Sometime in the mid-1880s, Thomas Edison famously told Nikola Tesla he would receive a $50,000 bonus if he could design over a dozen different types of full-scale inventions for him. Edison lied to Tesla. After compounded financial and logistical frustrations, Tesla eventually lost interest in working for Edison, resigned from his post, and sought employment with Westinghouse Electric—one of Edison’s competitors.
With that new, more benevolent employer, Tesla went on to become noted for among many other things the development of the alternating-current electrical supply system. Truly, for many, passion and love for the job definitely play a role in the effectiveness put into discharging duties.
Yet it is as well true that people’s personal bottom lines are a big part of the reason they enter into their professions and continue to push themselves to work to the best of their capacity; from sustained motivation to fostering and preserving loyalty to one’s employer, and as well to quota drive, everything ultimately boils down to the nature of remuneration.
To begin, poor remuneration gradually works to kill the working spirit of any human resource. This is because even those who derive the greatest joy from the sort of work they do, still have to as a matter of necessity, address the expenses which are a pressing part of everyday life. A situation of poor returns for one’s efforts is very likely to see work output eventually begin to correlate positively with the nature of those poor salary returns. For example, in Ghana today, there are many nurses who reportedly simply embark on their daily commutes to work, apathetically go through the motions, return to their homes, and repeat that bland, listless cycle till their paychecks are due at the end of the month.
A lot of them feel as though there is no point making any remarkable effort at their workplaces because it ultimately is for what they perceive to be a paltry salary; correspondence with a number of Nursing Officers revealed that many registered degree nurses in Ghana today have a monthly take-home salary of between GH₵2,100-GH₵2,400. Diploma and certificate nurses, having lower professional qualifications, make less—GH₵1,600-GH₵1,800 and GH₵1,000-GH₵1,200 respectively, all this depending on their sector and organization of employment, then experience and/or rank. Depending on family size and/or cost and standard of living, these figures may either seem fairly decent or woefully insufficient.
Yet, however, the primary concern within the nursing community is that payment in actuality does not always reflect the above-quoted figures, even, and remuneration receipt oftentimes isn’t prompt, and typically arrives sporadically and piecemeal.
On account of all the above, like many other Ghanaians they live in constant situations in which they sustain families and/or themselves on loans, then see the large chunk of their ‘meagre’ salaries go into clearing those loans in full or in part, only to begin the cycle of incurring debt when the rest of their funds invariably run dry. Having to live a life of that sort can understandably work very hard at killing the passion that led those people to enter the field of nursing, and in many healthcare institutions across the Ghanaian nation today that really is the situation; it even goes as far as to affect their public relations reputation and image, and hence, affect public trust in them.
Somewhat tangentially, beyond good pay, incentivization is a rather key concern. It is fairly easy to be dismissive of work incentives and conclude that a salary is all the incentive a worker would need. Yet it would be found that in a number of circumstances, incentivization is a greatly competent motivator for consistent or even boosted performance at work.
Many professionals, in general, feel that the high quality of their work ought to be rewarded with a correspondingly high standard of pay, and anything short of that, or the absence of decent pay raise opportunities or even incentives, would dampen their motivation and there would eventually be diminishing returns where worker output is concerned.
Secondly, on the back of that latter statement, there is a strong relationship between payment, and the output standard, and the loyalty of a worker to an institution. To tackle the loyalty element of the topical statement, it is understandable that decent or proper payment would result in a heightened sense of loyalty from a worker to an employer; while a poor or even entry-level standard of payment would result in a situation of rather deficient loyalty to that employing firm.
Many workers find themselves in a position in which they are with an employer, [either fairly or barely] meeting what is required of them, while in their hearts they strategize and seek, or wait gingerly for an opportunity with a firm which would offer them better financial prospects.
Fundamentally, they struggle to give off the best of their efforts because they may deem their current employers or situation to be unworthy of what they fully have to offer; this especially is in cases in which more and more is required of workers but for the same level of remuneration over even after pay cuts, mostly because many employers know that even with underpayment, workers still are unwilling to resign from those scarce jobs and have to struggle with the realm and ramifications of unemployment.
As with the cited instance of the great Tesla, people will at the first suitable opportunity very willingly carry their prospects elsewhere, if they deem their current situations and employers to respectively be woefully unmotivating and unworthy of the full quality of services they can offer.
However, in an alternate situation, workers who are compensated decently for their efforts and kept incentivized in varied ways, even when other possibly better opportunities arise, may very well choose to stay with the employer who in summation gives them everything they need to thrive. In a situation of that sort workers would be able to focus on going the extra mile in their work, and would eventually progressively surpass their own output milestones.
Put another way, a situation of very good remuneration allows workers to both retain loyalty to their company and continue to strive to outperform even their best of efforts.
To continue, quota systems can have a rather positive effect on worker output. Quota payment may be expressed as fixed payment allocation or share corresponding to a given unit or duration of the performance. Quotas are typically implemented on an individual, group, departmental, or even organizational level, but at whichever level the use of corresponding quotas has a very high possibility to activate the best in any human resource.
Even from the perspective of the layperson, it can be understood that gaining says forty Ghanaian cedis for every four competent output units, would mean that the more competent output units, the more one could make; or, say, the more hours one works, the more one may make.
Quota payment has very potent motivational power with workers, and that is at the very core of it—motivation. Workers who have a high mental standard for their service would be intrinsically motivated to continue to push themselves, and the use of quota payment would only make it that much better for them because after all, the more work they do, and the better the quality of that work, the more they earn for themselves. It as well teaches them the monetary value of prudent high-quality output as opposed to low-quality output.
The motivation could as well be extrinsic and would sufficiently spur those who typically might need more of an outside push to do better. It is the same thing for those individuals; the better they do, the more they can earn. The less they do, and the lower the quality of their output, the less they earn. For all workers, as well, there is the implicit understanding that if they underperform and continue to do so, there is the real risk of being replaced by those individuals who would be far hungrier and livelier than they.
So this is fair and beneficial for both the firm and the human resource. Now consider this on a team or departmental level. With every unit worker having the mindset of higher performance equalling higher pay, output at the group or departmental level would be progressively better and better. On a tangential matter, it for example is for no trivial reason that some companies have ‘worker of the month’ incentives.
Attaining those achievements comes with varied perquisites which spur workers to aspire to do even better and better. In a more different situation, though, with payment being independent of work output or output duration, it is possible to have a situation of lowered productivity because after all, good or bad, payment remains the same for all output, and even if the workers receive no special incentives, they regardless would be unconcerned since per zero payment-to-output correlation, they lose nothing for giving off suboptimal performance, either.
This is at times observed in the public sector where some workers allow job security to negatively affect their work ethic. Implementing quotas balances out both scenarios rather efficiently.
In conclusion, it should be stated that the ideal situation really would be one in which workers received, if not comfortable, then at the least, adequate remuneration—a payment which positively correlates with the quality of their competence and output. It serves to sustain workers’ passion as professionals, it works to preserve their enterprise loyalty and allows them to focus solely on being the best individual human resource they could be, and it inspires them to be willing to excel in their efforts as team units.
The substantive boost in worker productivity in the grand scheme of things works to push employing firms far higher; and then, on the even larger scale, it works to push entire sectors and even entire economies far higher. Pay is as tied into productivity as the culture of a people is tied into an expression of their religious ideology.
Good pay, along with measures that check worker behaviour, will have a very strong likelihood of resulting in progressively greater and greater worker productivity, and as has been stated already, can have a positively terrific golden goose effect on a nation.