The battle for work hours. How to calculate the salary?

    History of success".

    Not so long ago I worked at a large company, where it was customary to calculate the wages of employees based on the hours worked by them. This scheme was applied to all, without exception: programmers, engineers, analysts, advertising managers, technical writers, lawyers, etc. To account for work hours, a special (and rather inconvenient) project server was even used.

    It would seem - a simple and good scheme: you can calculate the approximate salary fund (and this is an expense item) for the year ahead.
    But, as expected, in the reports all employees regularly worked out 40 hours a week. Is always. All.
    There were several “partisans” who sometimes forgot to celebrate there, but, in general, a paradise idyll reigned in the reports.

    Finally, someone from the leadership came up with the long-awaited thought that this could not be ...

    After a series of meetings and meetings, it was decided that now all the noted labor costs should be checked and approved by the heads of departments.

    It would seem - one more logical and correct decision. As if.
    But an additional amount of artificially created work has appeared, on which it is necessary to spend part of the working time, and the heads of large departments - a substantial part. Labor productivity has decreased because, in addition to labor itself, it was still necessary to spend time justifying what you did and why.
    Such an attempt to tighten the nuts did not lead to any special reduction in costs, but the useful time that employees could spend on productive labor was reduced.

    The management was seriously committed to achieving justice and took one more erroneous step: in each department an additional employee appeared, who now had to submit the hours for approval. Moreover, he claimed them not himself. He only checked them, endorsed them and passed them on for approval to the head. This, apparently, was a measure aimed at unloading the heads of departments from this extra work.

    This “overseer”, of course, by definition was poorly versed in the essence of the labor of employees.
    The first owner of this position in my department, yesterday’s student, did not understand why the developers needed a week to test the software, as she believed that it took enough hours to “check that it worked, the buttons were pressed, what was written on the screen”.

    Soon what happened was to happen. In this position, another overly conscientious employee appeared who performed the work of the “overseer” so diligently that it was practically impossible for ordinary employees to spend their labor through it without loss. Once, eight key developers, having missed due to its principle of almost half the salary, got up and quit. Quickly recruited “boys and girls” in return did not possess the necessary qualifications and could not maintain the previous level of work. At the end of the year, the department was abolished, and two large projects were closed.

    So the company's management won a Pyrrhic victory in the struggle to reduce costs

    Intelligence miscalculated

    As you know, what is encouraged is growing.
    If programmers pay for the number of lines of code, then "Indian code" will appear.
    If employees are calculated for the number of hours worked, maximalism will appear in the reports on labor costs.

    And we will get into a conflict.

    On the one hand, the company, in the person of its “egregore,” it is important that the work of workers was more intensive, and labor costs for each project were reduced.
    On the other hand, the company pays employees for labor, which encourages the latter to grow.
    This leads to a direct conflict of interests between the project manager and his subordinates.
    In this dispute, the one who is more principled wins.

    But is this a question that needs a fight? Will someone be better off winning her? After all, not only the level of costs is at stake, but also no less important - the loyalty of employees, as a rule the most key.

    After all, a commercial company is a team of people who have gathered in order to earn money and share it among themselves. The team is based on mutual trust. And in the event that the process of sharing causes someone to doubt justice, and - God forbid - conflicts, mutual trust is melting before our eyes. The management of the companies is a little less often than always forgetting that their employees are partners in a common business.

    To Caesar - Caesarean, locksmith - Locksmith

    How to properly evaluate the work of employees?

    First of all, in evaluating the work of employees should be encouraged (read - paid) what the benefits of this employee are.

    I invite companies that are attentive to their workforce to attend to a more subtle and individual selection of an employee’s remuneration scheme, depending on the content of his work and the benefits that the company receives from him. Today, information systems are already powerful enough to run several calculation schemes in parallel.
    Existing practice, when, for simplicity, entire departments are covered by a single scheme, it is time to abolish.

    Work hours

    Nevertheless, there is work that can only be evaluated on a time-basis basis. For example, the work of a cashier, security guard, driver, secretary, office manager, etc. The size of their benefits depends almost exclusively on the time they spend at work.
    Do not make mistakes here and do not make the cashier’s salary strictly dependent on the number of clients served by him. He can’t do anything if the customers simply don’t want to visit the outlet at some hours.
    There may be various bonuses for a good job, but the foundation is time.

    By the volume of work performed

    Classic piecework scheme. It works only when the result of the employee’s labor is a certain integral material or intellectual object that he created, whether it is a product, program, drawing, booklet, article, mounted cable network, etc.
    It is important to clearly define what to consider as a paid unit of work, and not to be mistaken. It is tactically wrong to pay the programmer the amount of code, not the entire program, or the analyst the amount of TK in the pages, and not the whole TK itself.
    Please note that it is not always important whether they were present at a certain workplace. For many of them, a sufficient workplace is a laptop that you can carry with you. This scheme is most suitable for calculations with freelancers.
    Such employees are rewarded for high-quality results and accelerated delivery of work.

    In terms of profit

    According to this scheme, you can only reward those on whom the size of profit depends directly. First of all, this includes the sales, advertising and, in part, marketing. The advertising department is specific, because the work that it does today will bring profit somewhere only the day after tomorrow, which can be tracked by CRM. In addition, there may be designers and copywriters in the advertising department who are better off counting piece by piece.

    A separate subspecies of this method of settlement is “by the amount of lost funds”.
    This is an important factor for the claims and debtor departments, internal audit, etc.

    Hybrid payroll

    In many cases, a hybrid payroll calculation makes sense, where part of it is calculated on the basis of labor costs, and part - on the basis of one of the schemes based on labor results, for example, according to the piecework scheme.
    This provides a certain “airbag” for employees who at some time were not able to achieve results for reasons not related to their laziness.

    Another important point in all the "motivational schemes."

    This is transparency and accessibility for the employee of information about his salary, preferably online. Information should include not only the final amount, but also how it is calculated and why it is.

    The developers of various ERP-like systems have an important idea: make an employee’s personal account with detailed salary information. This should be integrated with the module, where it reports on the work, and where the project manager manages the project. And it should not be different systems!

    The scheme is this: there is a certain virtual account of the employee where money is deducted daily or weekly based on the results of his work, with a breakdown. And he sees this account. Once or twice a month, the accumulated amount is issued to the employee in the form of a salary.

    This is the main "magic" of motivation: you made some efforts, and immediately saw how, and to what extent they were rewarded.
    The motivational scheme where the reward is "promised somewhere later" is a failure, it rewards, but does not motivate.


    The same money is debited from the project account, and the project manager sees this in his interface, with details. What was written off to whom and for what. No need to spend a lot of time transferring data from system to system, letters, calls to the financial department. Why is this all?

    Dear managers and employees!
    If you know the reward calculation scheme, which, in your opinion, is close to perfection, please share the formula.

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