Dear Friends,

Today's workers no longer foresee job security; they expect to be rewarded in some manner for excellent work, especially if the remuneration helps enhance their marketability. The strategies outlined below can be applied to nearly any industry.

In a day and age where organisations are struggling to keep employee attrition down, innovative compensation strategies and a paradigm shift in the approach to compensation management has led to a more professional and mutually beneficial relationship. The old contract guaranteed employee loyalty and commitment in exchange for implicit promises of lifetime employment and tenure-based advancement. Given the business realities of the past decade, today's psychological contract requires that companies offer their workforces explicit time bound exchanges of rewards for performance, particularly rewards that enhance an individual's marketability.

The following are strategies for motivating employees under the new covenant:

Paying for Competencies
Analyze key organizational positions to determine what competencies- that is skills, knowledge, attributes- differentiate average from outstanding performance., Particularly those competencies most critical to achieving the organization's future focused objectives. Once determined, these competencies offer an empirically based standard against which to compensate employees.

Promoting for Development
The notion of building professional and behavioral competencies also forms a solid basis for planning development. Instead of moving people into "bigger" jobs, a competency-based approach might focus on providing targeted experiences in employees' current jobs- for example, special projects, task forces, or other temporary assignments- that promote important skills, knowledge, and behaviors.

Putting Employees in Charge
Employees, for their part, must seize the initiative to get ahead. Progressive companies provide information, tools and resources to facilitate career and professional development. But employees are typically responsible for managing their own careers. This can include conveying their career goals, looking for ways to enrich and enlarge their jobs, building future focused professional skills, and using informal networks throughout the organization and beyond to gain recognition and become aware of growth opportunities.

Flat Operating Structure
Despite initial drawbacks, downsizing and delayering should ultimately have a positive effect on career and professional development. Although streamlined organizations- compared to vast bureaucracies- do indeed offer fewer levels for traditional promotions, they are also less likely to hinder talented people. A flattened operating structure can mean new learning opportunities, greater levels of responsibility, increased access to senior management and added autonomy- all of which support growth and motivation. Perhaps the key challenge lies in eradicating the entrenched, hierarchy-based notions of success, which led to unnecessary layers of management in the first place.

Regards,

Nicole Jayson