You get the culture you build! Been driving people through incentives? You’ve done the job right, here – take some cash. Project under compliance? Here’s an award. Whoops, missed a few deadlines. That’s OK. We’ll skip over your incentive for this half month, your appraisal will be just fine.
What happens when you then realize that people have begun to demand an incentive for every task they do; including their set KRA’s? Working one weekend because you were unable to complete the task during the weekday? Well, we are definitely not handing you an allowance for that! What then do you do? Slowly start stripping the incentives away? You might just find yourself in the middle of pandemonium but at that point, you have little option.
Here’s what happened to us. An incentive scheme begun in good faith in now in ICU. Why? Because we started building other monetary incentives for all the others so that they wouldn’t feel bad about not being included in the big incentive scheme. Currently, one in four are eligible for one or the other incentive scheme, some for more than one. Makes it a great hiring pitch but our budgets have gone for a toss.
If one purpose of the incentive is to equalize earning capacity, why not take a re-look at the salary structure? Currently, no one does any work for the right reason anymore. They only do it because they have an incentive to lose.
The annual appraisal? Well, that is just yearly bunkum. Everyone knows that it’s biased and unfair anyway!
The HR Business Partner Story 