The best way to motivate people to work better, more efficient and more profitable is making their salaries, the thing they work for; depend on the results of their work. That’s a no brainer.

Place it works the best obviously is where the employee actually feels they can do something to earn a better pay. For an example you cannot use such a scheme with support staff in the office – they have no contact with the customer, the customer doesn’t see the fruits of their work, i.e. if it’s an accountant we talk about. 

However, if it’s a customer representative, someone who puts the goods out in the store or the cashier, I would suggest their work is affecting the customers purchases and whether he or she comes back. Since it’s affecting purchases, it’s as a result affecting the results or performance of the company and as such, it would only make sense to improve them by making employees motivated to do so.

One thing to note here is that not the whole salary but just part of it should be affected by results only to ensure the person does get something at least, a base. Normally this per cent is around 25% to 50% of the total maximum salary that’s paid in addition to the base depending on the results.