In my last article I discussed the concept where employees have asked for some sort of incentive or reward for their participation in the generation of new ideas that would help the company. It was my view that incentives and rewards should be based on the value that is produced and results generated by the implementation of an idea (revenue, earnings, etc.), not the subjective value of the idea itself. It did get me thinking though….
What has occurred in business that has caused this sort of request to even be made?
Do we need to put incentives, or better put, more incentives in place to encourage each specific or incremental request or behavior? Have we reached a point where we all believe that our salary or wage is an entitlement?
This is tricky ground. I believe that there are numerous issues that have and do contribute to this evolving situation. Knowledge worker allegiance has shifted from the company to themselves. There are many reasons for this but I believe its roots are in the market boom of the 1990’s when employees changed companies with almost great regularity in order to receive ever higher compensation. They focused on their own best interest.
Company allegiance to it employees has been changed under the combined pressures of cost reduction (including both true staff reduction and the drive to outsource functions to low cost labor locations), the demands of stockholders for improved stock value, and the prolonged downturn in the general economic conditions. The company too is focusing (maybe more so now than in the past) on its own best interest.
It seems that what was a somewhat mutually supportive relationship between the company and its employees may have become somewhat more mutually adversarial. That could explain why companies only want to pay for what they quantifiably get, and employees only want to do what they are quantifiably paid to do. This could explain the employee requests for incremental incentives for every company incremental work/output request. I am not entirely sure, and I will think about it some more.
Thanks for another stimulating current events topic, today as Goldman’s Blankfein is being grilled on TV. Some of the dilemma you discuss seems to be since measurable metrics are the guideline for performance reviews, while Good Ideas are vague and require subjective weighting. Then you have things like when Delta’s Richard Anderson hit his targets that “entitled” him to the $8.2M bonus he banked last year despite Delta’s $1.5B losses. Not that he didn’t deserve it since most say he stopped the bleeding, but when you dissect those evolving, dissolving relationships that employees used to have with businesses (back, of course, also when dinosaurs, pensions, and a sense of family existed), worker attitudes do start getting reshaped as the edges of logic become harder to process. But I’d rather shift away from that Union mentality where workers only do what they’re paid to do, and look into our field, Marketing, where this Scientific Method is harder to apply. I can measure Hits, and Calls, and Leads but how do you measure the guy who’s ideas are something extraordinary? I always study the best people I work with, hoping to end up with similar results, but ironically, even tho I can observe where and how they do things differently from others, it’s still hard to pin down anything real-time. So, how do you create measurements that are real (versus indirect ones like revenues would be to marketing)? Let me stop a minute, and go back to your original subject – maybe it’s just that Adversarial relationships require and honor hard set rules (like when we let China into the WTO), while Supportive ones encourage more flexibility (like in Greece and Spain’s new evolving relationship in the Euro Union). Can it be that simple? Is it just that you do more for people and organizations you know well, and in today’s world, we all reboot every 3 to 5 years so we get less patient?