Should We Pay Employees to Show Up?

What if you could make an extra $1,000 just for showing up to work? That's actually happening in Detroit in public schools.

So Detroit Public Schools has a program that gives high school students a $100 gift card for every week of perfect attendance up to $1,000.

And now they're expanding the program to middle school students who can earn up to $50 a week.

It's an effort to combat chronic absenteeism, and it raises an interesting question for employers.

When did showing up become something that we have to pay people extra to do? Because employers are doing it too.

And in a dental practice, there's a big difference between having someone on the schedule and having someone you know you can count on.

So today we're asking, should employees get bonuses for attendance? Are we rewarding reliability or paying people extra to meet a basic expectation of their job.

Sadie has used her own attendance incentive for years involving ping pong balls, drawings, and prizes.

So we're putting the ping pong balls under the microscope today.

Sadie, let's first, we're going to talk about all of this, but I want to hear about the ping pong ball protocol and we'll go from there.

Okay.

Well, I'll tell you, I've shared this with a lot of different practices.

And if I share it openly on a forum like Dentaltown, for instance, or on a Facebook group, there's going to be dozens of people that love it.

And then there's going to be naysayers, you know, people that come, oh, we should never have to bribe our employees in this way.

But I'll tell you this real world situation.

They have 14 team members.

Out of the 14 team members, 13 would miss work or come late every day.

month.

There would be at least one or two absences by each of these people.

And it was very aggravating because you know when you're a team and you're missing some of your team, it's hard to win, right? It's almost impossible to win.

You need everyone on the team present.

And it's a real problem.

And so you can think, well, in some practices you see a lot of this, right? And it's usually because maybe the office manager misses work or it seems like it's okay.

And we'll talk about that.

But in this particular client's practice, we needed to come up with something.