The leadership of IL SHRM brought me to their state conference this week (thank you John Jorgerson and Dave Ryan) and I decided to live blog one of the keynote sessions. Cy Wakefield is the speaker and she helps organizations recreate their mindsets in order to achieve business success. Be sure to check out her site https://cywakeman.com for more information about her. I highly recommend her as a speaker because she is knowledgeable, entertaining, and engages the audience.
Although there have been many nuggets of wisdom that have come from her lips today, here is one point she made that caught my attention in a big way.
Your value of the employee is not current performance. It should also include future potential as part of the calculation. What is the emotional expense? SO, the employee value equation becomes:
employee value= Current performance + future potential- emotional expense
Right now, we hire an employee to come to work and do a job. We agree on what we will pay them for that work. Then, for some reason, we allow them to come to us at the end of that year after they have done the work and try to negotiate (or we give) an increase. Why? Why don’t we just pay what we agreed? Because we are adding on the pay for the future potential of that employee. The loss however, and there IS a loss, comes in the emotional expense that it takes to manage that employee.
Instead of focusing as much on paying employees who are either resistant to the company mission or ideas or on paying for performance on employees who are just maintaining the status quo, let’s put our efforts on really paying those with VISION to move the organization forward.
Do you agree? Why or why not? Share it in the comments.
5 Comments
It has been a great session. It is also great having you here with us. 🙂 Thanks for the Post!!!
It’s so cool to see how far ISC SHRM has come in one year. In DeKalb, last year, I was the only one tweeting. Now, to see so many people filling up the #ilshrm10 hashtag and live blogging is quite exciting. I wrote a news release asking the question: Can HR and social media get along? The answer, in my opinion, is yes!
Interesting viewpoint. But most research I read (Daniel Pink, A. Kohn) suggests that money is not the key motivator. Money represents approval or status. Learning to engage with the employees’ real needs and dreams is the way to keep a workplace happy and healthy.
@Laura- Great observation. Like you, most of the reading I’ve done on the topic and what I experience in the workplace falls into the Daniel Pink frame of reference. This was the first time I’ve heard such a drastically different approach. It was very thought provoking.