Along these lines, it takes a certain amount of money to have me decide to take a job, and then from there empowerment or autonomy will probably result in me doing better at the job.
I agree. Funny, I had a training session with an academic management efficiency guy a couple years ago. He ran through this long list of stuff – TQM, Lean, whatever – and said, “Don’t let anybody fool you. This is all the same thing wrapped up in new, differently-named packages so managers get to do offsites in Jackson Hole and Honolulu every other year to learn the same thing that they’ve already learned. Talk about waste!”
I agree. It’s impossible to say that pay isn’t the most important thing, because if the pay/perks aren’t up to snuff, I simply can’t consider the job. No job, no matter how rewarding, is worth being broke and having to scramble. That said, if a job sucks but pays a lot, I’ll be looking for another job, and I won’t be as productive.
At the end of the day, I’m looking for net happiness. Not having to closely follow a budget or work a second job to make ends meet brings me happiness. Not having a job where I’m patronized or led around by the nose also brings me happiness. Would I leave my job for another job that paid twice as much, but also would be incredibly high-stress and make me miserable for 8-10 hours a day? No. Would I leave my job for another job that paid twice as much, I liked fairly well but didn’t empower me quite as much? Well, yeah, probably I would.
The problem with questions like ‘pay or empowerment’ is that companies misinterpret the results. One example: I worked with a company that pointed, repeatedly, to studies saying that people cared more about their relationship with their immediate supervisor than their pay. When we paid less than industry standard, overworked people, forced them to do overtime at the drop of a hat, and constantly changed around our criteria for the job, what happened? The immediate supervisors were blamed for the turnover. Because, of course, the study said that employees generally leave a job because of their direct manager.
We actually did a survey of outgoing employees, and the survey results indicated what the supervisors were saying: people were leaving due to pay, stress, overwork, bad conditions, not their managers. But the survey results were ignored because, after all, they didn’t agree with the study, and the study is science. And, of course, it was what the company wanted to be true. So the focus on driving the management harder, threatening them, forcing them to take useless training classes, etc. continued, since it was way cheaper than fixing the real problems with the organization. Guess what the results were? It was cheaper, but the money was wasted. It would have saved money, in the long run, to actually look at the data and make the more expensive changes needed, because we wouldn’t have paid for a lot of stuff that made no difference, aggravated good employees, and paid all of the turnover costs (and associated costs) on top of that.
Most companies lack the will or ability to honestly appraise themselves. They want to believe that there’s some magic (and cheap) way to fix morale issues. There simply isn’t. Don’t ask people to rank, well, what do you want more - decent pay, or not being treated like crap? People obviously want, and need, both. Ask better questions, and make honest attempts to improve and to assess your successes and failures.
I work for the pay and perks. I’ve got almost 30 years with PacBell/SBC/AT&T–if you were to believe our fearless leader, he’s all about empowerment. Down at street level, it’s just another catchphrase. I’ve seen all of those quality/team building/company rah-rah programs come and go. Six Sigma is the latest and greatest, and they’ve got metrics on how many people in each workgroup have to get their belts of whatever color. They’re attacking issues that I and my peers suggested fixes for more than a decade ago. If management had listened to us back then, they could be doing something more constructive with their time now.
It’s not really an and/or thing. Would you rather run a McDonalds or be a first-year associate at a top law firm making over $100k a year?
HR management surveys about what employees want are generally bullshit because HR people are generally imbeciles. You don’t need a survey to figure out what makes employees happy:
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Money - I don’t care what anyone says, people work for money. 99% of the work that needs to be done wouldn’t get done if it wasn’t paid. People want to feel that they are getting paid what they believe they are worth and that they would not be better off by changing jobs.
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Clear expectations - Whether you are a new intern or a vice president of a division, people generally want to know how they are being evaluated.
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Balance between support and autonomy - Most people don’t like to be micromanaged. Most people also don’t like to be given a project (or worse, nothing to do) and then just sort of left on their own.
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Treated with respect - Surprisingly, people don’t like it when you yell at them, are rude, or don’t respect their time away from the office.
If that’s a serious question I think I’d rather run a McDonalds. Other than that I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your post.
Give me money. That’s what I want.
Pay and responsibility typically go hand in hand. If you want more pay, you normally have to be willing to take on more responsibility, and if you take on more responsibility, it normally comes with more pay.
I chose option three. As I’ve said in past threads on similar topics, my formula is:
Not hating job > Money/Benefits > Liking job
I don’t consider “empowerment” necessary for me not to hate a job, so it’d fall into the least important category. Money is second…I’ve taken a significant pay cut to leave a job that had me dreading getting up in the morning, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Beyond that, I don’t expect to like my job all that much, or else I wouldn’t ask to be paid to do it.
Funny you should mention that. There is a Luckys and a Safeway near us. Cashiers at the Luckys can’t do anything without a managers approval. They are slow, sullen, and unpleasant, and we avoid the place whenever possible. In the Safeway the cashiers can do most stuff by themselves. They are mostly middle aged women. I don’t know for sure they are happy, but a lot of them have been there for years and seem damn cheerful. We go there for the bulk of our shopping.
