Lincoln Electric's Approach to Motivate Employees

Lincoln Electric's approach to motivate employees

The company motivates employees by providing “reward” and “engagement”. Reward is evaluating the employees properly and giving reasonable salary, and are divided into three parts:

-Wages based on actual piecework
-Year end bonus linked with the profit the company achieves
-Guaranteed employment

We can see that piecework is a direct indicator of the employees output. In addition, the year end bonus is linked with the profit the company earns. The guaranteed employment provides employees the base line for their life, so they don’t have to be worried about getting fired or searching for other jobs, which makes them more concentrated on their jobs. From the combination of these three components, employees can have confidence to work and to understand that their performance will be measured properly.

Engagement is also an important part for the employees. The company provides information of the board meetings to all employees. This enhances the employees’ feelings of being well-informed and engaged. The employees even can challenge the current unit wage for manufactured parts. This is an open discussion, so we can see that employees are treated as if they were partners.

The effect of Lincoln's approach to company's performance

The company’s approach to motivate employees has been working in a positive way. The employees are satisfied with the family style community, and the productivity has increased as well. The company’s style of treating employees as important partners has been successful in other manufacturing companies too. For example, when Honda opened its first factory in the U.S., the CEO and employees shared the same cafeteria, just like Lincoln.

There have been seve...

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...the Second World War in an effort to maximize America’s mechanical output and help win the war, Lincoln gave away proprietary information to competing companies.. This cost the company competitive advantage, and in turn profits, for several years after the war, but based on their skills and adaptability, they were able to out stripe the competition soon after. We are also told that Lincoln Electric will not fire an employee, which allows the workers to embrace change and progress, even if it means they will incur a short-term downturn in productivity. Upon some further reading, we were able to see that Lincoln electric came upon hard times in the 1980s, and lost 40% of its sales. Even in this time of hardship, they stuck to their promise of not firing an employee, and today they have regained all of their lost ground and are extremely profitable and productive.