How Braintrust Toys Can Link Their Compensation and Evaluations to the Company’s New Objectives and Innovation Strategy

Explain how Braintrust can link their compensation and evaluations to the company’s new objectives and innovation strategy. There are various factors that motivate employees to work effectively within an organization. Some of these factors include a conducive working environment, the company’s tolerance for diversity, and the nature of compensations. Of these motivating factors, attractive remuneration is probably the biggest motivator for the employees. Essentially, an employee will opt work in an organization with not so attractive working conditions but offers good compensation than work in an organization with favorable working conditions but offers poor compensation (Open.lib.umn.edu, 2018). Moreover, it is important to note that employees tend to seek other employment opportunities if their current compensation does not match the amount of work they put in. It is for these reason among others that company ought to link employee compensations and evaluation with the key company objectives. One of the ways that the company can consider for linking company objectives to compensation and evaluations is by taking the existing employees through training and development. By so doing, the employees will be well equipped to handle technological equipment set to be used pursuant to the new objectives.

The new company objectives are expected to be more demanding considering that besides requiring the employees to develop their skills to work with new technologies such as robotics, they will need to improve existing products. Moreover, the company intends to launch 15 new products to satisfy new markets. As such another way through which the company can link compensation and evaluations to the objectives is by compensating the employees based on their level of innovativeness as opposed to longevity in the company. Additionally, employees who make major contributions should be considered for promotions as well. This will not only motivate other employees to be more innovative but will make them feel valued.

What methods of performance evaluation might they use? Why? One of the performance evaluation approaches that may be used by Braintrust Toys is the 360-degree feedback (Open.lib.umn.edu, 2018). While this approach does require the employee and their manager to complete a work performance assessment form, it also involves drawing feedback from the employee’s peers and indirect supervisors. The rationale behind using this approach is that innovation is about being resourceful and being able to link different items from different departments to create an exceptional product. Another performance evaluation method that Braintrust could consider is management by objectives (MBO) (Open.lib.umn.edu, 2018). Notably, two of Braintrust’s new overall objectives are improving the attributes of existing products and launching at least 15 new products. Through the MBO approach, the company can assign a specific role to each of the employees focused on enabling the improvement of existing products of designing the new products. Depending on how efficiency in terms of timely submission of findings and the quality of findings, the company would be able to evaluate the performance of the employees. Finally, the company can also make use of the rating scale. Through this method, employee performance is measured against set criteria. The criteria may include traits, level of competence, and number of completed projects. Each criterion is assigned a numerical value and the ridge between exemplary performance and poor performance is clearly defined. To some extent, this method could drive the employees to be proactive as opposed to being reactive.

References

Open.lib.umn.edu, O. (2018). 11.2 Appraisal Methods | Human Resource Management. Open.lib.umn.edu. Retrieved 21 March 2018, from http://open.lib.umn.edu/humanresourcemanagement/chapter/11-2-appraisal-methods/