Realty workers put some skin in the game
What would you do to earn a raise? Log overtime? Train new employees? Take a class to acquire a new skill set?
For employees at New York City’s Rapid Realty, making extra money requires only a needle, ink and a skilled artist. The real estate agency began offering an extra 15 per cent commission to every agent who got a tattoo.
According to reports, Rapid Realty would even pay for the ink, but with one catch. It had to be a tattoo of the company’s logo.
According to The Associated Press, Rapid Realty CEO Anthony Lolli didn’t come up with the idea. Instead, he said, an employee decided on his own to get a logo tattoo. Lolli spread the incentive program across the entire company, and says workers are “passionate about the brand.”
Sounds extreme, but so far at least 40 employees have been inked up on Rapid Realty’s behalf, and some for reasons more fundamental than money. “It’s a good opportunity to show commitment to a company that makes going to work fun everyday,” said employee Robert Trezza in an interview with WCBS in New York.
The cash-for-tattoos program has earned extra money for Rapid Realty employees and plenty of publicity for the company, but some expressed concern about what would happen when workers decided to change jobs.
“It’s difficult enough for an employee to walk away from something they’ve been promoting and believing in for sometimes years,” said Toronto-based career-coach Catherine Thorburn in an email to the Star. “There is a mourning pro- cess . . . (but) companies aren’t interested in helping you mourn the death of the relationship, they simply want you gone. Having that company’s logo tattooed onto your body makes that all the more challenging to do.” Commenters on the company’s Facebook page were similarly underwhelmed. “Don’t do this,” one user wrote. “De-humanizing,” another posted. “I would never use this company.”
The Internet is littered with tales of regretful human billboards who thought a tattooed homage to a company or celebrity was a great idea — until it wasn’t. During last year’s U.S. presidential campaign, an Indiana resident named Eric Hartsburg used eBay to auction ad space on his face, and said he eventually accepted thousands to tattoo candidate Mitt Romney’s logo on his temple and cheekbone. But three weeks after Romney’s election loss, Hartsburg was searching publicly for someone who could remove his tattoo.