Share the knowledge – December 2012

First of all let me wish you a very prosperous 2013. I hope this new year will bring you happiness and growth, and I look forward to our continued interactions through Compensation Insider in the coming 12 months :-).

And now, back to my regular schedule of posting !

Like every month, here are some of the best or most relevant Compensation & Benefits, performance management, HR and/or global mobility articles that I came across recently :

• Tim Sackett gives Comp pros a run for their money and wants to focus his ideal Compensation team on only one thing : paying the positions that are the biggest revenue drivers above the market so that we have the best talent there. Other Comp issues ? “You know what happens when you lead any industry in revenue?  All that crap tends to take care of itself”, he says. Fine – but that’s taking care of today. Don’t you also want to focus on the people who are driving innovation in your organisation so that you prepare the future ? Food for thought in any case…
• Shared by Stephanie Thomas at Proactive Employer, a short video of how Capuchin monkeys react to perceived unfairness – the experiment apparently prompted some blog posts to invite women to “throw the cucumber” when they are confronted to lower pay than men. The video itself is short at 2 and a half minutes but presented with a nice sense of humour. Here is the video itself : (email readers may have to click through to see it) :

• And here is Stephanie’s follow-up post on women and gender pay equality, saying that women need to negotiate their compensation more (men do it a lot more than women) but also to make sure we are comparing apples to apples when gathering pay information in order to prepare our arguments for the negotiation.
• Do bonuses matter ? They do if part of a fair and equitable rewards system. So, the overall results from the survey conducted by the author’s company show that good rewards system do not lead to high performance organisations, but are a hygiene factor necessary to have a high performing organisation. Nothing really new under the sun… BUT I like the list of the 12 characteristics of good reward systems so go and check it out.
• What would happen if we started paying bonuses in advance ? So the case is about paying a bonus in advance with threat of making the employee repay it in case of non-performance. In that case, loss aversion plays in full – definitely – and it positively impacts performance as employee will do their best to avoid the loss. I wonder however if it’s fully comparable to clawbacks for executives in case of wrongdoing, as stated in the World at Work article. Why ? Because executive bonuses are paid post performance like “normal” bonuses and the clawback in that case is not linked to lack of performance (ie : not intended by the person) but is instead linked to active wrongdoing, which is intentional and therefore the risk has been “accepted” and consciously taken by the executive… And, in the case of the teachers in the study, the performance evaluation is automatically due, while in the case of executive wrongdoing, well, those who engage in it choose to believe that the controls won’t be as systematic… Maybe some other readers have some research or experience to share on this comparison ? Did Dan Ariely write on this topic ?
• Attitudes of executives to pay and reward. This is an overview of the results of a PwC survey of over a 1,000 executives in many countries around the world and looks at the psychological aspect of incentives. A good read.
• Governance ? Ethics ? Don’t know what to do ? Check out this blog post from Dan Ariely commenting about a US government report titled “The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure”. You will smile but also think…
• Key issues for Directors in 2013. This post examines the increasing role of Board Directors, and the challenges they face in ensuring their duties in the best possible manner. Not focused on Compensation Committees, but worth reading for good governance.
• Survey says : employees want a pay raise in 2013 as their first job-related priority. What a surprise 😉 !
• Why everyone at my company has one job title – an inspirational read about the real value of job titles.
• In CFO.com, John Boudreau one of the HR gurus, explains why CFOs need HR in order to maximize business performance through sustainability or what he calls “the triple bottom line” : profit, planet, people. Now you get why he’s one of the most prominent HR gurus 🙂
• This one is a few months old but nevertheless still valid. Prasad Kurian shares insights on why the moment of sharing performance rating is so disliked by both employees and managers, and also  offers some ways to get, partially at least, past this major inconvenience.
• 10 skills every leader should develop in 2013 from Sharlyn Lauby at HR Bartender. I was interested to see content curation listed here – I know I spend a lot of effort curating content on this blog, for example through this Share the Knowledge column. And yes, it is hard and takes time to go through so much reading, identifying the “most worthy” and organising this information in a format that makes sense and is relevant to others.
• And as complement, here is an analysis of how leading CHROs see the future of HR as a “performance advisor”. Don’t miss out the original report from ic4p
• 5 ways to fix HR. An interesting approach from Laurie Ruettiman. I especially like point number 4: “Get your hands dirty. Everyone — from CEOs to your uncle Joe who hasn’t had a job in ten years — thinks they know more about HR than they really know. If you feel that HR is so awful, do a stint in the department and fix it.” Isn’t it the same when we ask employees who have a problem or complaint to come up with a proposal for a potential solution ? Line managers, you don’t like HR ? Join us and make us better !
• Pay in 2013 – mixed salary forecasts reveal two-speed Europe, says Hay.

For those of you who are interested in GCC and MENA articles, here are some regional pieces :

• A historic decision in the UAE : corporations and government entities will have to have females on their Boards. The announcement drew, obviously, a lot of attention. Clear advantages of women in leadership describes the positive impact of women and diversity in Boards for share price and economic results of their companies. Let’s finish with my own article about why the decision will have a profound impact on HR activities in the UAE in the coming years, and an example of one of the first companies to follow the new announcement in the UAE : they have appointed females to their Board.
• More jobs and more homes: Sheikh Khalifa announces vision for the country on the UAE’s 41st National Day.
• More than 20,000 jobs to be created for UAE Nationals over the next 5 years. And 2013 will be the year of emiratisation, as announced by Ministers in the past few weeks – so watch out for more news on the topic in the coming months.
  
• The UAE “expat package” is back – but this time bonuses are more modest. The title does not fully fit the content as the expat package was never gone – in the UAE we still get tax free (except for US passport holders) packages with allowances. Still, there are some comments about pay that may be of interest.

Best of the rest :

• A light guest post at Women of HR from my former colleague Hanadi El Sayyed
• Thanks to Paul Hebert at i2i incentives for highlighting this video on influence, based on the research from Robert Cialdini, best selling author of Influence : The psychology of Persuasion. A great way to spend 11 minutes ! Here is the video (email readers may have to click through to view it)