As an Agile company, we sought an alternative to traditional methods of awarding the company’s bonuses. Big Up!, infact, is based on real merit rather than on the imagined quality of a work performance. We’ve been looking for a method that encourages collaboration, creativity, motivation, and gambling without fear of mistakes, which would also involv all employees and collaborators
We have found these features in Merit Money, a project that we have reinterpreted and made our own.

WHAT IS MERIT MONEY?

Merit Money is a new methodology for allocating bonuses within the company, which wants to solve some of the problems that have arisen over time in the old Bonus Assignment System.

The principle behind Merit Money is that of merit. Every employee, in addition to receiving a standard wage, will get right extra based, precisely, on merit. However, the bonuses will be unpredictable and unexpected, because the most important index to evaluate performance will be the colleagues’ feedback.

To implement this new system of self-assessment among colleagues there are several phases:

  1. You need to create an environment where you can fail, because you learn by your mistakes.
  2. You must create a virtual currency (token) without a real monetary value until the manager decides which value to assign it and when it is possible to collect the bonus.
  3. Choose the unit that can benefit from the token, that is, the single employee, entire teams, or other.
  4. Determine the number of available tokens and the maximum time frame for delivery.
  5. Only the others’ merit can be recognized, so the tokens must be delivered to the colleagues, and not to yourself.

The most important concept of Merit Money is that there is no clear definition of merit or performance, this is at the discretion of the individual, who decides how to interpret the project and how to say “Thank you” to colleagues.