Motivated maintenance

To help enforce a company culture of cleanliness, Tony Zalocha, founder of Stone Age Landscaping, will periodically check to see which of his crews has the cleanest truck and take them out to lunch.

And while company culture alone may encourage employees to go above and beyond, business owners may find that those incentives can help to create that culture change and yield fringe benefits to both the client and the business as a whole. Allen Clemons, president of Great Estates Landscaping in Covington, Georgia, implemented an employee incentive program there in February.

The program involves a quality control inspection that is conducted by managers on site every 60 days where they grade crews in 12 categories, including pruning, weed control, mowing, irrigation management, horticulture and cleanliness, among others. If a crew earns a cumulative score above 87 percent for all of the properties that they are responsible for, they then qualify for a bonus. A score below 87 percent indicates that the crew has ultimately come up short for the client in some way, Clemons says.

“What it does is it incentivizes the crew to do the right thing when no one is looking. This program is just a win-win-win. The customer gets better service, we know where stand, and we have a way to measure people. Without metrics, you can’t hold people accountable. By holding them accountable, everything changes,” he says.

Crews are further motivated with a whiteboard that lists monthly scores for each crew and truck across all company branches. The crew of the month with the highest score gets an additional bonus. Employees use the whiteboard to see where they rank and to learn from the top scorers to try to improve their own scores.