Every so often a client asks us to configure an attendance bonus. Points for a month with no unplanned absence. It sounds reasonable, it is easy to measure, and operations managers love it because absence is the thing that ruins their week.
We say no, and this is the explanation we give.
The General Test
A rule is a problem if a reasonable person could describe it as a penalty for doing something they are entitled to do. Reframe the rule as its inverse and see how it reads.
| How it is pitched | What it also says |
|---|---|
| Points for perfect attendance | You lose money if you take sick leave |
| Team bonus for zero incidents | Your workmates lose money if you report one |
| Points for staying past rostered finish | Unpaid overtime, with a prize attached |
| Points for not taking a break | Skip your entitlement, get a voucher |
The right-hand column is what people hear. It is also, roughly, how it will be characterised if it ever ends up in front of someone who assesses these things for a living.
Attendance
Sick leave is a statutory entitlement. Personal and carer's leave exists because people get ill and because people care for others who are ill. Attaching a financial reward to not using it produces two outcomes, both bad: people come to work sick, and people with a chronic condition or caring responsibilities are systematically worse off.
In a food business or an aged care setting the first outcome is a direct operational risk, not just an ethical one.
An attendance bonus is a policy that pays people to infect their colleagues. That is not a rhetorical flourish, it is the mechanism.
Safety
Team incentives for a clean incident record are the same shape. The reward is not for being safe, it is for the absence of reports — and the cheapest way to produce an absence of reports is to not report.
Peer pressure does the rest. Nobody wants to be the person who cost the crew their bonus in week eleven of a twelve-week run.
The alternative is to reward the leading indicators instead of the lagging one:
- Completing a safety module or refresher
- Submitting a hazard report — yes, rewarding the report itself
- Attending a toolbox talk
- Completing a pre-start check on time
These are all things a worker controls directly, they all increase safety rather than increasing silence, and they are all easy to verify.
Output And Hours
Points attached to units produced, sales volume, or hours worked start to look like a variable component of pay. Whether that is a problem depends on the award or agreement, but the general principle is that remuneration for work performed belongs in payroll, where it is visible, superable where applicable, and counted correctly for leave and termination.
Moving a portion of it into a points system means it is none of those things. We will not configure it, and if a vendor offers to, that is worth a second thought.
What Works Instead
The rules that hold up over time have three properties: the worker controls the outcome, the outcome is genuinely good for the business, and nobody is worse off for exercising a right.
| Rule | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Peer recognition, with a reason | Controlled by the giver, costs little, high frequency |
| Covering a shift at short notice | Rewards a discretionary favour, not an obligation |
| Completing a certification | Verifiable, permanent, benefits the worker too |
| Service milestones | Automatic, universal, impossible to game |
| Hazard reports submitted | Rewards the behaviour you actually want more of |
| Referral that passes probation | Clear, dated, and genuinely valuable |
Two Practical Safeguards
Even good rules need guardrails.
- Publish eligibility before the period opens. Rules announced afterwards are read as rules invented afterwards, and the argument that follows costs more goodwill than the points were worth.
- Cap the sender, not the receiver. Limiting how much recognition one person can send stops gaming without penalising the person who genuinely gets recognised a lot.
If you want the full list of what our platform will and will not configure, it is on the eligible products page, including the exclusions we apply regardless of what a client asks for.
Have a rule in mind?
Send it to us. We will tell you plainly whether it can be configured and why.