WiserIT

One of the root causes of the current economic crisis is the switch in renumeration thinking. Once we undertook a specific career because that entailed using our God given gift and our natural talent and becuase the work was rewarding in a self satisfying way. As we became more experienced and skilled we where rewarded accordingly. Essentially we earned what we where worth, with a Christmas bonus thrown in. The Christmas bonus was a thank you from your employer, take this and have a Merry Christmas with your family. We have evolved into a renumeration scheme that is an excersize in trade off's. We will pay you this much every month but if you achieve this much we will reward you expidentialy. No more Christmas bonus, your bonus comes at the end of the fiscal. Employees no longer pursue a particular career because of the satisfaction they get from doing what they do well, we pursue a particular career because of the finacial rewards. We work for money, and we work and work and work. Sacrifices of time, family and health are made to achieve the maximun incentive bonus. The  effort required is a sprint, it is not sustainable so we take risks to achieve, we dont think of the negative long term consequences of a particular strategy or deal on our organization, our customers or our collegues. Make the most money while you can. And now we all know how it has ended up. Today we are faced with the realisation of the consequences of reckless deals and strategies. Question is are organizations going to change the way they renumerate employees, especially senior employees? If they change how are they going to change? How many people are going to be attrated to jobs that dont have substantial incentive bonuses built into the package? How will organizations afford to cost in incentive bonuses, that where previosly self liquidating because they where only paid on achievement of growth? How will we move into a new renumeration method whilst retaining our talented people. I believe this is one of the crucial questions we will have to find answers to in the near future. Organizations will, if they want to operate responsible, have to find an answer to how they reward us in the future. Organizations created the incentive based renumeration schemes, they where happy to live with short life cycle employees, they moved from sweat the assets to sweat the employees becuase it generate good growth. They where happy to have employees there for the money not for anything else because it was good for the share price. They where happy to run the risk reward race because for a long time the risk never materialised. It will be interesting to see how organizations tackle this one!

Love this photo, hon!