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Comment by isolate | Hacker News Reader

Penalize them financially for making mistakes or give a bonus for not making mistakes.

That's bad advice.

Just going to cause resentment IMO.

The concept of double checking your own work doesn't really fly in engineering work. Not that everyone shouldn't do it but it doesn't tend to add much value to the end product. It is human nature to overlook your own mistakes.

In HW development, separate people verify and validate everything. The cost of a mistake getting through is too high to just hope it is all good.

The point is that mistakes will always happen. You shouldn't blame staff for being human but the mistakes can't get out the door. If it's that important, a second set of eyes needs to be there IMO.

However since this is a post office, really the important thing for the customer is to get in and out as quick as they can. The major complaint is probably the waiting time. So in one sense the employees are helping customer satisfaction by getting them processed quickly!

This is probably illegal (garnishing for mistakes), so check with you local labour laws before doing this. Though I would recommend against this unless you want employees quitting or stealing from you.

Even if you just bonus and don't penalize, if you do it often and regular, it becomes an expectred portion of compensation, and the lack of the bonus becomes the penalty. It does require skipping or reducing the next round of raises in lieu of the bonus structure though, unless you are fine with just paying out more money to employees to reduce problems (which for some people and/or some situations is fine).

Yeah, it's a good point. Carrots might work better than sticks. You can always fire people for incompetence though.

Penalize them financially for making mistakes - that is illegal in Australia, see https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay/deducting-pay-and-overpaymen...

Perfect recipe for getting everyone to play it safe, never learn and someday when the guru on the team leaves the stress level skyrockets and you suddenly find out many have been giving out their resume for months and suddenly finding work elsewhere. Also a recipe for a lack of transparency leading eventually to catastrophic failure.

You've been downvoted, but I think you're right. These workers have no sense of the damage they could be doing -- if a package gets lost, for example, because of their error. They need to be made to feel it personally somehow.

At the very least they should know that if something goes wrong because of their error and the business is held liable, they will be fired. If there's no way to know which worker committed the error, maybe that's the first thing that should be fixed.

Bonuses for error-free performance are also a good idea.

I'm all for treating workers well, but it goes both ways: the workers also need to treat the job well.

In an ideal world, yes.

This world is not ideal. You'll want a caveat: talk to the people who are having trouble, _and make it clear that you're not just here to yell at them_. Your goal isn't to punish, it's to teach. Punishment is useless if you don't tell the person what they did wrong, or if you don't let them fix their mistake.

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