The motivation factor

Revenue-based bonuses may seem like the most obvious way to motivate advisors and staff to build a business, but two veteran MDRT members say there are more ways than money to get the most from your employees and enhance their job satisfaction.

“If we can get staff doing things that use their unique talents — and everybody’s got a unique talent — everybody is happier. Their day is much more pleasant,” said Michael H.J. Evers, CFP, CLU, a 39-year MDRT member.

Give them space

Within Evers’ practice of five admins and two advisors is the comptroller who is preparing video for an upcoming webinar. Shooting the video and editing is not her job, but she happens to be very proficient with technology. “She’s in charge of finances, but this just happens to be something she has a passion for, so we let her run with it,” Evers said.

Aligning employees’ strengths with suitable tasks and collaborations can empower them, and having some autonomy to make their own decisions about day-to-day tasks can boost their confidence. Evers’ practice recently hired a new administrative assistant to fill in for an employee going on maternity leave. The onboarding process is basically to show people the basics and let them do what they’re good at. His early training will consist of shadowing other employees to discover his “natural inclinations.” Then he’ll be plunged into the “deep end” to do more complicated tasks. Experienced staffers will check his work, but in a short time, the new hire is being shown a growing level of trust by taking on more responsibility.

“This encourages everyone to be able to work with a decreasing level of oversight, which produces an increasing amount of job satisfaction,” Evers said. “We try to let people work to the limit of their capabilities, and most of them don’t have much of a limit. We have very little staff turnover.”

Helen Jayne West, APFS, a 26-year MDRT member, also runs a boutique firm where she makes professional and personal growth for her staff a priority. She discusses goal setting during employees’ annual appraisals and has helped one personal development intention become reality by paying for a staff member to become a certified financial advisor. Others have engaged in self-taught research on technological innovations like artificial intelligence. She also holds annual brainstorming and training days, where she brings in an outside trainer, and they learn new skills and discuss short-term and long-term visions for the business.

“We’ve been doing that for the last five years, and we pay for training, but last year I stepped up to run it, which worked quite well,” she said.

Compensation

Handing out bonuses as an incentive for strong performance isn’t so easy in the U.K., where strict regulations prohibit incentivizing advisors to bring in revenue based on bad advice to clients. “The culture is definitely changing here,” West said.

But she does provide extra income-earning opportunities by ramping up sales efforts for three to four months at a time, or “profit sprints.” For this period, she lays out criteria for her staff — what they need to achieve, in how many weeks — and sets the reward, which is a percentage of the revenue generated. It is not guaranteed, and bonuses are off the table if a single complaint is received.

“People’s ability to keep their foot on the gas all the time is really hard, but this is a time when we really go for it,” West said. “And if we have a complaint, then we don’t pay out the bonus because our regulator now is really hot on treating the customer fairly and not giving employees or staff targets to achieve at the peril of the client.”

She also pays bonuses for special events, such as the recent 20th anniversary of the business’s founding. “I took 10% of the payroll and dished it out according to the hours that they work,” West said.

West also celebrated the milestone by taking her entire team and their significant others to dinner in London and to see the musical Mamma Mia. “We had this amazing trip together,” she said.

Evers pays bonuses when the practice’s volume of new business for a quarter exceeds the average for the 12 previous quarters. If the growth is higher than the rolling average, 10% of the increase is paid to staff by the first paycheck during the following quarter. A second opportunity for quarterly bonuses is tied to the performance of the firm’s estate planning arm, and the extra money resulting from there is paid into the employees’ retirement account, which is not taxed. The bonus plan has been around for more than a decade and typically pays out during a couple of quarters per year with recent awards ranging from $700 to $1,500 Canadian.

The perks

While the bonus plan helps to get all oars rowing in the same direction, Evers cautions that compensation is not “the be-all and end-all” for incentivizing employees.

“If you think it is, then you’re going to have short-term employees, because as soon as somebody offers a dollar more, they’re gone,” he said.

Besides a competitive salary, two weeks paid vacation, and paying 100% of employees’ group medical and insurance package premiums, Evers offers nonmonetary perks like closing the office from Christmas to New Year’s Day with pay. For summer holidays that fall on Monday, the office is shuttered on Friday for long, four-day weekends. They also schedule quarterly “staff fun days” when everyone spends the day together away from the office on outings such as touring a winery, going to a brew pub, cooking a big meal at a food pantry, shopping at an outlet mall and touring Niagara Falls in a boat. For a recent post-holiday gathering at a fancy restaurant, everyone was picked up and returned to their homes by limousine, so no one had to worry about driving.

When employees feel empowered and teamwork is enhanced as individuals understand their coworkers’ roles, their job satisfaction spills over into servicing clients.

“When a client calls in with a problem, they can tell if the employee they’re talking to is smiling or not,” Evers said. “It’s pretty obvious to the clientele. We treat our clientele with a great deal of respect, and we try to do the same with our employees because they are as important as a client.”