Each month Recordsforce has a company meeting where we get EVERYONE together. We review the company goals and our progress towards reaching them. We discuss any housekeeping issues and then we review some Flashlight Award nominations and announce the Flashlight Award Winners.
Then we turn our attention to the “P” in PACE with our Employee Performance Score Bonuses. PACE allows us to compare all of our workers, regardless of what task they perform, by comparing their relative performance and time in a task. If you perform task “A” 150% faster than the company average, and you perform task “B” at 100% of the company average, and you perform these tasks for the same amount of time on a given day, the resulting PACE Score for that day would be 125. The PACE Score is a weighted average of all of your task scores for the time period.
This is how we measure operator performance. How fast are you compared to your peers in the tasks you perform and how does that compare to operator’s performance against their peers in other tasks? It’s the first time in our industry you can compare employees who perform dramatically different kinds of work, but both are measured by speed of their work.
At Recordsforce, we have three types of operators. Operators who get documents ready for scanning are called “Document Prep Operators,” operators who scan documents are aptly named “Scan Operators” and we have “Data Entry Operators” and you can guess what they do. When we give raises each year, we want to have a way to apportion the production bonus money to the staff who perform the best. This can be hard to do when your company has workers who perform 20 or 30 tasks a day and have tasks that have zero overlap with other workers. How do you compare performance?
With PACE, I can rank all of my staff, regardless of the types of tasks they perform, by the employees throughput relative to other employees who performed the same task. Each task creates its own PACE Score for the time period being measured and each task’s score is weighted by the amount of time spent in that task.
To qualify for the PACE Bonus, employee’s Commitment scores need to be perfect (they worked the hours they were scheduled), their accuracy needed to exceed 95% and they had to have worked at least 20 hours over the month. We then take the top 20% of the staff, or everyone who scored over 120 (whichever includes more staff) and give them a bonus equivalent to their PACE Score.
It’s a bonus system that directly ties their performance to the amount of the bonus pool they win! It encourages employees to become very proficient at their work and to focus on work they are good at. A win/win for the employee and company.
Using the PACE score system, we’ve seen dramatic improvements in employee productivity. We are not pushing them to work harder, they are looking for ways to improve. Additionally, we support a suggestion box that employees can use to submit process and software improvement ideas. Many of these have led to overall improvements in productivity across all operations.
By creating an objective measure of employee performance across all tasks, the management team is able to make objective decisions about who gets raises and how much. Additionally, our conversations are not emotional or based on sudden employee emergencies. We provide raises based on a method that is applied to everyone in production equally and is blind to everything but raw performance.
We continue to focus on Accuracy, Commitment and Engagement in many ways, but by announcing the PACE Scores and giving bonuses, we remind every employee each month that we pay for great performance and we recognize it universally, supporting our core values Everybody Matters and We Want to Improve! Recordsforce continues to drive performance while improving the quality of life for its employees.
Our employees are pushing themselves to new levels of performance every day. They are driving the company to provide improvements to support even greater performance. This is all happening in a team-based environment where everyone supports the culture of constant improvement, both personally and professionally.