Here at the Compensation Café, we frequently write that all compensation is communication, but we have never addressed the extent to which communication is a form of compensation.
Effective communications must be active in your organization in order to supply sufficient satisfiers to the motivations of workers. In short, you can pile money at the door, but if the relationship between work and pay is not communicated, the biggest payroll budget in the world will not buy the output you desire. Likewise, reliance on noncash intrinsic value to drive behavior will fail if the performer never perceives the fulfillment of their particular objective; i.e., if the social worker never interacts with a client. An earlier article covered how the lack of feedback about supervisors dealing with slackers can harm morale, poison the work environment and cripple productivity. Cash (which can be a form of communication itself) is wasted without robust communication that links it as a feedback device for performance maintenance. Those who prefer to tap into intrinsic motivations must also communicate the results of the work behavior to the performer in terms they appreciate. Communication is a form of compensation itself.
Other posters confirm that disengagement is tied to failure to deliver the positive public affirmation elements that are greatly valued by workers. People yearn for praise, prize status symbols, celebrate milestones of progress and take satisfaction from assurances confirming the adequacy of their performance and the equity of their treatment. Every one of those mechanisms involves differentiation feedback of some kind, where people compare outcomes or compete against their own personal expectations. Otherwise, why would anyone golf or bowl?
The desire to test our competencies seems to be hard-wired into every human being. Folks wonder how they stack up against others and constantly draw comparisons. It seems impossible to deny that communication of such test results is a reward.
The employee value proposition includes a variety of elements in a total rewards package. We need to expand our definitions to include the fact that feedback is indeed food for the psyche and thus meets a liberal definition of compensation. Yes, praise and other forms of communication that warm the soul are not cash, but they are compensation elements because they perform admirably as rewards that satisfy motivations that drive performance. After all, compensation is frequently defined as a reward for services, although it's more commonly limited to payments. I guess I should concede that although compensation is usually defined as cash remuneration, the broader term total rewards would certainly always include communication elements because they are vital for feedback.
A reward is something of value, so total rewards should include communications, cash, prizes, worklife balance, workplace environment, perquisites and health care benefits, not to mention the other noncash elements and intrinsic satisfiers.
Seems like our definition of total rewards should always include the preconditions necessary for the effective employment of workers. Communications are a necessary prerequisite for an environment supportive of an effective compensation system. Failure to communicate ANY important aspect of the reward value proposition renders the compensation system and total rewards program ineffective. Just as you cannot suck all the oxygen out of a room and expect people to survive in a vacuum, you can’t sustain a viable compensation program without adequate communications. One can argue about what is “adequate” and what defines “viable”, but you can’t deny that feedback to performers is a vital part of all total reward programs.
That tells me that communications can be a form of compensation. What do you think?
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 image "Rotary Dial Telephone" by Rough-rider
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