In the past, most rewarding systems have been geared to the individual employee. However, with the emergence of teams in most of today’s organizations, systems are being revamped to reward teamwork. A good example is Behlen Manufacturing Company in Columbus, Nebraska.

The 1,100 mostly production employees are organized into 32 teams. Some of these teams have only a handful of members, whereas others have as many as 60. Although each individual receives a base-pay component, which comes to about $8 an hour, the rest of the compensation is variable and is determined in a number of different ways, including how one’s team is performing.

The centerpiece of the manufacturing company’s variable–reward plan is gain sharing, an increasingly popular form of compensation whereby all members share a usually fixed percentage of the documented saving or performance gain accomplished by the team. Behlen employees can earn monthly gain sharing of up to $1 an hour when their teams meet productivity goals. The CEO explained this team reward system as follows: “If you’re in a group that makes stock tanks, for example, from the start of the process to the end of the process, over all shifts, all month long, if the team achieves certain levels of productivity, each of its members is rewarded anywhere from 0 cents to $ 1 an hour for every hour worked in that area. ”Documentation of the gains is based on actual pounds of products, so that everyone on the team knows exactly how well their team is doing.
Another part of the company’s variable-reward system involves profit sharing. Employees receive 20 percent of the profits. In recent years this has resulted in everyone’s getting a profit-sharing bonus equivalent to three weeks’ salary. Still another part of the reward package is the employee stock ownership plan. Each employee receives company stock equal in value to 2 percent of