Incentive remuneration not delivering role ownership?

Performance related pay is supposed to motivate people to take more ownership of their role, to work harder, be more productive and contribute. But surveys indicating employee engagement of 10-30% are clear evidence that people contribution is failing.

The cartoon is facetious and exaggerates to make a point, but you are not alone if you are questioning the effectiveness of your incentive remuneration scheme.

This lack of employee engagement is causing employers to actively seek other ways to improve employee motivation, engender role ownership and increase people contribution.

With growing recognition that motivation is innate and external stimulants at best short-term, terms like employee ownership and employee empowerment are increasingly widely used, and indicative of new initiatives by employers to create the sense of role ownership and greater employee accountability originally intended from incentives.

The desire to inculcate role ownership, combined with growing awareness of the value of people, is also fuelling recognition of the need for a more entrepreneurial attitude amongst employees. This is furthering 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, rather defeating the purpose.
• Lower level employees see little correlation between their role and profits and so any form of profit-sharing holds little relevance.
• Once again they are predominantly a top-down 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, and what ensures greater engagement and effort.

By recognising people as assets the Zealise approach already mitigates the problem of their not feeling valued and delivers more than any other competitive offering. But it goes even further and also creates a mechanism that overcomes all these other deficiencies and:

• Recognises the investment in people and their value to the organisation, so providing a new basis for rewarding their contribution.
• Offers a unique method of creating employee ownership at little or no upfront cost, to either company or employee.
• Compels the sense of ownership that all other schemes aim for, but fail to create.

So, if you want to create the organisational zeal to improve the effectiveness of the way you recognise and reward your people, contact us immediately, to see how we can help. Remember though, creating greater organisational zeal by improving the effectiveness of the way you recognise and reward your people is only element two of our 3-in-1 solution. To find out more about element three and how it rounds off our solution, go to People Management now.