Bonus models for installers: what we've seen work
People in our industry rarely talk openly about bonus models. Technicians don't like to discuss what they earn. Companies that have found a model that works keep it to themselves, and we understand why. A model that took years to tune is a real advantage, and it touches people's pay, which is personal.
Still, we think the topic deserves a more open conversation. Before we started Jarvis, we worked in the infrastructure industry for years and built incentive models for installation teams ourselves. We saw how much a good model changes a team, and how quickly a bad one costs trust. Since then we have worked on the same question with our customers. This post shares what we have learned.
Pay transparency is coming either way
The deadline for EU Member States to transpose the Pay Transparency Directive into national law was 7 June 2026. That deadline has passed. The date when particular rules apply depends on each country’s legislation, so check the requirements and timing where your teams work.
The directive matters for bonus models because its definition of pay includes variable components such as bonuses. Employers will have to make the criteria they use for pay and pay progression accessible to their workers, and those criteria have to be objective and gender-neutral. Workers will also be able to request their individual pay level and average pay levels, broken down by sex, for categories of workers doing the same work or work of equal value. Member states may exempt employers with fewer than 50 workers from the part on pay progression.
In practice, a bonus model that lives in one manager's head, or in a spreadsheet nobody else understands, will be hard to defend. A model with clear rules that everyone can see is not. Transparency is no threat to a good model. It only exposes a bad one.
This is not legal advice. Check the applicable law in your country, or ask an employment lawyer. Any link between bonuses and customer payments must also comply with local employment law and agreed pay terms.
No bonus model is also a decision
Some companies avoid bonus models to keep things simple. That simplicity has a price, and it shows up in two places.
The first is productivity. When extra effort earns nothing extra, most people settle at a pace that is good enough. A good model gives every technician a reason to plan the day well and to solve a problem on site instead of booking a second visit. What we have seen is that a well-built bonus model pays for itself. The extra units and the revisits that never happen add more to the margin than the bonuses cost.
The second is hiring. The best technicians take responsibility for their own efficiency and want a share of the result when the project goes well. A flat hourly wage tells them that none of this counts. Sooner or later many of them move to a company that pays for performance, or they go self-employed.
So a good bonus model is not a cost to keep low. It improves the margin, and it keeps the people you most want to keep.
Four principles of a good bonus model
1. Shared economic success
A bonus is a share of extra profit. If a project runs with low efficiency and thin margins, there is no extra profit to share, and the model should reflect that. Fund the bonus from the project's result, not from a fixed promise made before the first unit is installed.
This works both ways. When the team pushes efficiency up, the pool grows and everyone should feel it. When the project struggles, a smaller bonus is not a punishment. It is honest. Technicians accept this far more easily when they can see the numbers behind it (more on that in principle 3).
A common way to build this is a baseline per technician or per team, set at the number of units a day that covers the cost, and a rate for every accepted unit above it. Units that need rework or a revisit only count once they are done right. That keeps quality inside the model instead of next to it.
2. Fairness
This is the hardest part, because the real world is messy. A technician in a dense city district may reach the next site in five minutes. A colleague in the countryside drives half an hour between addresses. An old building with a locked cellar is outside the technician's control, and so is a resident who isn't home. Yet these things decide how many units a day is realistic.
A model that ignores this rewards the luckiest area, not the best work. Here is what we have seen work:
- Goals per area. Base them on travel time and building type, rather than one number for the whole project.
- Weighted units. A meter swap in a hard-to-reach cellar counts for more than one in a modern meter room.
- Credit for wasted trips. If the technician arrived on time and the resident wasn't home, the technician did their part.
- Rotation. Difficult areas are shared, so the same people don't always get them.
Fair rules are also what pay transparency asks for: criteria you can explain, applied the same way to everyone who does the same work.
3. Visibility and progress
A bonus that only shows up on the payslip at the end of the month does little for motivation. By then nobody remembers which days made the difference.
Technicians should see every day how many units they have delivered against their goal, and what that means for their pay. Project managers should see the same for their teams and the whole project. When people see the link between their own day and the result, the model starts to work as intended. A technician can see that a well-planned day without revisits moves them further than a rushed one. And nobody has to ask the office how their bonus was calculated, which removes the guesswork that breeds mistrust.
This needs a system that records each unit when it is done. Paper reports collected at the end of the week, or a spreadsheet updated once a month, can't provide it. Software built for field work, such as Jarvis, can.
4. Payouts that follow customer payments
Installation companies are not banks. A large rollout can run for months before the customer pays for the delivered units, and few companies can prefinance bonuses for that long. So tie the payout to what the customer has accepted and paid. Shared economic success means sharing the timing as well.
Be clear about this from the first day. If technicians know that the bonus for a unit is paid with the payroll after the customer pays for it, a delay is expected rather than a broken promise. A clear record of which units the customer has accepted, and which it has paid, makes this easy for everyone to follow.
How Jarvis supports bonus models
Jarvis is the system installation companies use to run their projects, so the data a bonus model needs is already in it. Jarvis assigns and plans the work per technician and per team. Every unit is recorded when the technician reports it on site, with the installation photos checked by AI.
Technicians follow their progress against their goals in the Jarvis app every day. Project managers see planned achievement next to the units actually delivered. Every unit has a full audit trail through to invoice-ready data, so it is clear which units can be paid out.
If you are setting up a bonus model, or reworking the one you have, we are happy to share what we have seen work and what we would leave out. Book a 15-minute walkthrough.
Sources
- Directive (EU) 2023/970: definition of pay (Article 3), accessible pay criteria and the limited pay-progression exemption (Article 6), information rights (Article 7), and transposition deadline (Article 34).
- National transposition measures on EUR-Lex: notified national measures. Application dates and obligations must be checked against the relevant national law.
By Valter Pasanen, Founder, Grid Jarvis. Published 2026-08-09.