Management is all about how to drive the value factors within the corporation so that the value is created, strengthen, and sustained. Many tools have been created in order to achieve this goal, from strategy to process, from vision to practice, from design to application, and one of the main ideas in creating such value is to drive the people dynamics towards the direction the organization want them to. It is a common understanding that remuneration and incentive systems have been designed, applied, and refined as the basis of human motion towards this goal, sometimes they work, but mostly they fail, why?
So here’s why, yes money is one of the drivers, but not everyone happy with it, not even for C-suites (CEO, CFO, CIO, etc) level, they often questions about the anomaly of having high salary and incentives against their peers, ‘why we paid the same while I responsible to bigger risk’, or ‘why he got higher pay with less effort’, etc, etc. This close to a conclusion that we should put money out of the equation by saying salary is highly confidential and a strict subject of information that ought not to be shared to anyone. The act is alright, but not answering the challenge, since in normative basis, it is just like playing poker, either we actually know someone else’s card, or just being confident on our own, and we are make conclusion on the assumptions.
It is not over. The question again, what drives our motivation? Let’s take a look in another perspective with a simple example; Rudi Yizkiadi (not a real name, but if you presume that it is, I’m not blaming any of you) is a devoted employee who in his spare time loves to travel around the globe and taking pictures to be uploaded in his social networking site, by doing this he feels satisfied and recharged to live his life and work in a balanced yet high performing way (in his perspective, by the way). And then, in community events, the company value their devoted employees with meal voucher or super-exotic-coffee-blend discount, and since he is one of the devoted employees, Rudi get some of them. He may be pleased, but not as pleased as if he get travel voucher or a set of new lenses for his camera.
We are, beings of purpose, our motivation is based on our own purpose, sometimes it related to what we do as corporate people, but mostly not, if you are an investment banker who also love to put your money in the capital market and play with it, it’s good, because your hobby is highly related to what you do in daily routines. But how many of us as business analysts love to play guitar in our spare time, or go karaoke, or fishing, or hiking, or going for culinary adventure? Probably most of us do different thing from what we do as an employee. Why are we doing it? Why do we play guitar after long working hours? Why do we gone fishing? It’s because we love doing it, to do different thing differently is the way to accentuate ourselves, and the most likely motive is to hand over the stress to something else.
Another example explains that we are the being of purpose is this; if you happen to know the Linux Foundation or Free Software Foundation, the people behind the organization, who most of them have no formal job, they spare their time to make great programs that if it sold will be very expensive, and people out there are willing to pay for them. Yet they share it for free… The Economists says they are breaking the economic-law by not charging for all the time-consuming work they’ve done, The Psychologists say these people just want recognition over the contribution, or whatever. The point is that this evidence is not always congruent to the fact that people loves money, yet there’s people who do it for free. So money is not the answer for some people (or maybe most of them).
Customization comes in handy in this particular cases, should or should not a company knows each of their employees’ purpose is depend on how much the company willing to drive their human factor as one of the value factors into the expected level of commitment and engagement. That correlated directly to the company’s overall performance. By defining and translating each and everyone’s purpose, the company have bigger chance to reward every individual within their organization the full amount of customized recognition that not only creates the unique selling proposition as an employer, but also a more engaged environment and a culture that value diversification. Of course that must goes both ways, where employees expected to give the fullest of their capacity for the reward that they have and gained, striving for the company’s goal that have been designated to each of them with great enthusiasm. This probably will be the ideal, but it is not impossible whilst the means have represented the end.
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