Loyalty discount
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The Human Resources military-industrial complex
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Loyalty discount
ˈlɔɪəlti ˈdɪskaʊnt (n.)
The great falsification of the human resources dogma.
For the strictures of salary bands, forced ranking, gerrymandered performance appraisal system — all the great apocrypha of the HR canon — mean that through time how much a given employee is paid will decouple from whatever value she offers the firm, however meagre.[1]
Over time, those who remain loyal to the firm are penalised. The only way to correct this — to mark yourself to market — is to join a competitor.
To be sure, salaries may drift upwards, decade by decade, courtesy of HR’s finely honed calculus, which 8s predicated on abstract value: a director is worth more than an associate director; a good associate director should be paid more than a bad one. All true, and fair, in the abstract, but this is to impose the tyranny of the average on everyone.
The managed world loves its archetypes. Just as the common law has its reasonable person, economics its rational one, the boxwallahs of personnel have their average employee.
But there is no average employee. It is an emergent property of an unstable group. It includes the young savant, who will be catapulted out of the cohort to bigger, brighter things, and the weak gazelle who should insh’Allah, be torpedoed from it. Neither will be there in a year's time. Yet HR insists on drawing an average from these varying trajectories and holding everyone to it.. No single employee at any time has both characteristics. -one at the firm operates in the abstract
See also
References
- ↑ As we have remarked elsewhere, it is more or less axiomatic that all employees contribute some positive value to their organisation. Except, possibly, the unnamed Italian hospital worker who bunked off for fifteen years.