Lesson 3: It is important in any business to construct a compensation plan that properly motivates employees to be productive.
Case in point: Staking a tomato field
Unless your idea of planting tomatoes for your garden is buying two Topsy Turveys and hanging them on your porch, its pretty much guaranteed that you will need to stake your tomato plants so that they will not fall over onto the ground and rot. There are several ways to do this: Many people use a cage contraption that surrounds the plant and gives it support as the branches grow through the sides of the cage. Old school support was provided by staking a plant with a 4 foot wooden stake and then using some material to tie up the plant along the stake. You can tie off with any variety of materials, my grandfather even used old panty hose for this task, though few people these days have enough old panty hose sitting around the house. More commonly, folks have used a thin twine for the job….a little lighter weight than the twine of a hay bale, but not quite as narrow as a common cotton string. The traditional method for staking a plant involves driving the stake into the ground about 6-8 inches from the base of the stalk, then cutting short pieces of the twine and tying the base and the larger branches to the stake, working your way along the height of the plant.
The first year that we planted a field of tomatoes we hired a family of migrant workers to stake our field. My father agreed to pay each of the family members a little over minimum wage to stake each plant (which as you know from my earlier post is a lot of staking, cutting and tying). At lunch time of the first day, the progress was not impressive. My Dad estimated that it would cost a small fortune to have the field staked at the current pace, and wondered if the people who had recommended this family for the job might have been insane. Dad resolved to come to terms with the family for staking the entire field. This price should include each plant being properly staked, and would not be based on the amount of time taken to finish the job, as long as the job passed inspection at the end. In this way, my dad could be insured a fixed price that was predictable, and the family would be motivated to pick up the pace.
To my father’s surprise, the family happily agreed to the terms. When they returned from their lunch, it was clear that this was not the first time such a negotiation had taken place. First, their “gear” looked strangely different than the morning gear:
- Twine: it was no longer in a small spool, but was in a large box strapped like a bowie knife to one of the teenage boys’ belts. Also, the twine exited the large box and was now threaded through the end of a broom stick like a home made make shift giant needle
- Stakes: No longer on a cart, they were now in a cotton-picking-looking long burlapish bag, low to the ground and attached to the shoulder of a young boy that looked barely able to drag the large bag along the ground.
- Hammer: transformed from a small, slightly larger than a common hammer, sledge hammer, into a giant 20lb sledgehammer that was wielded by a muscular Gladiator looking dude that swung it as though it were a two handed broad sword in battle.
The technique was oddly simple and almost rhythmic in routine. The small boy with the bag of stakes would scurry along the ground and every other plant would pull a stake from the bag and hold vertically without even looking up. The Gladiator would crush the stake into the ground with 1 to 1 1/2 swings and move on to the next stake. When one row was complete, the young man with twine attached to his belt and oversized needle in hand would run, literally run up the row, weaving the twine from one side of the plant to the other completing a full wrap on each stake and surrounding the outside of the tomato plant with twine on the lower portion, and then at the end of the row would tie off the end stake and repeat the routine higher up the plant until there were three pieces of supporting twine on each side of the plant. In this way, the plant had been staked with external support much like the cages we use in our gardens, but with speed and accuracy which almost had to be experienced to fully appreciate.
So, in essence, this family had the skills of experts, but because we were not properly compensating them, had not unleashed the proper motivation for them to use their skills. By the end of the day, the field was finished, and from then on, we paid by the field to stake our tomatoes.