D'Arcy commented on a
Inc magazine article by Joel Spolsky on rewarding employees. I like D'Arcy's comments, and, rather than replying to his comment, I have many ideas of my own.
How do you reward IT employees? And what do you reward them for? Joel has some interesting examples - do you reward the intern who brings a new million dollar business idea, or do you reward the rest of the team who is finishing a product that will double the regular revenue of the biz?
We have all heard the horror stories. "If you just get this delivered on-time, then you will all get a bonus/trip/whatever". The manager knows that the project won't be on-time, so there is no risk to him and only frustration for everyone else.
I worked for a small company and worked many hours on a project. When review time came I expected a raise. Maybe not for the hours worked and success, but I had gained and demonstrated many skills which could translate into future projects (this is a key idea that I will come back to shortly). My boss said that I had done a good job, but in his opinion the project and its timeline and workload were exceptions and not the rule. And that the next six months or year did not have extraordinary projects that would require longer hours, so why increase the pay? I protested about the long hours. Then he bragged that he basically got all that for the same price, which showed that he was shrewd business man (and a jackass).
If you live and work in corporate IT-land this may be quite different than if you work for an IT-only business or service. Corporate culture may have a specific reward structure (or no reward structure).
Tim Harford's book The Logic of Life - the Rational Economics of an Irrational World, (a book I recommend), is all about incentives in daily life. The book has a chapter on the rationality of a manager pitting all workers against each other for that larger raise. This behavior has built-in incentives for the manager. The idea is that raises are given out based on comparitive performance. If someone works 60 hours a week, he is most likely to get that top raise, while the rest get decreasingly less, with some in the department getting nothing. I worked in a place like that where the people who worked those long hours got 3% and everyone else got less. Pretty soon people don't care anymore, especially for a measly 3%.
At one place I worked, there were quarterly IT awards - a certificate and some cash reward. Almost all of the things rewarded were based on an IT person putting in long hours to fix something or to bail out the business. And, almost without fail, these instances actually involved some emergency that could have been avoided by better business practices, better IT practices (like documenting something before someone leaves, fixing bugs a little better before go-live, or avoiding obvious risk in the first place). What they were rewarding was a cowboy-coder, hero culture, where someone saves the day in the middle of the night. And, similar to Joel's examples, people grumbled because they compared their project to the other guy's project. Or a person got a $20 certificate to the company store and a resulting lime green company-logo'd shirt (because that was the only one available) for his efforts.
And what about pay? Are performance reviews focusing on past performance or on traits, responsibilities, and gained and demonstrated skills which can translate into future performance? I think that they should have a balance of both, but definitely stress the latter. And stressing skills which will likely translate into future performance should be the focus of increases in pay.
What do you think?