HR manager Steve Cohen saw that despite repeated attempts to structure a fair employee awards program, all he got was a lot of grumbling about how unfair it was. Here’s how he fixed the problem (part of an ongoing series). As part of an ongoing series, we’ll have practicing HR managers present real problems they faced and how they solved them.

Since we like to foster the team approach, we use profit-sharing to motivate employees. You know the reasoning: If the company makes more money, the employees will, too.

And it works pretty well for us – except for some occasional grumbling that it’s not always a fair way to reward people. The main complaint: What if my department shows a lot of improvement but company profits don’t go up a lot? Then I’m being penalized because maybe another department didn’t improve as much as ours did.

The complaint was a reasonable one that we wanted to address.

Split the pot

We did that by breaking the profitsharing pot into two parts – one for the company overall and a departmental one based on specific measures for each department. That way, everyone gets a bump when profits rise, and more-deserving departments get a secondary bump, too.

The system doesn’t cost us any more money because it all comes out of the same pot. We just divide it up in a different way.

And it answers employees’ complaints about fair rewards and, more importantly, gives rewards to those who deserve them.

(Steve Cohen, VP for HR, Checkers Drive-In Restaurants, Tampa, FL)