I’ve been itching to write about a human resources issue for some time. It is a secret passion of mine. You see I happen to know that 100% of the value professionals enjoy comes from a combination of great customer and employee satisfaction. If you’ve not got that, you’ve got wage slaves who piss of the client because they’re pissed off, which means no-one is happy as your income falls. Easy innit? Now I’ve got the excuse.
In commenting on one of my previous posts, David Terrar introduces an interesting story about a CEO, half of whose total compensation is derived from externally audited customer and employee satisfaction surveys. How cool is that? One of our joint correspondents, Charles H. Green provides excellent commentary:
Any time you reward people for profit, you introduce the opportunity for manipulation of the levers to achieve that profit. Of course, that’s largely the point, but it almost inevitably becomes susceptible to abuse. Witness the gazillion scandals.
So now we have a method of seeing accountability in action, tied to reward. This is not about setting performance targets as a whole. This is about management putting its actions where its mouth is. Instead of mouthing platitudes, they risk real reward. In other words, they give a real voice to those who have to do the work. I’m betting such a system would give rise to:
- Improved profit because everyone is dependent on everyone else in a very real way.
- Employee relations quality would sky rocket.
- Innovation would be rife because of 1.
- No cap on potential to achieve – people would consider that improvement is no longer a race or a war but a matter of mutual benefit.
- This need not be an angst driven policy. Encouraging internal blogs would be an excellent way of starting the process. If you’re going to do the ‘dark blog‘ thing suggested by Stowe Boyd, there are lots of ways to overcome the natural fear of change.
- Serious issues around ethics would start to evaporate. You can’t run this kind of business unless you’re doing the right things. Any whiff of being out of whack with that and you’re for the chop. That’s because of 1.
Of course failure to adopt this novel approach to compensation renders the company open to ridicule and the pursuit of self-interest. What I’m suggesting is the ultimate in self-interest.
This is not fantasy. This is reality. How about starting with staff and partners as a bit of an experiment?
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