In the last month, executives have been at the centre of a media storm. In a period of budget cuts and financial crisis, executive pay has been under intense scrutiny. Stephen Hester, the RBS chief executive, and Sly Bailey of Trinity Mirror, are only the latest in a long line of executives who have had to explain or even reject their bonuses.
According to an ICM survey, few people now believe that top bosses should be paid more than £1m a year. The poll of 2,000 adults also found two-thirds wanted wider representation from staff on remuneration committees.
What can change management tell us about this regular business dilemma?
Firstly, no one should be surprised to find that it is an issue. Plato was the first to propose executive salary caps, when he said that a community’s highest wage should not exceed five times its lowest. That was ancient Greece.
Secondly, a good plan and prep is required. How is remuneration calculated? Who is involved in the decision making process? Of course these questions need to be answered by taking into consideration different stakeholder needs and expectations.
Executive pay isn’t something that happens irregularly, it shouldn’t catch people by surprise. It should be trailed and communicated with context through a solid long term plan.
Bleak. That’s been the outlook of late. Public sector strikes, higher living costs, a never ending retirement age and general economic apocalypse have been the big news stories for what feels like forever now. We are living through thrifty times, and what was made abundantly clear in George Osborne’s Autumn statement last week (apart from the fact the government will fail to cut the deficit in 5 years, as promised) was that the UK faces a long and painful road to recovery.
The question is, just how much of an impact will the austerity measures and hard hitting rhetoric outlined in the Autumn statement have on those UK employees lucky enough to stay in a job? The answer seems to be, significant. In the public sector pay rises have been capped at 1% until 2015, in the private sector banks are being warned to cut bonuses and build up reserves in light of the eurozone crises and elsewhere, almost 50% of SMEs are cancelling the most sacred of employee events – the Christmas party.
This raises a thorny issue. In times of economic peril, just how committed are companies to keeping existing employees engaged? By removing both financial and non-financial incentives, either through headcount reduction, curbed compensation or the cancelling of employee events, businesses may be saving the pennies but potentially risking falling engagement and in turn productivity.
We think it’s crucial to mitigate against the risks of low employee engagement during times of austerity. It doesn’t have to be flashy, but some recognition is crucial.
What do you think?
Icons have international recognition. But they also have cultural bias.
Able and How is gearing up for international client work next week. And the office has been discussing how icons have a number of appealing similarities around the world. There are for example natural colours that are associated with apples: red, green or even yellow; and red and orange for fire.
Colour is also perceived differently across nations. So in many Islamic countries green may represent revolution or in the US red and blue denote the political colour preferences of Democrats and Republicans.
Can icons be truly international? Our work in the Middle East reveals that culturally neutral graphics work the best. We are avoiding any stars (religious symbols); handshaking (man-woman contact has specific rules) and animals (dogs and pigs in particular).
So, is there such a thing as a culturally neutral image?
Employee ‘enablement’ seems to be the latest term to emerge in the Internal Communications world. It has been mentioned in a few circles recently, including this article that suggests enablement is ‘the missing link to productivity’ in business today.
But is there really a difference between engagement and enablement? Is anyone out there using ‘enablement’ [...]
How do you get your daily digest of news and information? If it’s through online media you are in the majority of the world’s news readership. However recent research from the University of Oregon suggests that the way we ‘read’ affects recall. We tend to scan, semi-engage with content and not finish the end of an article. This study has [...]
How many times have you come across someone powerful and full of confidence articulating very few words? You may have been left wondering how they made such an impression.
The impact of non verbal communication is well-known, and Professor Albert Mehrabian’s research in the 1960s has provided extraordinary soundbites: “55% of meaning in communication is through facial expression.”
However, leaders need to [...]
Able and How has spotted a rare display of good stakeholder communication, after a fractious industrial dispute – all the way from Australia.
It comes from Qantas Airways, the Australian airline carrier, hot on the heels of the grounded fleet last week. Alan Joyce, CEO sent out a timely and informative note to frequent flyers in a reassuring tone that oozed [...]
Crisis. Economic instability. Strikes. Sinking stock prices. Inflation. It feels like never ending bad news leaving us with the question, both professional and personally: ‘how on earth can I have predicted that’? Sometimes you can’t. Crisis is crisis. But change, well, modern life and modern business is all about constant change and sometimes you get unexpected outcomes that are good [...]
The Able and How team have been spending a lot of time in the Middle East recently. Our colleagues on the ground there have punctuated our London-based client work (and occasional vociferous current affairs debates) with some very intriguing photos depicting slogans and every day signs in English and Arabic.
Able and How love the art of language and we spend [...]
At Able and How we are aware of the link between business performance and employee engagement. The benefits of enhancing the bond between employees, their colleagues and their organisations have been well documented over the last decade.
According to ORC International’s latest Perspectives survey, employee engagement in the UK is lagging behind global trends and has fallen to 17th place in [...]
