Compensation certainly is a powerful tool. One of the first scenarios that comes to my mind when I think of a person in my life being motivated by compensation is my younger sister. When my sister was a senior in high school she started working at my family’s restaurant as a Hospitality Specialist, or host. The job of the Hospitality Specialist at our restaurant, as you may assume, was to answer the phone, book reservations, and assign servers to tables — but what was a top priority of management was for the Hospitality Specialist to also sell “add ons” to as many reservations as possible. These “add-ons” were pricey packages that included things like champagne, a dozen roses, boxes of chocolates, balloons, and rose petals, that if ordered were placed on the table before the reservation party arrived, to add a special touch to the dining experience (and a higher dollar amount to the check!). Selling these add-on packages took some work on the part of the employee to up-sell them to guests on the phone and convince them it was worth it for them to add it to their special experience — this was a fancy dinner restaurant, after all! To incentivize the hosts to put in the extra effort and sell more add-ons, management created a commission-based system that gave the hosts a percentage of the sale for each add-on they sold. My sister was excited by the opportunity to make extra money from commissions, and immediately started marketing the add-ons to each guest that called the restaurant. Within a few months my sister had beaten the record of most packages ever sold, and was continuously making the most money of all the hosts, some who had worked there for years, just by selling so many packages. My sister was determined and highly motivated by the commission-based system and acted exactly as management had hoped every host would.
