Reddit reviews The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

We built our own inventory management system to help us track productivity.

• We track productivity by the team since we want them to function as a team. We have 12-15 on the inventory team which includes warehouse staff and inventory receivers. We just take the total number items sent to Amazon for the week (since we're almost 100% FBA) and divide by the number hours worked on that team.
  
  • You can do this without fancy software since you can get a count of how many items are shipped to Amazon from shipping plan and time tracking software will tell you hours.
    
• As far as motivation, this year we've started doing a book study with our team leaders on The 4 Disciplines of Execution and started implementing it and we have seen huge gains (like 30-50%) in productivity. It has also allowed our team to focus and our staff making the productivity steps much more efficient. It was one of the best things we've done as a company since I've started as an entrepreneur in 2005. I can't recommend it highly enough.
  
• As far as money, I have found that money is not a good long term motivator. It does motivate for a short time, but it's like drugs, you need more and more of it overtime to get the same effect. Instead of having goals and tracking productivity has really helped us much more.
  
  • We have found that you do need to be competitive with your pay in order to attract the candidates with the right skills, but doubling their pay is not going to get double their work as far as warehouse staff.
    
  • We do give out $30 gift cards when the team accomplishes their goals for the quarter.
    
  • We do also have have a team cash bonus for reaching growth goals, but nothing major, just a couple of hundred dollars for the year if we grow.
    
  • We also use the book Traction to create a 2 page strategic plan that details what our core values are and who fits those.
    
    • This has also allowed our team to know what the company focus is and what is expected of them.
      
    • This has allowed us to hire slow and fire fast to find the right people faster.