Performance Pay at Safelite Essay

Safelite was the largest nation-wide auto glass company in the United States with about 500 stores, more than 3000 employees and 3000 trucks. The company has started mobile services and gained 12% of market share. Although Safelite offered mobile service from virtually all of its stores by the early 1990s, the main focus of the company was to serve the customers at their place and the trend of the stores was decreasing so forth. The incentive was $1000 to open a new store as bonus. So every employee tried to open a new store rather working hard and improving the production. The employees of the Safelite were required to work for eight hours and according to the CEO John Barlow, they were only putting in windshields for two and a half hours. They were not putting their complete efforts and loyalty to the company. Wasting their times and not working for what they were paid. The other reason of the low productivity was the popularity of mobile service, which decreased the demand of the store-based services, and the customer’s trend was changing to mobile service rather than store services. The other reasons includes the customer was not at the location where the mobile truck was called when the technician arrived or the technician was given the bad directions of the technician failed to understand the direction given by the customers. The employees didn’t put their complete efforts to the work and they were not working hard. Another reason was the problem understanding of the customers. Many of the technicians were not able to understand the complete problem of the customers. They came to know the problem when they reached the customers place. Sometimes the technicians were not carrying their appropriate tools, which were needed in the repairing for the customers. The mobile truck was liable to travel to the location where customer calls them. The reason of that was stores were not easy to find. It was because the stores were not well located; they were simply opened for the sake of adding more locations and were not always located in the prime service areas. John Barlow also added that if the location is not well located so why a customer bothers to find and go to the store. The fleet of the trucks became unable to justify its own cost. The company was seeing one repair job per truck per day to be maintained but they thought that this is a little expense. Individual technicians were installing an averag e of only 2.5 glass unit a day. It was the very bad performance than that of they had expected. Since the installation of a single windshield generally took less than an hour to complete. And lastly, some DCC managers didn’t cared to hustle and assigned jobs equitable rather than funneling more jobs to those technicians who worked the fastest.