The battle for labor. How to calculate salary?

History of success".

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

It would seem - a simple and good scheme: it is possible to calculate an approximate salary fund (and this is an expenditure item) for the year ahead.
But, as was to be expected, in the reports all the employees regularly worked 40 hours a week. Is always. Everything.
There were several "partisans" who sometimes forgot to celebrate there, but, in general, paradise idyll reigned in the reports.

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

After a series of meetings and meetings, it was decided that now all the labor costs noted should be rechecked and approved by the heads of departments.
')
It would seem - another logical and correct decision. As if.
But there appeared an additional amount of artificially created work, on which it is necessary to spend part of the working time, and the heads of large divisions - a significant part. Labor productivity has declined since, in addition to labor itself, it was necessary to spend more time justifying what you did and why.
Such an attempt to tighten the screws did not lead to any particular reduction in costs, but it did reduce the useful time that employees could spend on productive labor.

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

This “taskmaster”, of course, was by definition poorly versed in the essence of the work 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, because they thought it was enough for an hour - “check that it works, the buttons are pressed, the screen says what you need”.

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

So the management of the company won a “pyrrhic victory” in the struggle to reduce costs.

Intelligence miscalculated

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

And we will get into a collision.

On the one hand, the company, in the face of its "egregor", it is important that the labor of workers was more intensive, and the labor costs for each project reduced.
On the other hand, the company pays employees precisely for labor costs, which encourages the latter to grow.
This leads to a direct clash of interests of the project manager and his subordinates.
In this dispute, the one who is more principled wins.

But is this the question in which the struggle is needed? Will someone better from winning it? After all, at stake is not only the level of costs, but no less important - the loyalty of employees, usually the most key ones.

After all, a commercial company is a group of people who have gathered to earn money and divide it among themselves. The team keeps on mutual trust. And if the process of sharing causes someone to doubt justice, and - God forbid - conflicts, mutual trust melts before our eyes. The management of companies is slightly less likely than it always forgets that their employees are partners in a common cause.

Caesar - cesarean, locksmith - locksmith

How to properly evaluate the work of employees?

First of all, in the evaluation of employees should be encouraged (read - paid), what is the benefit of the employee.

I suggest that companies that are attentive to their workforce take care of 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 conduct in parallel several calculation schemes.
It’s time to abolish the existing practice, when, for simplicity, a whole scheme is covered with whole departments.

For labor hours

Yet there is work that can be assessed only temporarily. For example, the work of a cashier, security guard, driver, secretary, office manager, etc. The size of the benefits they bring depends almost exclusively on the time they spend at work.
Do not make mistakes here and do not put the cashier's salary in strict dependence on the number of clients served by him. He can not do anything if customers in some hours just do not want to visit the outlet.
There may be various awards for good work, but time is the basis.

By the volume of work performed

Classic piecework scheme. It works only when the result of an employee’s work is a certain integral material or intellectual object that he created, be it a product, a program, a drawing, a booklet, an article, an assembled cable network, etc.
Here it is important to clearly define what is to be considered 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 analytics, the amount of TK in the pages, and not the TK itself.
Please note that it is not always important whether they were present at a certain workplace. For many of them, an adequate workplace is a laptop that can be carried around. This scheme is most suitable for calculations with freelancers.
Such employees are awarded for high-quality results and accelerated delivery of work.

By the amount of profit brought

Under this scheme, you can reward only those who directly depend on the amount of profit. First of all, this includes the sales department, advertising and, in part, marketing. The advertising department is specific, because the work done by it today will bring profit only the day after tomorrow, which can be traced by CRM. In addition, in the advertising department there may be designers and copywriters who can be counted on piece by sheet.

A separate subtype of this method of calculation is “in terms of the amount of non-lost funds”.
This is an important factor for claims and debtor departments, internal audit, etc.

Hybrid payroll

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

Another important point in all "motivational schemes."

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

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

The scheme is as follows: there is a certain virtual account of an employee, where daily or weekly “denyuzhku” drip down on the basis of his work, with a transcript. And he sees this bill. Once or twice a month, the accumulated amount is given 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 in what amount they were rewarded.
The motivational scheme, where the reward “promises somewhere later” is failing, it rewards, but does not motivate.

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

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