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How to optimise the contribution of your people

The cartoon is facetious and exaggerates to make a point, but how effective is your incentive remuneration / performance related pay scheme?

Performance related pay/incentive remuneration is supposed to optimise your people contribution and encourage greater role ownership that enables your people to fulfil their potential. The theory is that you get greater employee motivation and commitment, and people work harder, are more productive and so contribute more.

But surveys indicating employee engagement of 10-30% are clear evidence that the theory is wrong.

Yet people are only starting to realise this now. But incentive remuneration is just the wrong remedy to a larger problem. (That is why we actually focus on that specifically in the "New Approach to Incentive Compensation") Employee engagement begins with personal fulfilment and the only way to optimise your people contribution is to create a corporate culture in which your people realise their potential and so are fulfilled.

And, because we understand this and therefore address the root causes of employee disengagement, we offer you a unique opportunity to leapfrog the confused thinking in this area and to:-

• Create a platform to optimise your people contribution
• Reverse the damage done by misguided incentive remuneration schemes
• Inspire greater employee motivation and employee engagement
• Instil greater employee commitment and employee loyalty
• Create the sense of ownership originally intended from incentive remuneration schemes.

People Management the Next Big Thing

You may well ask, "If incentive remuneration is so ineffective why has it taken so long to recognise this?" There are a number of answers to that, but the main one is that the high return on investment from technology advances and business process re-engineering have hidden these costs.

This is coming to light now because the marginal return on investment from technology and business processs improvement is shrinking. The low hanging fruit has all been picked and, in order to survive, you now have to look elsewhere for your growth. Hence the new focus on people management. Where else is there to look?

Nor is it a coincidence that employee engagement is currently such a hot topic. The focus on technology and process was at the expense of people and employee disengagement inevitably followed. Now, because of those diminishing returns, the costs of employee disengagement are beginning to hurt.

The Catch 22 of Employee Engagement

You may find this difficult to accept. After all it is not as though you had been ignoring your people altogether. You may well have introduced initiatives to improve work-life balance with work-from-home and job-sharing opportunities and any number of other ideas. Consequently you may find it tempting to think your people are just ungrateful. The problem is that none of these actually help make people more self-fulfilled.

The crux of the problem is that people actually don't like being told what to do. It is very difficult if not impossible to feel fulfilled if you have little scope to use your initiative or to contribute to what you actually do or how you do it. So to find ways to improve employee motivation: to create the employee commitment and loyalty and instil the sense of role ownership and personal accountability, you have to find a way to inspire greater personal fulfilment. This is a daunting challenge, not least because employee disengagement is going to act as a handbrake on all your efforts to engender employee engagement. Clearly you are going to need something pretty powerful to break this vicious circle.

The New Dimension

There is a lot already being done to address this. Concepts like intrapreneurshipand employee empowerment are increasingly widely used and are indicative of new initiatives to engender greater people contribution, through a greater sense of employee accountability that results from greater personal fulfilment and role ownership - ironically all things originally intended from incentive remuneration / performance related pay schemes.

Simultaneously a wider awareness of the role of people in driving sustainability is also fuelling recognition of this need for a more entrepreneurial attitude amongst employees. This is driving initiatives to encourage employee ownership through either employee share schemes or gain-sharing schemes or both. These, however, have inherent limitations because:

• Cash is king for lower earning employees, who thus tend to sell their shares and defeat the purpose.
• They hold little relevance for lower level employees who see little correlation between their role and profits.
• They are too often a top-down (imposed) solution.

Even more significantly, however, they fail to make employees feel valued which is the key to igniting enthusiasm and the ultimate driver of self-motivation: the force that ensures the greater engagement and effort that powers productivity.

The Zealise Integrity Programme uniquely resolves all these issues. It works as a catalyst to create a 'climate of commitment' and spark the organisational zeal that:

• Enables employees to fulfil their potential and thus stimulates greater employee engagement
• Creates role ownership and employee accountability through employee ownership
• Creates the shared values that cement organisational integrity through common purpose
• Optimises your employee contribution

Building on the ideas first expounded in "Lean Organisations Need FAT People" it creates an environment in which every employee is effectively working for himself/herself and thus has a greater interest in the overall organisational performance. It builds on the growing recognition that motivation is innate and efforts to generate it from the outside are at best short-term and instead creates a powerful internal motivator that makes your employees more responsible and take greater accountability for their work and thus contribute more than they would in any other model.

To find out more about our pioneering approach and how it can help you realise the potential of your people and maximise your people contribution contact us now.