While, I was organizing a software training workshop for a major Electric Power Distribution Corporation in New Delhi, I asked Vikram Singh, one of the participating Senior Managers, who has a team size of 150 employees for performance review, “What is the bigger problem when conducting employee appraisals: managing appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?“.
Sometimes back I wrote a post ‘What’s in the name? SuccessFactors for HR‘ where I mentioned the special skill of an HR manager who knows every employee by name. While I was reviewing a new feature in the software EmpXtrack, called Employee Hierarchy (similar to an Organization Chart), I recollected a motivating incident.
During one of my conversation with a CEO of a start-up company the discussion turned towards Compensation Planning to motivate employees, especially the talented ones. It was agreed that the most talented ones need a continuous motivation to maintain their momentum. During the discussion, the CEO narrated one of his bad experiences about one of his talented employees, whom he admired, wanted to reward, motivate and compensate appropriately.
Tom worked with John, the CEO of the company, and was a very talented employee who worked diligently. John being happy with the Tom’s work, rewarded him with a cash prize of $ 1000 (which was a significant amount ), in anticipation that Tom will be motivated to perform better. He also had lots of plans for Tom in the back of his mind. Both Tom and John seemed happy and thought that they did a good job.
Contrary to John’s belief Tom submitted his resignation within a much shorter span. During his exit interview, Tom did not state any specific reason for his resignation too (although, it was found later that he left for a better compensation package). His resignation came as a shock to John, who was genuinely interested in retaining good employees and did all what he could do to ensure it.
‘Where was the mistake?’, questioned the CEO to himself and to me too.
As I did not know much about the employee, it was inappropriate for me to come to any conclusion. But the question always remained behind the back of my mind. I always believed that it had something to do with appropriate compensation planning and rewards.
Here is a relevant a research paper by Rick Garlick, Ph.D., Director of Consulting and Strategic Implementation, Maritz Research titled ‘Individual Differences in Reward Practices‘.
The objective of this research was to find out what motivates different employees and to define some general categories of employees with specific reward or compensation aspirations. Here is an abstract of the research.
While everyone understands intuitively that we are not all motivated equally by the same rewards, you might not know it by the way many companies manage their incentive programs. Many times, human resource managers assume that what is rewarding to them will be rewarding to others as well, which may be a false presumption.
As Maritz Inc. was interested in understanding how the workforce is segmented on its reward preferences, it conducted an online Maritz® Poll of 1,003 North Americans. An analysis of participants’ recognition preferences identified six distinct reward profiles, along with some of the more common characteristics of people that were most likely to fall within each ‘reward’ segment.
Reward Profiles
Awards Seekers (22% of the general population, rounded to the nearest whole number): Awards Seekers want incentives that have both monetary and trophy value. These individuals are highly motivated by gift cards and travel awards. Awards Seekers also place higher value than most others on status awards. They are far less motivated by things that might take time away from their normal routines such as the opportunity to mentor other employees, the opportunity to work with people outside their own area, or the opportunity to take on particularly challenging new projects.
Difficult economic times call for tough calls, and, downsizing is one of the toughest calls that leadership and HR have to take. Though downsizing is the most hated task and nobody wants to do it; it is a necessary evil for saving a company from an economic collapse.
With little efforts organizations can minimize the effect of downsizing on economy and employees to a some extent. Here are 10 tips that one can consider while downsizing:
Every body talks about the best HR practices, it is good, but merely bringing in the best cannot give the desired results if some Bad HR practices co-exist in the organization. So what are those Top Ten Bad HR practices which caution & alert an organization.
1. Employee has no access to [...]
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The world economics went through a big turmoil during the third/fourth week of September 2008. The news of debacle of major financial giants like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Merrill Lynch scared event the most patient investor across the world.
In the middle of the same turmoil (whether somebody noticed or not) TT Ram Mohan, Editor , [...]
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I posted one of the Talent Junction blog posts to CiteHR.com titled “How HR Manager can improve Performance“. It was very well received by the HR community (Read by 2,879 HR professionals and 54 posted thank you comments and still continuing.) One of the HR professionals on reading this post sent a very [...]
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I was invited to a attend a seminar conducted by a local chapter of a management group. The conference was titled “Budgeting for Growth” where experts and industry leaders were invited to share their views on optimizing budgets for Marketing, Infrastructure, Information Technology and HR. Since my interest is in the area of HR, the [...]
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Thomas, Karl, Steve, Martha, Matthew, Bill and so many others in the organization complained of work pressure, unachievable targets, peer pressure, time management and loss of work life balance. Despite working hard, their performance was going down and impacting organization’s bottom line.
Who is to blame for poor performance of employees and business? Ask line [...]
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After spending a lot of time working on HR technology, I have just tried to collaborate some of the technology knowledge that any HR Manager should know.
1. The Era of Excel is over, its no more the most Powerful tool.
There was a time when Excel Geeks were highly in demand. Everybody will approach them [...]
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