Using ratings from other employees is not a bad idea. Giving actual dollar amounts to employees and asking them to work it out amongst themselves is epically horrible. There will inevitably be close friends who just give each other everything, and groups of people who work out exactly how to spread the money amongst each other. In this situation, the person who honestly allocates the money based on merit loses, and the person who uses the bonus money as a bargaining chip wins. Is that the behavior you want to encourage in your workplace? Are you prepared to deal with the divisions and unpleasantness that will inevitably follow?
I can’t imagine a work environment where being popular is a guarantee of being the best worker. I mean, I can imagine a job where being popular is PART of being the best worker, but it’s not the only part, or even the most important part.
Well, I guess that hookers have to be popular with their johns, but I would imagine that they wouldn’t be necessarily be popular with other hookers in the same brothel, or working the same corner, or working for the same pimp.
I’ve held a lot of jobs over the years, but I can’ t think of one where this is true for everyone in the workplace. Can you please explain the work environment you are thinking of?
The fact that you cannot imagine such a work environment does not mean that one does not exist. CCL hit the nail on the head upthread–it could work in an environment where pretty much everyone has the same job and all are responsible for getting certain tasks accomplished.
Here’s an example: an IT help desk at a large company. Say it is structured so that they initially divvy up the work somehow but everyone is equally responsible for getting all the work done. Each person may have specific expertise or have encountered a problem before, so teamwork and clear and fast communication would be key, I would think. I’d bet that folks would generally give the money to the guy willing to stay late to handle the last few problems and who always chimes in with a helpful suggestion that solves the user’s issue.
I think it’s a terrible idea. Employees are going to make pacts to guarantee a certain amount of bonus. People will waste a lot of time discussing this instead of doing their jobs. Ultimately, many will feel ripped off.
If I were put in this situation, as a protest I would give my bonus to the top four people in the company (CEO, CFO, CIO, and CTO) who probably are not aware of what’s going on. Once they received their “bonus,” they would hopefully question what was happening and put a stop to it.
Rand, my last job was at an IT desk desk for a large company. I still think it’s a terrible idea. While I was happy to help my co-workers, doing that wasn’t really the focus of my job; my focus was on resolving issues and completing projects for my manager. I could accept that ratings from internal users could affect my bonus, and I could accept that my manager could control my bonus, but I honestly don’t see why my co-workers would know the most about my performance.
What my co-workers would know, ultimately, is how easy I am making things for them. That isn’t always a good thing. One of my co-workers (of a very small number; help desks aren’t that big) disliked me because I was making her look bad. I consistently had to retrain her on the same thing again and again, even including things she had trained me on months before. She was unqualified, and spent most of her day wandering around complaining about everything and everyone. Inevitably, one of two things would have happened: she wouldn’t have given out the bonuses fairly, or she would have considered the amount that she received to be insufficient and would make a huge stink about it. Actually, probably both. I have no doubt that she would have tried to interrogate me about how much I gave her.
I think that feedback from your co-workers is a positive thing. But, ultimately, sometimes your co-workers just aren’t your friends. Do you honestly think that the all-star person who does lots of extra work and stays late makes the most friends amongst staff and will get the most accolades? Managers love all-stars. Co-workers often don’t. They will figure that the all-star makes more money anyway and give it to their friends, or just distribute it completely evenly to avoid rocking the boat.
If we had extended it outside the help desk to include the greater IT team, it would get even worse. The IT techs’ favorite help desk people were the ones that never assigned them tickets and never called them, and who never held them accountable for screwing around. The help desk was specifically instructed to call managers at certain points of time, but this didn’t help us win friends. It did help tickets get done, though. Do you think they would have given us much of a bonus?
We actually did peer reviews of tickets in that department, and they were widely considered to be a colossal failure. Because the peer reviews themselves weren’t rated or reviewed by management, what happened? People breezed through them giving everyone 5/5 to avoid rocking the boat, or they nitpicked all kinds of stuff that wasn’t even in the guidelines. Sorry, but I don’t want my bonus based on something like that.
But even in your hypothetical, the person getting rewarded isn’t the person who’s the most popular. It’s the person who best helps out the team (i.e. the best worker). He or she should will be getting a bonus based upon job performance…which is what bonuses are supposed to be about.
So best case scenario is everything works out great and everyone gets the bonuses they’d be entitled to if you used a more rational system. A more likely scenario is that even in this type of workplace, humans are humans and they’re inherently greedy. The whole structure turns into Lord of the Flies.
I know what my people are doing. I don’t really know what the other manager’s people are doing. We still rate them against each other.
I hate to break this to you people, but your review is a popularity contest anyway. In any place where I’ve worked, management ranks the employees against each other. Now there is somewhat of a correlation between job performance and how popular you are with the managers, however it works both ways. Does a manager likes you because you are a hard worker or do they give you a lot of opportunities to demonstrate your hard work because they like you? Or is it just about kissing ass. Ultimately it just becomes a popularity contest with management.
How would you know if this was a good idea anyway? If management asigned bonuses and you didn’t like how they turned out, you would say management are idiots and jerks. You don’t like how bonuses turn out with your peers deciding them, then your peers are idiots and jerks.
Really what it sounds like is everyone thinks they are the best worker, they don’t get along with their coworkers and they think management will just recognize how good their work is.
As a manager, it doesn’t do me any good if you are the most productive employee (whatever that means), but you bring down the rest of the team with a shitty attitude.
There is even a special word for this: calibration. You often have to endure an elaborate and somewhat degrading “360 degree” review whose only purpose is to justify the arbitrary rating you’re given after the brutal calibration meetings. There is something refreshing about just letting employees vote with their wallets on who their most popular colleagues are. It cuts down on the huge transactional and psychic costs of employee reviews and really just accomplishes the same thing.