Date: June 1, 1999
To: moving@avatar-moving.com
From: "T.J. Carney" <tjcarney@cmcn.com>
Subject: AMS-Forum Employee Compensation
X-Hosted-By: http://www.avatar-moving.com
[ Return To The Hall of Fame ]I'll shoot for the opry tickets here. I believe that skilled employees are capable of high productivity when work is organized and managed to take advantage of their skills. In this business, there are so many obstacles to productivity that are not the fault of the working crews that I am a cautious of too much emphasis on productivity unless it is spread organization wide. Consequently, my company has implemented a "pay for skills" compensation package for hourly workers (we are a non-union; de-certified in fact, multi-facility company). We do have local, linehaul and packing contractors and find that productivity tends to be written into these deals. The fundamental component in this program is that driving, packing, and cargo handling skills, combined with good operations management, equal productive efforts that end in productive results. There is no way, in my experience, that productivity occurs in marginally or deficiently skilled crews in this business.Our compensation program, summarized for the sake of brevity: We established an entry level wage rate for each labor market we are in, and established the top rate we were willing to pay for "the perfect, highest skilled van operator" (which is the same top rate for each of our terminals). We rated 24 skills as a percentage of the difference between the top hourly rate and the entry level rate. For example, at one of our terminals a class A CDL pays 31% above entry level, and van line qualification pays an additional 8%. Included in the 24 skills are 6 quarterly rated skills that equal 16% of the top hourly rate. These include attendance, uniform compliance and pace of work assessments that the operations manager makes at the end of a quarter for each employee. Every worker knows what it takes in terms of experience (some of our rating is based on a number of years experience), skills, and qualifications to make what rate of pay! I am now finding new interest by our moving crews in gaining experience on different types of jobs for the purpose of improving their pay rate. When a driver has 75% of the 24 skills documented, he/she will be offered some jobs on a percentage of revenue basis, especially fixed price moves where productivity really pays off for both the driver and the company. Anyway, if you have additional interest in our program, please send me a note off-line. I'm not willing to share this program with any company I think of as a competitor in my markets because I believe this program to be a competitive advantage for our firm.
T.J Carney
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