Employee reward programmes – key drivers challenged

The results of a 2009 study by Hay Group into the "Changing Face of Reward" have just been released. It found that the "War for Talent" has narrowed into 3 fronts focused around high performers, high potentials and 'mission critical' roles. Of course there is no way that one can challenge the findings but they certainly point to a potential disaster in the making.

One needs look no further than these three terms for the first inkling of this. Why? Because there is no recognition here whatsoever of the loyal 'foot-soldiers' who ultimately do all the unsung work on which the organisation relies.

What is a 'mission critical' role? Where do the boundaries lie between mission critical and mission non-critical? Not for nothing are the receptionist and telephonists sometimes referred to as the "Directors of First Impressions." How much potential business is lost if they don't do a good job? That might just make the difference between survival and failure. In this day and age a clerk who misdirects an important email with a key customer file attached can "unleash the dogs of war!" Every day the newspapers are full of stories about people who have not done their job properly and, at the very least, exposed the organisation to a maelstrom of bad PR.

With strategic thinking like this the HR profession is ensuring that it will NEVER effectively solve the employee engagement problem, which is one of the biggest challenges of the times.

This is highlighted by the finding that "The focus on pay for performance has never been greater." Maybe not, but that doesn't mean it should be. The tragedy is that no-one has recognised that pay for performance conflicts with the goal of building an effective team. And at the end of the day any organisation is ultimately a team. Thus pay for performance is a root cause of employee disengagement and organisational inefficiency.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the 3 categories identified by the Hay survey, but these people are already recognised through higher salaries. In order to optimise their contribution – and everyone else's – you would do better to offer a key reward programme that rewards everyone for the way the team performs. The fallacy of performance related pay has already been discredited by recent executive performance. It is high time it was finally exposed and kicked into touch. If you want to optimise organisational performance you have to recognise and reward team performance.