Because of my experience with bonuses I have an intense suspicion of them and management motives in paying them.
So take this with a pinch of salt, but I've seen it, done it and felt it.
Management see bonus as a cost, and a huge one (it adds up over a year for every employee)
What do management do with costs ?
The employee sees it either as a large percentage of his salary that his individual performance has no bearing on and that management can manipulate at will , or an amount so pathetic he just can't be bothered to do anything for it.
In the former case he will end up working harder just to make up his salary (remember management reduce costs), strangely enough employees resent this sort of thing, in the latter it's completely counter productive, performance will go down.
I used to be in manufacturing, and bonus was based on production targets, which I did have a direct impact on, because if the computers stopped so did the process. I did get money, almost 15% of my salary was bonus. However before you get jealous, my salary was very very low, the bonus simply made it up to market. However if there were production losses for anything everybody took a hit. Performance related pay in a nutshell.
The trend you have to watch out for is more and more of your take home becoming bonus related.
It has always been my experience that management want to pay you less when you underperform not more when you exceed expectations, they generally consider that an unwanted side effect.
It soon occurs to management that they can reduce costs by manipulating the bonus or the factors that give rise to it.
How about a mandatory reboot test so your up time is never 100%. ?
Counter-productive
1) Trigger points. For instance lets say you get amount x for every % of up time over 80%. On Monday, total disaster, hdd failure, can't make your bonus, rest of the week , no one gives one.
2) Low money. Asking an employee to work his butt off for one cent an hour. Explanation unneeded.
Divisive
1) Come up with a scheme where employee A gets more than employee B, because they 'performed' better. Employee B will not agree. Finger pointing, low morale, the lot.
2) Everybody gets an equal share of the bonus. Employee A believes they contributed more than lazy incompetent employee B. Employee A not happy low morale, bad attitude, the lot.
I was once on a profit bonus . This was not too bad an idea, in that the performance indicator was less likely to be manipulated (well in the UK), the goal is so remote from the guy on the shop floor that divisiveness nevers sets in, it was payed annually, most just before Xmas, the remainder after the last months calculations were finalized in January and was about 13% of my salary. Very nice, so nice in fact management cancelled it and replaced it with something that did not reduce their final profit. Watching what they thought they had made drop by 300k set their teeth on edge.
Unless you get a radical re-think including a re-assessment of how the other benificiaries get bonused, you are going to watch departmental performance go down.
Even more salt.
The scheme you've outlined with it's enormous disparity in both value and conditions I hesitate to call moronic, because I've met morons who've come up with better ideas. The company would have been better off leaving you out of it completely, now they are euchered because they will be taking something away from you even if it was totally crap.
If I was you I'd buy training software for the most marketable skills you can find and any other job finding aids, then try and leave the company en-masse, because you are working for halfwits who shouldn't be allowed to to run a toy shop, and I don't mean a shop that sells toys.
P.S. If any of your bosses is known to clean his gun collection with obsessive regularity please paraphrase on presenting this.
P.P.S
I have been there and got the tee-shirt. It was a cheap white thing with the company logo on it. Shrunk and went out of shape the first time I cleaned the car with it.
Do yourself a favour get right out of there.
