Safelite Autoglass Essay

My first part-time job in my life was actually my first job. It was an unpaid part-time internship in one of the local commercial banks in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mainly internships in Azerbaijani banks are not paid; hence the financial part of the job was not my main driver and motivation to work. As it was my first job, I was very enthusiastic and motivated to show my best to the team I was assigned to. Moreover, my coach in the team used to be an intern as well, and he knew that it was very hard for the interns to stay motivated all the time, as the company did not pay for it.

He always found a new task or assignment for me, so I could stay interested all the time. One of the main reasons for low productivity was that the employees simply were lazy and did not try hard to work. ““Some of the technicians spend too much time playing pinochle” stated one of the managers.

” (Hall B., Lazear E., Madigan C., 2001). Another reason is finding the correct location of the customer.

Sometimes the driver is not instructed correctly about the location, or the technician forgets to use the manifest and etc. Moreover, 10-20% of the of the time the technician found out that they have been given the wrong part in the warehouse, which usually causes a reschedule with the customer, while sometimes the customer could simply cancel their order in favor of the competitor. On top of that, the employees complained about incorrect job division among the staff. The proposed PPP plan is basically based upon the problems with the low productivity of the company. The PPP plan is addressed to solve the problem with the productivity.

The manager of the company already has experience in this kind of situation from which he benefits in Safelite. The PPP plan on top of the above mentioned, also introduce new problem for the HR department: “Safelite also offered truck privileges for a time, but later ended them, because of the liability involved with allowing employees to drive trucks after hours. The loss of the truck privilege caused recruiters in HR to worry about how they could ever get technicians from other companies to come to Safelite.” (Hall B., Lazear E., Madigan C., 2001) One of the pros of the PPP is that part of the employees was already familiar with this type of compensation program. As a part of the program, lowering the guarantee rate for the employees after 12 weeks of work might result in a huge turnover.

One of the problems of this system is that some situations which lower technician’s productivity were not in his control such as weather, scheduling errors and etc. Moreover, as mostly the busy periods are spring and summer, in winter low demand, hence the employees will get paid less, which might increase the probability that the technician will leave to a job with a guaranteed wage. Overall, Safelite installers are not good candidates for piece-rate pay, as the workers themselves first of all are “lazy”, and PPP system does not guarantee increased motivation and will to work among the employees. In my opinion the company should better set a guaranteed wage for the installers.

First of all, the division of the job should be done by the ability of the employee to install the window. The faster the worker, the higher wage. The installers should be divided into several categories or gredes, which shows how fast the employee can install the wind based on his past performance, and for each category there should be a fixed salary. To keep the employees far from laziness, there should be an average monthly minimum norm, which a technician should install according to his grade, which depends on the season of the year as well.

Bibliography
* Hall, B & Lazear, E & Madigan, C. (2001). Performance Pay at Safelite Auto Glass. Harvard Business Journal. – (4), 80-90