What Makes a Great Place to Work?

Read this section to look at benefits and some factors that make a business a good place to work.

Wages and Salaries

The largest, and most important, component of a compensation package is the payment of wages or salary. If you're paid according to the number of hours you work, you're earning wages. Counter personnel at McDonald's, for instance, get wages, which are determined by multiplying an employee's hourly wage rate by the number of hours worked during the pay period. On the other hand, if you're paid for fulfilling the responsibilities of a position – regardless of the number of hours required to do it – you're earning a salary. The McDonald's manager gets a salary for overseeing the operations of the restaurant. He or she is expected to work as long as it takes to get the job done, without any adjustment in compensation.


Piecework and Commissions

Sometimes it makes more sense to pay workers according to the quantity of product that they produce or sell. Byrd's Seafood, a crab-processing plant in Crisfield, Maryland, pays workers on piecework: Workers' pay is based on the amount of crabmeat that's picked from recently cooked crabs. (A good picker can produce fifteen pounds of crabmeat an hour and earn about $100 a day.) If you're working on commission, you're probably getting paid for quantity of sales. If you were a sales representative for an insurance company, like The Hartford, you'd get a certain amount of money for each automobile or homeowner policy that you sell".