How to Pay professional Employees
post # 227 — October 31, 2006 — a Managing post
An accounting student writes in to ask:
I interned with an accounting firm that paid everyone (except for partners) by the hour. Under this system employees made a lot of money during tax season. People seemed to work much longer hours than at another firm I had worked in which paid straight salaries. It really did not seem they had so much more to do, but time-and-half wages were a huge opportunity cost of going home. “Time-in-seat†seemed to be a motivation which could only lead to a lack of efficiency.
I don’t blame the firm on this one—a lack of efficiency seems to be a fundamental problem with billable hour work in general because more hours translate to more pay. I can’t blame the employees either—why not use this incentive structure to their advantage? The partners encouraged people to work as much as they wanted.
At school, we studied a manufacturing company (Lincoln Electric) which pays its workers a piece rate. Lincoln requires a quality standard for each piece (no pay if the standard isn’t met and the employee has to fix things up on his/her own time). Teamwork is factored into a score that determines bonuses at the end of the year (and importantly, employees are held to the teamwork and other requirements). With year-end bonuses having the potential of 100% of the whole year’s wages, the employees take these rules seriously.
Obviously, you can’t really pay piece rate for a tax return (and I’m not even sure you would want to). Paying by the hour must inevitably put dollars ahead of excellence (at least slightly. Paying a salary currently seems like a best bet.
How should employees be compensated?
The Lincoln Electric case study is very famous in business schools, but I’m not aware of any professional firm that uses piece-rate wages for its employees. Does anyone else out there know of an example?
As a lot of people have discussed, paying people by the hour builds in lots of discincentives and poor behavior. Nevertheless, many firms do this, even if it is only in the aggregate form of paying bonuses annually for those juniors with the most billable hours.
I think this is a terrible system because junior employees don’t really get to control their own workload. It’s a partner who decides whether or not give a piece of work to junior person A or B. So getting more billable hours may just be a matter of being chosen more often. (Although you could argue that such a system serves as a quality screen — only the good juniors will be sought out by the partners who allocate work, so they will end up busier.)
There have been some firms that create a “free market†for work allocation — to get assigned to a job, juniors can offer to work for a discount off their salary, and partners can pay a premium over normal salary rated. That way, partners only sought out either the :best†for their jobs†or the cheapest internal resources for the basic work. I know firms (elite firms) where this lasted a long time.
In spite of its creativity, I’m against such models. All quantitative incentive schemes backfire (we’re dealing with smart people here!) Ultimately, I think you have to do what Alfie Kohn said “Pay people well (a salary) and work like mad to get them to forget about the money.†If you want them to work to higher quality, more collaboratively, with higher productivity, then you must MANAGE them to accomplish this. You can’t just design a scorecard and then say “go!â€
One thing in the Linoln Electric system is worth contemplating. A significant annual bonus for everyone based on company results and teamwork makes a LOT of sense to me.
Anyone else got different views?
Carl A. Singer said:
I’m 30 years past B-school, but as I recall Lincoln Electric’s claim to fame (or infamy) was a bonus earned w/ a 6-month payout stagger — so should you quit you’d loose your bonus (actual or credits towards.) The key — and this may go back to “Spunky” Meredith who taught a labor management course at my undergrad — Case Tech, was that this was the union busting tactic: higher pay & bonus — as long as no union.
Going back to “piece-work” as it was called. (I recall my father, a tailor, went to work in a metal fabrication factory during the Korean war, as that’s where the money was.) Piece-work requires a uniform measureable output and easily communicated / measureable standards of (output) acceptability. The faster you worked (i.e., the more output you produced) the more money you received. And, since, corporate profit was correlated to output, the more profit for the corporation.
There may be limited “white-collar” situations that might lend themselves to such measures — but it’s usually a stretch.
The subjective allocating of work is really an interesting topic (not to be confused with resource leveling, etc.) I recall the cultural difference when IBM’s Global Services consulting and PWC’s consulting wed. Overstating — and there’s plenty of gray area — utilization is key for the individual’s (personal) success — in the IBM model, to a great extent it was self-managed. The individual contributor needed to manage their own utilization by doing great work and demonstrating same so project leaders would pick them — but they also (sometimes) had to avoid short-term assignments that might land them on the beach / Bench should they miss the beginning of a major new opportunity, etc. The PWC model was that utilization was more of a partner’s responsibility — he or she was responsible for the members of their team (family.)
I may have overstated — but the perhaps I’ve identified the two extremes — bottom up (the individual tries to manage their assignments) and top down (the manager does ….)
I recall a specific example when I was an facilitating account planning session for a major client — We needed a key expert to parachute in for 3 days — getting him was extremely difficult because (despite pulling rank) team leadership couldn’t assuage his fears re: being on the bench after a short assignment. Clearly a conflict between what’s best for the client / project and what’s perceived as best for the consultant.
Carl
posted on October 31, 2006