One big reason that Toyota has a reputation for quality is that factory line workers can stop the line when they see a problem. Back 20 years ago this got implemented in an AT&T plant in Denver, and quality soared. You can empower both of these classes of jobs - but you have to trust the workers. That’s hard for some companies.
I detest work and ONLY do it for money; all that other stuff is just The Man’s ridiculous attempt at subterfuge, and I ain’t buying a lick of it.
I chose B - but I might have chosen C, the power to do what I want.
Empowerment is a form of respect, and I think respect is everything. If they pay you a crappy salary, I can see money being number one, since lack of money is lack of respect. Once you are doing well enough that this is not that huge an issue, then empowerment becomes everything.
I get to pick my projects and get to do a lot of industry activities as part of my job. If they told me that I’d have to only do assigned jobs, but that I was getting a 20% raise, I’d be out the door in five minutes flat. (And 20% of my salary is not chickenfeed.) Now, the fun stuff I do is useful, and often is stuff that they don’t realize they need until they hit a snag and find I have the solution already, but it is fun.
I bet I could be making more money if I toed the line during some times in my career - but I’d also be dealing with a lot more stress. Now excuse me, I have to go back to coding a tool to do something which more or less everyone says is impossible to do - but will only take me a week or two.
If you are just about the money, I’m pretty sure lawyers make more than franchise managers. But a franchise manager probably has a lot more autonomy than an associate in a law firm does initially.
Clearly, as I’m sure you’ve had plenty of opportunity over the past 30 years to find a job that offered more empowerment if you really wanted one.
Speaking as a mid-level manager, it isn’t always easy to just “empower” people. Some of my employees I can leave alone and they will get the job done. Others, have to be watched like children otherwise they will wander off and not do their job properly.
What sort of employee does a person who says “I’m only about the money” make? Well, I’m sure they will do their job, and not one bit more (and maybe even quite a bit less). They don’t seem to grasp the concept that by doing things that benefit the company, they benefit as well. Of course, good management is about making people feel as if they are part of the company and share in it’s success.
The worse kind of managers are those who actually punish any sort of initiative or creativity. Those sort of managers have no place in the modern business world.
That and positive thinking seminars, and blaring fox news 24/7 on all the company TVs in the hope that people internalize the anti-labor concepts promoted by it.
If a company tried to ‘empower’ me so they could avoid giving me a raise or benefits I’d make me want to work there less, not more.
Having said that, there is a difference between manipulative & non-manipulative empowerment agendas.
A whole lot of spending money?
Different Beatle. Well, “Money” wasn’t a Beatles original and “IGMMSOY” wasn’t a Harrison original either!
I rather a job which is creative in nature, which is why I picked “actual influence” over money.
But I am end up as a coder-drone or the sort for some boring off the shelf database application, just hand me the money.
I voted for “something else”.
I’d say that the most important thing is that my job be creative, and challenging (but not so challenging as to be frustrating).
If jobs were only 4 hours a week, I’d be happy to shovel shit for a living. But as jobs are around 40 hours per week, it’s really important to me that days don’t drag and my work is stimulating.
And I practice what I preach: I’m moving into an industry now that pays less than what I used to earn.
I agree with the OP in that, while I personally prefer a job where I can make decisions, it’s not true for everybody; also, for me this is true only after the job covers more basic needs. “Hobo” is a wonderfully independent position but doesn’t pay anywhere near enough.
I’ve got two speeds when it comes to jobs: Peon mode and Engineer mode. But, while I do find Engineer mode more enjoyable, what I can not withstand is those cases where on one hand I have an Engineer’s responsibilities and on ther other I’m expected to have a Peon’s lack of initiative, or where I have two bosses and each one wants a different gear. The situation where I can propose several options and influence which one is chosen is what I like best, is the ideal situation for me but not for everybody, I know many people who’d find it terrifying; and, the one I can’t stand is not the one where I can’t decide or influence pretty much anything: it’s the one where I’m asked to do an engineer’s job but at the same time keep in mind that Nobody Pays You To Think (ok, why did you hire me then? If you just wanted someone to make admirative noises at you, you could have hired someone from a temp agency!)
‘Empowerment’ is usually miles away from actual power–it’s giving you fake options to distract you from the ability to make truly meaningful choices. I’d rather have a few extra cents than the ability to vote on the colour of the office walls.
The knowledge that your choices actually matter, though, is worth its weight in gold. And, sometimes, pants-shittingly scary, which I think is part of it’s value.
I’m sorry to say that there are people in this thread who I wouldn’t have hired with a ten foot pole when I was managing. We were pretty good at screening out those in it just for the money, so I was lucky enough to not have had this problem very much. Not that it made life easy, because you had to ride herd on people wanting to go off in five different directions.
There are two types of people: those who say “tell me what to do” and those who say “I’m doing what I need to, but I see something over there that needs doing also.” Real empowerment is letting this second type thrive, and not telling them to sit down and shut up and do their work. And I totally agree with your last paragraph on what makes a bad manager. Google lets people work 10% of their time on their own projects, and all sorts of cool stuff has come out of that.