Incentives For Their Own Sake

It's fairly easy these days to find articles written by those who advocate increasing the eligibility of employee incentives.  Their recommendation is to push inclusion further and further down the organization's hierarchy.  What a grand concept!  Everybody wins.  The argument is that all employees affect a company’s success, that each and every one will chase the almighty dollar of variable pay, and that the opportunity for ever larger rewards will motivate them to do great things.  All of which would in turn deliver improved financial results for the company's bottom line.

Maybe.

And maybe it's not such a good idea after all.  Perhaps it's a bit of a crap shoot as to whether the corresponding higher compensation costs will result in improved financial gains.  Consider the challenges faced when you contemplate a broader eligibility for your annual incentive program.

What's The Plan?

Start with a re-examination of the basics.  What do you consider an incentive element when designing a compensation program?  My definition is a reward for performance that goes above and beyond the norm, or beyond what is expected.  Thus it shouldn't be a reward for performance that would have occurred as a matter of course.  The intent for offering an incentive is to prompt a change in behavior, to get employees to do something they wouldn't ordinarily have done, and to get them to do it solely because they have been offered a financial reward to perform both their regular tasks and to accomplish stated business objectives that go beyond the norm.

That should be the plan.

And because these objectives are noteworthy, you would expect that they would differ from year to year, as the needs of the business evolve and adapt to changing business conditions.  This emphasis on annual objectives reinforces the intent that incentives should be designed to reward effort above and beyond those duties listed in the job description.  They shouldn't be repetitive, year after year.  That's what the job description is for.

Incentive rewards should also not be provided simply because an employee performs their job well.  That particular carrot should be the role of the annual merit increase.  In fact, such an exercise would be considered “double-dipping”, or paying for the same performance twice.  You should not be using an incentive as an inducement to get employees to perform their expected duties.  Again, that's paying twice to reinforce the same behavior.  It’s also using compensation to replace the leader’s own responsibility to manage their staff.

Sometimes You Win; Sometimes You Don't

When deciding on whether to add a variable pay opportunity to an existing base salary compensation model, you need to ask yourself, "what will the company receive in return for the increased costs (variable pay) of an incentive program?"  If you are planning to increase your targeted compensation costs by 5% or 10% of the base salaries of an affected group, how will you answer the ROI question?

Hint:  You had better provide a business (financial) rationale, and not some subjective phraseology like “survey says” or “everyone else is doing it" or even “it’s the right thing to do.’  Management tends to frown on such trivial rationalizations.

It's also worth noting that employees lower in the hierarchy have a greatly reduced line of sight between their actions and business success.  This entails having to create quantifiable objectives for performance (you are quantifying, right?) that should integrate vertically with department, functional and / or organization objectives.  If you don't integrate what you’re telling employees to do, you may find yourself paying out incentive rewards when the company as a whole has not been successful.  Keep questioning:

Yes, you did it, but was it important?   Did your accomplishment support the broader organization's objectives?

As a counterpoint to the eligibility question I'm often asked about Gainsharing programs.  These initiatives can be a useful method of introducing incentives to select employee groups who have a direct line of sight to potential savings.  They can affect real change.  However, successful plans eventually kill themselves off as viable gains are achieved (low hanging fruit) and payments becomes less and less robust after the easy pickings are collected.

So to recap, let's review the business urgency for lowering incentive eligibility to below the management ranks.

• Is the employee line of sight (performance / business results) direct, or remote?

• Can you quantify the expected ROI?

• Can you balance the increased compensation costs against hard financial gains for the organization?

• Would the variable pay become strictly an added cost, or would any portion of base salary be at risk?

If you have a reasonable doubt on any of these points, I suggest you think long and hard before implementing such a program.  It would be very difficult to dig yourself out of that hole.

Chuck Csizmar CCP is founder and Principal of CMC Compensation Group, providing global compensation consulting services to a wide variety of industries and non-profit organizations.  He is also associated with several HR Consulting firms as a contributing consultant.  Chuck is a broad based subject matter expert with a specialty in international and expatriate compensation.  He lives in Central Florida (near The Mouse) and enjoys growing fruit and managing (?) a brood of cats. 

Creative Commons image courtesy of Photos8.com

Comments

[Dan Walter]

Great article Chuck