You will never satisfactorily optimise employee engagement or redress the problem of employee disengagement until you recognise and address the organisationally ingrained force that sabotages your efforts to do so. Unfortunately this force is so universal that most organisations and their leaders either remain blind to it or powerless to swim against the current.

What is it? Incentive remuneration and the drive for performance related pay.

The Zealise solution offers a totally new model for rewarding performance that eliminates most - and maybe even all - of the elements of conventional incentive remuneration that induce employee disengagement. It:

• Is premised entirely on the concept of the organisation as a single team
• Is transparent and equitable
• Cannot be manipulated or abused
• Counters much of the short-term thinking that undermines other reward systems.   

Why it works

Improved personal performance unquestionably benefits the organisation where the person works. So the theory that incentivising people to improve their personal performance would appear to be so sound as to be unquestionable. However, studies now show that the theory only holds true for routine, mechanical activities. The more complex the role the less effective incentives are.

This is understandable - and perhaps even obvious - when you look at the big picture. By nature complex work depends on other people. Consequently personal incentives destroy the fabric of teambuilding. You see it is impossible to create effective teamwork and organisational integrity when everybody is driven by self interest without shared values and/or a common purpose.      

Unfortunately it is rather late in the day to be recognising this. We have created a monster! Performance related pay has become so ubiquitous and widespread that is a case of trying to put the genie back in the bottle. It is always difficult take away something that people have become used to.

Paradoxically performance related pay has excerbated the employee engagement problem and contributed significantly to active employee disengagement because:-

• Performance measurement is not an exact science and the measures are all too often subjective.
• Rewards and reward scales vary dramatically. This has caused the widening pay gap between higher and lower levels in the organisation and hence fuelled resentment and disengagement.
• All too often the incentives seem to be a contractual right and the performance measures thus seem to be either irrelevant or set too low. Somehow this seems to apply more at the senior level and thus situations arise where the lower echelons are denied their incentives and even have their salaries frozen or even reduced while their bosses continue to be rewarded handsomely. This flames the resentment described in the last point.  

All this is further exacerbated by the short term focus where past earnings have been invalidated by subsequent business failures but it is too late to recover the awards made.

Our solution avoids all these issues and so gives you the framework to ensure the employee engagement to achieve the higher levels of performance and the organisational integrity that will secure your long term success.