How does a post frame crew hourly bonus work?
A post frame crew hourly bonus keeps every hour paid at each man's rate, with no minimum day, then shares whatever is left of the job's figured labor budget when the crew finishes early. The surplus splits by hours times each person's multiplier, and you decide who carries an overrun. Finishing early stops costing your men money and starts paying them.
- A small crew pushes for a shared goal because nobody wants to be the one who cost the others. In field experiments, team incentives lifted output 9 to 17%, mostly through guilt and social pressure. Babcock et al., 2015 ↗
- When a capable partner free-rides, the others cut their own effort rather than be the sucker. A multiplier lets the leader who carries a weak day earn more of the surplus than his hours alone say, so the men doing the carrying aren't the ones losing out. Kerr, 1983 ↗
- An announced surplus share is a non-discretionary bonus under federal law, so it belongs in the regular rate for overtime. A man who worked overtime that week is owed overtime on the bonus too. U.S. DOL, Fact Sheet #56C ↗
A crew pay model for builders who pay by the hour but want the crew to have a stake in finishing early. A job is figured for a number of days, and its labour budget is what the planned crew would cost for those days. Everyone is paid every hour they work at their own rate. Finish inside the budget and the surplus is split by hours × each person's surplus multiplier. Run past it and the job books a shortfall — and you decide whether the crew carries it into its next surplus or the company absorbs it. A running crew balance and a company surplus ledger keep every result attributed to a crew and a job, and every man sees what finishing ahead has paid him on his own phone. Built for post-frame crews, whose jobs are figured in days before the first post goes in.
Also called: hourly plus surplus · crew bonus · finish early bonus · hourly crew pay · crew incentive pay · shortfall
Every hour paid, with no minimum day
Each person is paid every hour they log, at their own rate — set per person, or falling back to the crew's rate. There is no daily minimum and no rule about what counts as a day. The hours come off one tap in and one tap out on the crew's field links.
A day-rate threshold turns every early finish into an argument about whether it counted as a day.
A man paid for every hour he works never feels cheated by a short day. There is no six-hour line to argue about at the truck; the hours he clocked are the hours he is paid, and the surplus is on top.
A multiplier for the people who carry the job
The surplus is split by hours × each person's surplus multiplier. Leave everyone at 1.00 and it is a plain share of the hours. Give a crew leader 1.4 and his hours count for more; a new hand at 0.2 counts for a fraction while he learns. Admins, sales managers and project managers set rates and multipliers; nobody else can change them. It works the other way too: lower the multiplier of someone the crew is carrying, from filed reports and for the next job, and what he doesn't earn goes to the men who carried him. And pair speed pay with photo checkpoints, so finishing early never means skipping what gets covered up. Which reward drives which behaviour has the research.
Some leaders carry a weak crew over the line every week, and a split by hours alone pays them exactly the same as the man they carried.
The leader who carries a weak day should feel it in his pay — that is what keeps good leaders. A multiplier on the share, not the wage, rewards the result without turning every rate into a negotiation.
Run long, and somebody decides who carries it
Try itA job that runs past its figured days books a shortfall, and it waits for a decision: Who carries this shortfall? If it was the crew's, the crew carries it, and its next surplus pays it down before anyone takes a bonus. If it was yours — a late delivery, a change of plan — the company absorbs it, and the ledger records that too. Admins and project managers are alerted when a crew passes its figured days, while there is still time to do something about it.
A job that was supposed to take seven days took nine, the money went somewhere, and nobody could say whose it was.
Nobody should pay for a delay that wasn't theirs — and a crew that knows that will take the scheme seriously. Overruns are only fair to carry when somebody decides whose they were, so the decision is a step, not a default.
You hear about an overrun while the crew is still on site
The day a crew on this model passes its figured days, admins and project managers get "Crew B is past the figured days — Day 9 of 8 figured", with the job one tap away. When the finished job comes in over budget, a second alert says the shortfall and that someone has to decide who carries it. Who gets which alert is set on notifications.
You find out a job ran two days long when the payout is already being argued about.
A day over is cheap to fix while the crew is still there, and expensive once it's a fight about pay. Telling the person who can act — on the day — gives you the chance to sort the materials or the plan before the shortfall is real.
A crew balance and a company ledger
Try itEvery crew has a running balance across its jobs: surplus earned, surplus paid, shortfall carried. Above them sits the company surplus ledger — every crew's result summed, and what the company absorbed — so the business can see where its labour money came from and went. The same numbers roll up into Accounting under Crew payouts.
A bonus scheme nobody can audit is a bonus scheme that dies the first time a crew asks how the number was worked out.
