Business bonus models

[Jon Berntsen]

Hi! Are you utilizing a bonus model for your employees, what kind of model, how much does it pay out, and how are the perform results before/after taking it to use?

[Jon Berntsen]

Might be because people are off work due to Easter, but nobody utilizing bonus systems?

[Scott Schroeder]

It depends. Where I work it is more studio based, then individual based. So corporate looks at all of the numbers for each studio, then determines if they can give a bonus or not. Then it is at the partner level to determine what amount of the bonus an individual gets. Typically everyone gets the same amount to make it easy and to not make it seem as if they play favorites. At least that is how it works in our studio, other studio's in the big system may do it differently. The big numbers are profitability naturally, because if you aren't profitable then you don't have extra money. This is a good and bad system. It's good because it makes the employees hold the studio accountable for not wasting money because we all like bonuses (but hate the tax rate on them). It's bad because if you have one project that doesn't want to play along, wants to do work for free, then it can drag down your overall numbers. Then everyone feels like they get punished for just one project being poorly managed.

 

Before we were merged within the bigger corporate architecture system, bonuses were given out based on the partners feedback. If you kicked ass and there was extra money to give out, you got a decent bonus.

 

We do not do any sort of per project bonus as that would get complicated.

 

In my perfect world, bonuses would be paid out as cash or something not on the books even though that's highly illegal as a company to do that. Here in Colorado, we typically get a ~40% tax rate (state + fed taxes) on our bonus. You get this nice bonus, then see what taxes are taken out, and you feel kind of ripped off. I'd rather get that bonus as a pay bump because the taxes over the course of a full play cycle would probably be less.