history quiz

Course

Professor

[Name of Institution]

March 08,2019

Discuss four possible limitations of merit pay programs.

Merit pay programs are an effective way to increase the employee motivation and achieve better productivity of the employees. Merit pay programs are a means to provide extra income to the employees that show performance according to the set merit. Employees may be more devoted to work having an incentive of extra income. But there are several limitations to the merit pay programs too. Some of these are listed below.

1. Extra financial resources are required to gauge the performance of employees. To have a merit pay program in an organization, it is necessary to have performance measuring metrics in place which must be followed. The tackling of these tasks incurs extra cost to the organization which becomes difficult to achieve.

2. Lack of communication between management or supervisors and the employees is another reason that limits the effectiveness of merit pay program. Measuring the performance and acknowledging the contributions of each employee requires appropriate communication skills of the supervisor and also employee. Due to this limitation, the merit pay programs are highly dependent on the skills of supervisor too

3. Troublesome relationships between an employer and employee may also hinder the expected results. Measuring the performance is sometimes a matter of perception. An employee may be very productive in the workplace and does the expected amount of work and meets the constraints set by the project coordinator, he may not be deserving a pay increase or merit because the employer’s relationship with that employee are deteriorating. Interpersonal relationships are a necessity in workplace but many productive employees deserving a merit are denied due to unhealthy employer-employee relationships.

4. Poor measures of performance are another limitation to merit pay system. The nature of jobs and skills vary which also requires different mechanisms to measure job performance of. Employees. Some place can utilize the objective mechanism, but this is not possible for all and therefore a subjective method to gauge performance must be used. For these cases, the results may sometimes be erroneous, and this frowns employees who expect reward for their effort.

Under what conditions is it appropriate for companies to adopt individual incentive pay plan?

Individual incentive plans are the reward systems that are tied to the productivity and performance of the employees. They are used to keep the employee motivated, retain them and direct the workforce for the appropriate behavior. Companies should adopt incentive plans if the benefits of such investment are more than the amount of money company will use to have such a program. Secondly, it could be used only if the company wants to retain its productive and skilled employees. If a company has very experienced work force and wants to retain them, it may consider having an individual incentive plans.

Subjective performance evaluations are subject to several rater errors, which makes objective measures seem a better alternative. Discuss when subjective performance evaluations might be better (or more feasible) than objective ratings.

The objective and subjective measurements are the two ways in which organizations gauge the performance of its employees. The objective ratings are the discrete measurements used for measuring the performance of employees. They are utilized in cases where the tasks can be referred in terms of discrete numbers like number of clients served, days of attendance etc. Such sort of jobs use objective ratings. The second form is the subjective rating that are used for complex tasks that cannot be described merely with numbers. They require skills, time and expertise. Job types that are more complicated and cannot be marked with number use subjective ratings.

Many compensation professionals are faced with making choices about which

discretionary benefits to drop because funds are limited and the costs of these benefits continually increase. Assume you must make such choices. Rank-order discretionary benefits from the ones you would most likely eliminate to the ones you would least likely eliminate. Explain your rationale. Do such factors as the demographic composition of the workforce of the company matter? Explain

The discretionary benefits include the benefits given to the employees without a mandate of law. There are three categories of these benefits. Protection programs, services and the paid time off. The protection programs include insurance, medical bills, reimbursements etc. Paid time off means holidays, maternity and sick leaves. Services include family funds, college funds etc. If I am to drop a benefit I would most likely drop the services. The reason being they incur much cost and can be found through other means in the community. And the benefits that I will least likely drop are the protection programs like insurance because they are the necessary entity and must be considered by the employee.

The authors of these articles focuses on a number of things relating mostly to

indirect compensation. Based on your experiences and readings, what do you see as the future of benefits? How do you envision benefits evolving?

The benefits programs are witnessed to be evolving over time. In the prior times, the benefits were limited to only the leaves and extra bonuses. It then evolved to more services and family protection funds. This era has quite evolved benefits providing trips and lunch and even gifts fir the deserving employees. In the future the benefits will become more sophisticated and fascinating and will cover other areas as well. Like Google provides baby bonding fund for diapers and formulas and other necessities of infants.