Employee Satisfaction & Salaries

Most companies pay their employees via a fix payment salary system. Employees are expected to work 40+ hours a year, and during that time they receive a fixed salary of $XXXXX dollars that is associated with their perceived value to the company. Salary was a blessing for individuals worried about companies finding ways to cut out pay based on things like output and hours worked.

Salary is guaranteed, so employees know exactly how much they are going to make in any given year and can easily budget accordingly. For many people salary made sense.

These days, however, salary may be making less and less sense. Employees have numerous technological tools to perform their jobs which can save them hours of time in the day. Few employees that work solo with technology work the full 8 hours.

Most simply do what they need to do in order to not get fired. This is not necessarily the employee’s fault. Consider the following scenario: Employee is expected to complete a project in 8 hours.

Employee completes the project in 4 hours, all of it perfect. Employee has 4 free hours to spare. The employee now has two options.

Option 1: They can ask for or find more work, but they do not get any financial reward for doubling their expected output. In fact, rarely do these employees receive even acknowledgement of their accomplishments, let alone any additional pay for completing more work than necessary. Option 2: They can go on Facebook or play Angry Birds on their iPhone and take the remaining 4 hours off.

It doesn’t matter how they pass the time, but rarely do they pass the time working. Both ways they are paid the same, except one they would have to work harder for no gain. In some ways employers are getting less out of their employees because they are not working full 8 hours a day, but in other ways they deserve to get less out of their employees because the employee is not getting any reward for going above and beyond expectations.

As much as management and companies like to believe they reward great employees with raises and promotions, often times true output gets overlooked in favor of perceived output, and the best employees are left wanting. My thought is as follows: for salary jobs in the technology industry – where work is project based but salary is not – is it possible that employee satisfaction can play a larger role in production from employees, who may be motivated more to put in extra work in order to help the company succeed? Or is it more likely they will continue to work only the bare minimum unless they perceive some type of potential reward for taking on extra work?