RAMONA E. F. ARNETT

Sales and production work is amenable to merit pay. Try it with white collar knowledge workers, teachers, government officials, computer programmers and writers and you have a disaster after your first assessments. Merit pay requires performance measurement, and that means ranking staff. The half that come out below average are immediately angry at the system that labels them as below average. The second quartile looks at the first quartile and finds colleagues who to them are little or no better than they, and a few who don’t work as hard. Some of the people who are at the top and get bonuses like the system that is so perspicacious as to reward them. However, most in the top quartile because they don’t agree that the ones who rank higher than they are really any better become negative. So over 75 percent of the workforce is unhappy and thinks the system is invalid or the raters are biased or just arbitrary. Before you ever consider installing merit pay, find an organization like yours that has it and talk to the workers—not the executives—those who have been assessed for their merit.

Any plan is better than no plan.

In my precinct, every person who showed up got to vote. I had to hack into the machines so that they could, but it was not hard to do. The scary thing about it is that I could have just as easily changed votes or allow people to vote multiple times. The machines are not very reliable, and they are easy to tamper with. I’m not even a computer expert. But my job was to ensure that everyone who showed up could vote, and that’s what I did. People all over the county were being denied their right to vote, but not at our precinct.

In my precinct, every person who showed up got to vote. I had to hack into the machines so that they could, but it was not hard to do. The scary thing about it is that I could have just as easily changed votes or allow people to vote multiple times. The machines are not very reliable, and they are easy to tamper with. I’m not even a computer expert. But my job was to ensure that everyone who showed up could vote, and that’s what I did. People all over the county were being denied their right to vote, but not at our precinct.

Sales and production work is amenable to merit pay. Try it with white collar knowledge workers, teachers, government officials, computer programmers and writers and you have a disaster after your first assessments. Merit pay requires performance measurement, and that means ranking staff. The half that come out below average are immediately angry at the system that labels them as below average. The second quartile looks at the first quartile and finds colleagues who to them are little or no better than they, and a few who don’t work as hard. Some of the people who are at the top and get bonuses like the system that is so perspicacious as to reward them. However, most in the top quartile because they don’t agree that the ones who rank higher than they are really any better become negative. So over 75 percent of the workforce is unhappy and thinks the system is invalid or the raters are biased or just arbitrary. Before you ever consider installing merit pay, find an organization like yours that has it and talk to the workers—not the executives—those who have been assessed for their merit.

Any plan is better than no plan.