Most owners we talk to during consultations and when building marketing departments put salary at the center of motivation. The assumption is simple: pay is the only thing that decides whether a person performs or not. In the US, motivation is built on different principles, and those principles let companies get more output and more revenue per team member.
Why the US model works
The US approach rests on a focus on personal success and a high standard of living and earnings. That orientation is what makes the model productive: it is designed to unlock each person's potential rather than to control them.
Three practices do most of the work: profit sharing, project or hourly employment, and care for employees. Below is how each one works and what it means for a marketing team.
Profit sharing programs
The first tool is profit sharing. It is rarely used in Russia and the CIS, which is a missed opportunity.
The idea: the company motivates people not only through salary, vacation pay and sick leave. On top of that, it sets aside a pool of options every year or every quarter and distributes them among the most effective and loyal employees.
This changes how a person sees their role. Instead of feeling like a resource that will be milked and then replaced, the employee becomes a co-owner. People start to perceive themselves as owners of the business, and that usually shows up in engagement: more ideas generated, more of them implemented, and a visible effect on revenue.
A person who used to close 10 tasks a day starts closing 13 to 15. Overall profitability and company value grow. This matters even more now, when building your own business and freelancing are increasingly popular: people lose interest in growing an employer that simply pays them a salary and shift their focus to their own projects. Holding even a small stake in the business motivates them to put in more effort, because the result of their work comes back to them.
You might say this is an Elon Musk or Tesla story. It is not. Hundreds of thousands of US companies run a similar model and keep improving their numbers, because their employees care about the success of the business just as shareholders do.
Project and hourly employment
The second tool is project or hourly employment. Hourly work is arguably one of the defining features of the US market.
The company pays only for the hours a person spent on a task, not a minute more. When building the product line and the financial model, the business calculates how many internal hours are needed and sets the amount it allocates to pay people. Most US companies have no fixed cost in the form of a base salary. There are only variable costs: project or hourly pay. Minimum pay levels also vary by state.
This model is more efficient. Minimizing fixed costs through project work is a direct route to higher business efficiency and better margins.
When you stop paying base salaries and move people to project work, you take a permanent payroll burden off the company. There is work and there are orders: you pay project rates and operate. No orders: no payroll costs. That is logical. Why should a company pay people at a time when the number of clients is falling?
Retention and turnover
You could argue that this is how you keep qualified people in their seats, because if you do not pay them, they will leave quickly.
But recent practice shows turnover rising year after year. No one can guarantee that a person you invested in for several years will not move to a competitor who offers more, or start their own company and become your direct competitor.
Applying it to your own company
This is why it is time to rethink motivation and pay. We apply this model with clients when building remote marketing departments, and it runs inside our own company: everyone works on a project basis and is brought in for the tasks that exist.
This structure handles crises well, and crises keep coming. With almost no fixed costs, it is far easier to adapt to turbulence than for a company with a bloated headcount sitting on base salaries.
Care for employees
The third tool is the mix of financial and non-financial motivation that is popular in the US.
In the US, motivation is built largely around the person. Most employees have families, children and household tasks. To raise their effectiveness, the company takes on part of that load: it finds nannies and other household helpers, organizes on-site nurseries and kindergartens, runs family events and more.
This solves two problems at once. First, it gives people a strong reason to work here, at a company that covers part of their life's problems at its own expense. Second, it raises output: people no longer handle household tasks during working hours and have the energy for their actual job. Everyone wins: the company gets higher efficiency and more profit, and the employee sheds part of their life admin.
Financial motivation also includes piecework and hourly pay. US companies go further and offer bonus programs that let people earn more when the company earns more.
Pay for results
US companies almost never pay a bare salary. They tie pay to results, which raises operational efficiency and overall profitability.
Takeaways
The US motivation system rests on profit sharing, project employment and care for employees. These practices raise business efficiency and make crises easier to survive. It is time to rethink motivation in your own company too.