A crew that can trace its number job by job believes it — and a scheme people believe survives its first argument. Balances are added up from the job results every time they are shown, never stored, so they cannot drift from the jobs underneath.
Simulate a run of jobs before you commit
Try itSimulations lets you put made-up jobs in a row — one finishes early, one runs long through the crew's fault, one runs long through yours — and watch the crew balance, the company-absorbed total, the bonuses and each person's take-home move across all of them. It runs the same arithmetic as the real payout, so what you rehearse and what you pay cannot disagree.
A pay scheme explained with one example falls apart on the second job, when the shortfall from the first one has to come from somewhere.
An owner should know exactly what he is promising before he puts a crew's pay on it. The part of this model that matters most — a carried shortfall paid down from the next surplus — only shows up across several jobs, so you rehearse the run, not one job.
Put a crew on it from the crew's own card
Try itPay is set per crew. On the crew's card, Pay model lists all seven ways to pay — hourly, cost-plus, per unit, lump sum, day rates + shared surplus, hourly + shared surplus, and a share of the labor price. Pick this one and the crew's real jobs start booking a surplus or shortfall; each person's rate and multiplier live in Pay Structure, and only admins, sales managers and project managers can change them.
Pay rules live in a spreadsheet only the owner understands, so nobody else can answer how a crew is paid.
A crew should know the deal before the job starts, and the office should be able to say it in one sentence. The model sits on the crew, and the people who set pay are the only ones who can change it.
The crew sees its own record
Try itOn the crew app the crew has its own scoreboard — stages finished early, on time or late, the days it saved and lost, its best streak, and how long each kind of stage usually takes it. Each man's own Hours door adds what finishing ahead has paid him. Nobody has to take the office's word for any of it.
A bonus the crew can't see is a rumour, not an incentive.
Workers do better when they can see their own progress — a crew that counts the days it saved starts trying to save more. The record is pride and proof in one place, and for you it is a crew that pushes to beat the figure instead of filling it.
Every man sees what an hour came to, surplus included
Try itTap highest hourly wage on his Hours door and the sheet does the sum in front of him: 142 hours at $24 = $3,408, plus his $596 share of the surplus — so the hour came to $28.20. Below it, every job and what the hour paid, best first. Only his own money, never anyone else's.
The surplus lands as a lump some weeks and not others, so to the crew it never connects to anything they did.
Seeing $24 become $28.20 because the crew finished early is the moment the scheme clicks. It makes a man feel he is earning more and getting better — because he is — and it gives him a number to beat on the next job.
- 1Switch the crew to Hourly + shared surplus on its card, then in Settings → Pay Structure → Hourly + shared surplus set each person's hourly rate and surplus multiplier — 1.00 is a plain share of the hours; a crew leader might carry 1.20.
- 2Write on the job how many days its labour was figured for. The budget is those days times what a planned day of that crew costs, plus the equipment allowance.
- 3The crew clocks in and out on their field links; every hour is paid at the person's rate, with no minimum day.
- 4When the job is done it is booked on its own: a surplus is shared out by weighted hours — each person's share goes on their next pay run, with the overtime it owes for the job's 40-plus-hour weeks — and a shortfall waits for a decision.
- 5Decide who carries a shortfall — the crew, paid down first from its next surplus, or the company, absorbed and recorded.
- 6Admins and project managers are alerted when a crew runs past its figured days and when a shortfall needs a decision.
- 7Rehearse it first in Simulations: run a series of jobs, mark whose fault each overrun was, and watch the crew balance and each person's take-home.
- 8Each man sees his own record and what the surplus has paid him on the Hours door of his crew app.
Plenty of builders pay by the hour and plenty of crews are hired on it, but straight hourly pay points the incentive the wrong way: work faster, earn less. This keeps the hourly wage — every hour paid, no six-hour minimum to argue about — and adds the part that makes finishing early worth something: the budget the job was figured for, and a share of whatever the crew leaves in it. Two things a flat split could not do. Not every hour on a crew is worth the same to the result — a leader who carries a weak day has earned more of the surplus than his hours alone say — so each person has a multiplier. And a job that runs long has to land somewhere: when the overrun was the crew's, the crew carries it into the next job; when it was yours — a late delivery, a change of plan — the company takes it, and the ledger shows which.
- Straight hourly pay giving the crew no stake in finishing inside the days figured
- A bonus split by hours alone that ignores who carried the job
- Overruns with no consequence for anyone and no record of whose they were
Seven ways to pay a crew
You do not pay every crew the same way. Each crew is set to its own model on its card, and that choice decides what its screen asks for and how its labour is costed on the job. Crews are also marked as your own employees or as subcontractors, and your own crews say whether they frame every stage or pour concrete only.
