate people and keep turnover rates low.  Delta has been expanding since inception and introduced profit sharing just over 10 years ago.  While it may be expensive, it has been a a great success overall and has helped them become what they are today while still being profitable.  Delta has been transparent in the compensation approach as there are several articles written on the topic and I would not change that aspect.  I feel that providing transparency helps reduce conflict, reduces rumors, and promotes communication amongst employees and managers.  Further, it's a great recruiting mechanism that can help bring in the best people to ensure the companies success.

https://news.delta.com/delta-again-named-one-fortune-s-best-companies-work

https://thepointsguy.com/news/delta-profit-sharing-valentines-day/

Angela Hazelton 

The Hershey Company has a pretty complete compensation plan. For delivering results, Hershey’s provides well-compensated pay and a recognition system for rewarding those results. Many opportunities for growth are available through career development as the company continues to expand globally. Hershey’s also offers wellness programs for physical, emotional and financial health.

I feel as though Hershey’s has a pretty good benefits plan to attract talented employees and continue to increase the company revenues by the monetary bonuses/incentives offered. The well-being offerings such as the fitness center and tobacco cessation program should assist Hershey’s with less cost for health insurance coverage. In my research I may not have come across all the details of their total compensation plan as I feel they could be doing better with work-life balance including flexible schedules, teleworking opportunities and child care on-site or at least back-up and sick-child care availability. In my opinion, these options would assist with keeping their employees engaged and motivated to continue their careers as they raise families or deal with caring for aging parents.

Having an open dialogue between managers and employees will assist in offering the best and most appropriate rewards for each individual. I feel as though each individual employee’s situation allows for different compensations and this could aid in being fair and equitable amongst the employees. Having an individual plan, say an a la carte system, in place would allow for these opportunities to be financially feasible for the company. This a la carte system can also eliminate the need to be concerned about transparency as all options would be transparent but which benefit package/compensation plan chosen for each individual would be confidential.

https://www.slideshare.net/hersheycareers/the-benefits-of-working-at-the-hershey-company-us-version-2015