I mentioned this article in another editorial, but I wanted to talk a bit more about employee recognition and compensation. The article talks about other ways to compensate employees besides money and I agree with the idea. It doesn't give any solutions, however, and while I'm not sure I have any, I do know one thing.
You have to treat everyone differently under the same rules.
It's how I managed people and it's how I think my kids need to be treated. Fair doesn't mean equal, and I think that companies need to find ways to be fair to all their employees. But they need to be able to adapt and meet the different needs of different employees in order to have the best relationship with each of them.
With today's HR rules and issues, I'm not exactly sure what this means. It's hard to actually treat people differently, even if it makes sense. I expect that a lot of the differences depend on how flexible your employees are and whether or not they'd complain.
In the past, I've had people telecommute regularly because of issues at home, like an ill relative, while others had to come into the office on a regular basis. However I'd like to see this extended to other benefits as well. It seems that many employers offer employees the option of buying more vacation or selling some vacation back (which essentially changes your salary), but consider other options. How interesting would it be for someone to get a lower salary and only work 4 days (32 hours) a week? Or forgo bonuses for the guarantee $xxx a year to spend on equipment for your office?
The idea of mixing and matching salary and benefits to build a plan for each employee is an interesting one. I think it can definitely help with retention, especially if it appears that you are tailoring each type of reward to that person. Since every benefit, reward, or change in salary can all be equated to money, I'd think this shouldn't be too hard to justify. The hardest part is probably building some system to distribute these capabilities out to managers so they can implement them.
However you might try to build an effective compensation plan for individuals, one thing that you want to keep in mind is that you want to be sure you are building an environment that people enjoy. Find a way to get anonymous feedback, get suggestions, and work to build the type of office where people enjoy spending their 40+ hours a week AND can get work done.
Steve Jones
By the way, if you check the list of top 30 average salaries that top six figures, you'll notice that 3 of them have data in them.
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