The Attendance Bonus: The Easiest Incentive to Design and the Hardest to Defend

The peak incentive that actually works is the simplest one you can write. Administering it is what will consume your GM's November.

In July I wrote about incentive plans built on engineered standards — why the measurement banks most of the gain before a dollar of incentive is paid, and why the plan usually dies before it ever launches. That piece was about paying people to perform.

Peak is the opposite problem. You are not paying people to perform. You are paying them to stay.

Most of your floor in November arrived in October. There is no engineered standard on them, no baseline, no history. Whatever plan you run has to work on someone in their third week who has never seen the building at volume. That rules out almost everything.

Present, safe, and not on a warning

What's left is the simplest structure in the book, and it works.

Three gates. Present for all scheduled hours. No at-fault safety infraction. Not on a performance warning. Clear all three through the season and you're paid.

It needs no standard, no baseline, and no history — which is exactly why it works on a workforce that has none. And the timing is the hook: the money lands before Christmas, on top of the overtime. Extra money in the check ahead of the holiday, at the moment people most want it there.

Seasonal employees are usually in the plan. Agency temps usually are not — that program belongs to the agency, and it's worth pushing them to build one. The floor doesn't sort by badge type when it's counting who got paid.

The blackout is the easy part

Alongside the incentive, most buildings run a blackout period. Ours ran the week before Thanksgiving through Christmas. No scheduled PTO inside that window.

Say it early, say it at orientation, and almost nobody argues. People understand what the season is. The rule was never the problem.

The problem is that the rule has exceptions, and it always will.

Life happens, and you're not allowed to explain it

Management has discretion to approve absences, and it should. People made commitments in June for a Saturday in December. Doctors don't reschedule around your volume curve. FMLA applies in peak like any other month. Someone on limited duty can't be pushed out of a plan for being on limited duty.

So you approve some absences. You allow a percentage of the floor to be out on a given day, because the alternative isn't a real plan. And most of those calls are correct.

Then this happens. Someone leaves early three Thursdays running. By the third one the floor has noticed, and by Monday the floor has an explanation. It's usually the wrong one.

And you can't correct it. If the reason is medical, you aren't permitted to say so. The people who most need to hear this was approved, and here's why are precisely the people you're barred from telling.

That's the part nobody warns you about. The standard is objective and defensible. Every exception to it is confidential.

From the floor, it looks like favoritism

Now put that under the conditions of an actual peak.

Consecutive shifts. Mandatory overtime. Depending on your state, rules about how many days can run before someone gets one off. Burnout building week over week in exactly the people you need most, because the ones you lean on hardest are the ones who can carry it.

Under that pressure people watch each other closely. Who's here. Who isn't. Who got approved and who got written up. That isn't pettiness — it's fatigue plus money on the line, and it's entirely predictable.

Which is why the GM and HR being in sync isn't administrative tidiness. It's the whole thing.

Not because the decisions are wrong. Because inconsistent decisions across shifts are indefensible and unexplainable at the same time. If first shift approves what second shift denies, you have a fairness problem you can't litigate in public, in front of a workforce already watching, with cash attached to the outcome.

One standard, applied the same way, on every shift, by people who talked to each other before the answer was given.

The sequence that protects it

• Before the ramp — the three gates and the blackout window, in writing.

• At orientation — every hire gets the same version. Seasonal and agency alike, whether or not they qualify.

• Weekly through peak — GM and HR reconcile every approved absence against one standard, across all shifts. Weekly, not at the end.

• Before Christmas — pay it, on time. The date is the hook, and missing it costs more than the money.

What it actually buys

Run properly, the plan does what it's built to do. Attendance holds through the weeks it usually slips, safety stays in the conversation, and people who could walk in early December stay to collect.

But the money only buys attendance. What buys you a floor that trusts the process is that every exception got decided the same way, by people who weren't allowed to say why.

That's harder to build than a bonus. It's also the only part that carries into January.

Charlie Mangini Managing Partner, GoVia Alliance Group goviaalliance.com

Next issue: September 24.