REWARD SCHEMES FOR EMPLOYEES AND MANAGEMENT(1)

A major part of performance management involves managing employees and managers, as their performance will have a major effect on the performance of the organisation as a whole. This article looks at how reward schemes can be used to influence the behaviour of employees

 

MEANING OF REWARD SCHEMES

A broad definition of reward schemes is provided by Bratton:

 

‘Reward system refers to all the monetary, non-monetary and psychological payments that an organisation provides for its employees in exchange for the work they perform.’

 

Rewards schemes may include extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are items such as financial payments and working conditions that the employee receives as part of the job. Intrinsic rewards relate to satisfaction that is derived from actually performing the job such as personal fulfilment, and a sense of contributing something to society. Many people who work for charities, for example, work for much lower salaries than they might achieve if they worked for commercial organisations. In doing so, they are exchanging extrinsic rewards for the intrinsic reward of doing something that they believe is good for society.

 

OBJECTIVES OF A REWARD SCHEME

What do organisations hope to achieve from a reward scheme? The following are among the most important objectives:

 

1. To support the goals of the organisation by aligning the goals of employees with these.

2. To ensure that the organisation is able to recruit and retain sufficient number of employees with the right skills.

3. To motivate employees.

4. To align the risk preferences of managers and employees with those of the organisation.

5. To comply with legal regulations.

6. To be ethical.

7. To be affordable and easy to administer.

 

ALIGNING THE GOALS OF THE ORGANISATION AND EMPLOYEES

The reward scheme should support the organisation’s goals. At the strategic level, the reward scheme must be consistent with the strategy of the organisation. If a strategy of differentiation is chosen, for example, staff may receive more generous benefits, and these may be linked to achieving certain skills or achieving pre determined targets. In an organisation that has a strategy of cost leadership, a simple reward scheme offering fairly low wages may be appropriate as less skilled staff are required, new staff are easy to recruit and need little training, so there is less incentive to offer generous rewards. The US supermarket group Walmart competes on low cost. It recruits employees with low skills, and pays low wages. It discourages staff from working overtime, as it wishes to avoid paying overtime rates.

 

TO RECRUIT AND RETAIN SUFFICIENT EMPLOYEES WITH THE RIGHT SKILLS

If rewards offered are not competitive, it will be difficult to recruit staff since potential employees can obtain better rewards from competitors. Existing staff may also be tempted to leave the organisation if they are aware that their reward system is uncompetitive.

 

High staff turnover can lead to higher costs of recruitment and training of new staff. Losing existing employees may also mean that some of the organisation’s accumulated knowledge is lost forever. For many knowledge-based organisations, the human capital may be one of the most valuable assets they have. High technology companies such as Microsoft are companies that trade on knowledge, so offer competitive remuneration to key staff.

 

TO MOTIVATE EMPLOYEES

Motivation of employees is clearly an important factor in the overall performance of an organisation. Organisations would like their employees to work harder, and be flexible. The link between reward schemes and motivation is a complex issue that is hotly debated in both accounting and human resource-related literature.

 

A well-known theory relating to motivation is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow stated that people’s wants and needs follow a hierarchy. Once the needs of one level of the hierarchy are met, the individual will then focus on achieving the needs of the next level in the hierarchy. The lower levels of the hierarchy are physiological, relating to the need to survive (eg eating and being housed); once these have been met, humans then desire safety, followed by love, followed by esteem, and finally at the top of the hierarchy, self actualisation, or self fulfilment.

Applying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to reward schemes suggests that very junior staff, earning very low wages will be motivated by receiving higher monetary rewards, as this will enable them to meet their physiological needs. As employees become progressively more highly paid, however, monetary rewards become relatively less important as other needs in the hierarchy, such as job security, ability to achieve one’s potential, and feeling of being needed become more important.

 

Herzberg argued that increasing rewards only motivates employees temporarily. Once they become de-motivated again, it is necessary to ‘recharge their batteries’ with another increase. A far better way to motivate employees is to ‘install a generator in an employee’ so they can recharge their own batteries; in other words to find out what really motivates them. According to Herzberg, it is the intrinsic factors in a job that motivate employees, such as ‘achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility and growth or advancement.’ Giving greater responsibility to employees, for example, can increase motivation.

 

Perhaps the conclusion to be gained from this is that monetary rewards alone are insufficient to motivate employees. Other factors such as giving greater recognition and greater responsibility may be equally important, for example giving praise at company meetings, promoting staff, and involving staff more in decision making.

 

ALIGNING THE RISK PREFERENCES OF MANAGERS AND EMPLOYEES WITH THOSE OF THE ORGANISATION

Managers and senior employees make decisions on behalf of the company, acting as agents of the company. It is desirable that the risk preferences of these employees should match the risk preferences of the organisation and its stakeholders. One problem with many reward schemes is that managers are too risk averse, and will not make investments that may risk their targets not being met.

 

The events leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 are a good example of the opposite situation, where the risk appetites of employees at investment banks did not match the risk appetites of the owners. During this period, individuals working in the banks were paid large commissions for selling mortgage loans to customers. The problem was that the employees were selling loans to customers that posed a large risk to the banks, due to their low credit worthiness.

 

The problem was confounded by the fact that in many cases, the employees of the banks were paid commissions on the date that the loan agreements were signed, while the loans lasted for 25 years. In situations where the borrower defaulted, however, there was no claw back, so the employee would not be required to repay the commission.

 

Many countries have put in place new laws and codes to change this situation. In the UK for example, the financial services authority introduced a code whereby remuneration structures should be based on sound risk management practices,

incentive payments should be deferred over a number of years, and there should be claw back provisions whereby employees are required to repay bonuses in the event that the longer term results of their actions leads to similar problems experiences in the financial crisis.

 

Share options may also create a miss-match between the risks faced by the organisation and the risks faced by the holders of the options, since the holders benefit if share prices increase, but do not bear any losses if the share price falls. Share options are discussed in more detail later in this article.

 

COMPLYING WITH LEGAL REGULATIONS

Rewards should comply with legal regulations. Typically, employment laws include areas such as minimum pay, and equal pay legislation to ensure that no groups are prejudiced against. There have been high profile cases of female investment bankers winning legal cases against their employers because their bonuses were far less than those paid to male colleagues.

 

ETHICS AND REWARD SCHEMES

In recent decades there has been a move away from fixed remuneration systems towards reward systems where at least part of an employee’s rewards are based on performance of the individual and the business as a whole. Some writers claim that this is unethical for two reasons. First, such systems tend to place increased business risk onto employees. Second, such systems undermine collective bargaining systems, and reduce the power of unions. This leads to a situation where employees as a collective have less bargaining power.

 

The size of total remunerations paid to directors of large public companies has also become a hot political issue, with a perception that the gap between top earners, and average earners is becoming larger. In the US, the average directors of S&P 500 companies earn 200 times more than the average household income in the US. Defenders of such large differences in pay point out that this difference has actually declined in recent years; in the year 2000, directors of S&P 500 companies earned 350 times the average household income. According to some research, such high packages are justified as they do reflect the performance of those directors.

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