Question

How might you try to detect if your employee is gaming the incentive system? Try to think of concrete examples.

Answer 1

No incentive program is perfect and, over time, certain employees figure out few ways around the system to “earn” the incentive. For example:

1) The employees ring up single items as multiples trick. At a grocery store checkout, the cashier entered a fresh bagel purchase as 12 separate items instead of 1 item (a dozen). By doing so the cashiers received an incentive based on average transaction ring times. With changing of transactions the cashier improves their average. In such a scenario you have to think like an insider and play “what if” with your program, thus if you were the cashier at the grocery store who was provided incentives for average items rung up per minute, what you would do for improving the average. Although gaming cannot be 100% avoided however can be planned for and managed to detect the gaming of the incentive system. Moreover play fair and keep the rules simple

2) When the owner had noticed that complaints of the customer about long wait times were increasing but internal reports were improving of service time, this inconsistency must trigger further investigation. These should be monitored and, with the trigger in place, the owner know when things need recalibrating