The source: "Finam"
Recently, a friend of mine told me something curious.
In the company where she works, all departments are annually aiming for very high business development KPIs, meaning increased turnovers with no less profitability. This should mean a lot more money paid by clients. Bonuses are promised to managers who fulfill the plans and bad penalties up to dismissals and the cancellation of product lines to those who don't.
However, in reality, only promises of bonuses and rewards are kept. For years, unprofitable departments and their managers have suffered no consequences.
Finally, at an administrative meeting, after the results were summarized and bonuses announced, there was uneasy silence.
- What is the matter? What do you want from me? – the director asked.
- Blood – the managers answered.
The managers demanded that their colleagues who failed to do their jobs be dismissed and unprofitable departments closed. Was it because those departments negatively affected the overall financial results of the company? The sizes of the bonuses the managers received did not directly depend on those results.
The heads of departments said that they could not accept working 14 hours a day trying to attain their objectives while other departments saved their energies without losing wages. The "bloodthirsty" managers said the situation negatively affected the motivation of their people. Why work hard if, no matter what, you will still get your money?
I will not judge the correctness and ethics of those managers, yet the story seems interesting.
It shows, I think, that employees want not just the approval of what they do or esteem. They want fairness. To a manager, the quality seems to be just as needed as leadership, planning ability or persuasiveness.
Their wish is well illustrated by the latest experiments in behavioral economy. In one of those experiments, a participant was given a hundred dollars and was expected to share it with someone else as he saw fit. The money could be either divided evenly or $90 and $10. However, if one of the two rejected his portion, the whole hundred would be forfeited. Interestingly, when the money was divided evenly, both participants agreed. But if offered just $10 or $20, the participant would rather reject it. Why? It did not seem right, any amount being better than nothing at all. Yet, when people found the transaction unfair, they would rather have nothing than less than what seemed right.
Perhaps, Maslow's pyramid misses one need – the need for justice.
What am I talking about? I think, it is all about team work. When working on a project, the manager must make sure that if not the contributions then, at least, the efforts of all the participants are equal. One will not be able to hold a team together for long if someone in it works 10 hours a day while someone else spend most of their time in the cafeteria. Sooner than not, the manager will either get another team or themselves stop working.
If disregarded by the management, the faults of one employee will soon infect the rest of the team. This effect of social laziness is commonly described as "Why should I stick my head above everyone else's?" Very few employees will give all they have to their work simply because this is the only way they know how to do it. The rest will look at those next to them and slow down. There is no stronger dejection than seeing a thriving loafer.
No manager likes punishing employees, especially when the one to be punished has former good accomplishments or a lot of seniority. Yet work must be evaluated here and now without looking at personal relationships or past merits.
Not infrequently punishment becomes a problem in companies with democratic traditions of flat management structures. Managers equal in rank may discuss their colleagues between themselves but feel uneasy about losing their face by accusing them publicly and insisting that they be punished or even dismissed. This kind of cover-up forces companies to drag along with inefficient managers.
By Ludmila Shusterova, director of strategic development
BDO Unicon Outsourcing
