Pay is a Leaker

Pay can create leaks or make holes but it can't activate engagement

How to maintain low-cost engagement parties with small budgets seems to be the theme of the season.  We are not talking about the formal premarital status of a couple intending to enter the state of matrimony but instead address the psychological term for a deep dedication to work.  Employee engagement shows itself in a sense of personal emotional involvement and identification much like ownership.

Employee engagement is not something you can create.  Engagement is an employee choice.  Management can establish the conditions in which engagement can thrive but cannot command or dictate it.  People have their own motivations.  The best any employer can do is to offer a menu of reinforcements, reward systems, and consequences for positive organizational behaviors that are attractive to your particular workforce.  Such factors as communications, empowerment, incentives, performance feedback and working relationships are called “drivers” because they are considered effective in enhancing employee engagement. 

Pay is not generally considered a “driver” of employee engagement.  Yes, the reward and remuneration process that encompasses recognition, communication and feedback is certainly an engagement vehicle, but the dollars, pounds and euros themselves are not “drivers.”  I would go so far as to identify pay as a “leaker” that can deflate engagement but can’t directly increase it.  Passion for an occupation and enthusiasm for a work role can’t be bought with money.  But it can be quenched by pay cuts or starved by inadequate compensation.  Workers who are financially challenged due to low wages find that intrinsic satisfaction won’t pay the rent or put food on the table.  Once income rises to the hygiene level that removes it as a dissatisfier, the subject will perk up and become potentially open to responding positively to other reinforcement techniques that can activate employee engagement.  Until remuneration is at least minimally acceptable to the employee, they are unlikely to become engaged in their work.

Since low pay or demotivational reward practices can turn engagement off, it is therefore important to pay people right.  Decent salary is a necessary but insufficient precondition for engagement.  That point should be emphasized, because enterprises face problems where pay lags or is delivered by a process seen as inequitable.  They must first remedy those issues before they can ever dream of engaging their workers.  Pay can’t float your boat, but cracks caused by negligent inattention can sink it.  Once the leaks have been plugged, the boat can move across the waters towards its destination. 

With this understanding, it may become clearer that employee engagement simply requires “enough” pay rather than immense compensation sums.  The hard part of that challenge is determining when pay is sufficiently adequate to permit a supportive environment for engagement initiatives and finding the money to plug the gaps where they exist. 

 E. James (Jim) Brennan is Senior Associate of ERI Economic Research Institute, the premier publisher of interactive pay and living-cost surveys. Semi-retired after over 40 years in HR corporate and consulting roles throughout the U.S. and Canada, he’s pretty much been there done that (articles, books, speeches, seminars, radio/TV, advisory posts, in-trial expert witness stuff, etc.), and will express his opinion on almost anything.

Creative Commons photo "Drip"  © 2011 J. Ronald Lee

Comments

[David Chambers]

Another good article - thanks. I have long held the view that pay is a far stronger de-motivator than it is a behavioural motivator. So it is, if the pay is perceived to lack internal equity (more so than market equity) then dis-engagement, resentment and cynicism will build quickly and must be addressed. That said, the converse to this is when pay is 'about right' and perceived as being broadly fair, more pay will not drive engagement, or performance; rather it will be the factors of communication, brand pride, job interest, learning, leadership, belief in goals and the broader HR and leadership levers that will make the difference. I like Tom Peter's quote of a few decades ago "the hard stuff is easy...it's the soft stuff that's hard". Pay is rarely a miracle cure and yet as pay practitioners, it is expected to be the medicine we prescribe.

[E. James (Jim) Brennan]

Thanks for the feedback and the good summation, David. Many people, including many writers here, have observed that cash is your most expensive reinforcement mechanism. One of my favorite sayings is that not all rewards jingle... but only money puts food on the table.