Good Example Of Essay On Pay for Performance

Abstract

Despite the logical expectation of the success of the pay-for-performance program introduced to educational facilities, the project is not considered as one. Even though the necessity of educational level increase is recognized, the P4P program may not be the right motivational solution for the teachers, since it has a list of its disadvantages for both, employer and employee. Not only it is difficult to establish and maintain a fair and working performance evaluation system, which would consider all of the aspects of teachers’ work, but it is also difficult to operate the human factor with its prejudice and attitudes. Unfortunately, there is no standardized option of how to operate the pay-for-performance program successfully, since the education facilities are differentiated by the list of qualities, which correspond to their objectives and vision and should be taken into account; this means that each organization will need to establish its own sophisticated data collection system, differentiated motivational bonus offers, and the unique approaches to the needs of teachers, students and the society first.

The importance of the teachers’ input into nowadays society development process seems to be as obvious as the air we breathe to support body functions. The teacher has to be a mentor for students and other teachers as well. With the appearance of the push for higher standards we can notice the increase in pay-for performance approaches within the educational facilities. Idealistically, pay-for performance programs should encourage employees to do their best while not pressing any obligations on how to do it; it also should increase competition between the teachers, thus, positively influencing the overall quality of the education; and the program should reward people fairly due to the results that they have achieved. However, despite the expected, the program failed to produce its intended results.

The main disadvantages of the P4P program from the employees’ perspective are recognized as the following: negative competition among teachers and teams – because of the constant necessity to stand out from the group and outperform the requested standards teachers may lose the positive attitude towards other employees, and such factor gets especially crucial when comes to mentoring new teachers, where the trust and support is vital for the organization. “There was reduced mobility between teams, preventing the transfer of learning across teams” (Lagace, 2003); concentration on certain subjects only – when teachers are able to track the amount of pay, they can choose on how to achieve it, so the overall skills and knowledge development between teachers can drop due to the fact that some teachers may concentrate all the efforts in one extracurricular area. “they motivate employees to focus excessively on doing what they need to do to gain rewards, sometimes at the expense of doing other things that would help the organization” (Legace, 2003); the appearance of immorality – it is luckily that teachers will be unwilling to share any useful and outstanding information with other employees because of their desire receive the reward themselves; inability of total control – because of the existence of certain external factors, which surely have the power to influence the outcomes of teachers’ performance and are unluckily to be controlled or influenced, the possibility of teachers’ dissatisfaction and demotivation can occur, since the efforts performed would not show the desired results, thus the teachers would not gain their benefits; the absence of process development – the lack of information sharing due to the increased internal competition would prevent the technology of teaching process from its development, since instead of improving the learning mechanism and offering the solutions to the most critical issues, the teachers would be too afraid of the updated due to the implemented solution and, thus, higher standards for their job performance.

The P4P program has also several imperative disadvantages for the employer. First of all, it is the expensiveness of the program to be introduced. Idealistically, every employee would be willing to increase his or her bonus, thus, the organization will have to sign up bigger checks with each month. The second factor would be the subjectivity of the performance evaluation factors. “Improving teacher quality and alleviating shortages require a comprehensive approach to educator talent management” and “vision and leadership from administrators are crucial” (Laine, Grubb, 2009). Some administrators can be mislead by the subjective point of view, thus, the possibility of underestimated and overestimated employees can occur, which can lead to the loss of employees and decrease of the productivity level due to the gained employees’ decrease in self esteem. This follows us to the third disadvantage, which is the distrust to the management team and their decisions. If such situation occurs the management will have a trouble influencing the teaching methodology. Because of the initial intension to minimize the management interaction with the learning process by giving teachers the freedom to choose their own methods, the implemented P4P program by doing so may harm organizations’ image. The forth and the most vivid disadvantage for the employer, in my opinion, is the incredible difficulties in transferring the performance results from qualitative into quantitative, which allows them to be measured and analyzed. The entire system of differentiated evaluation methods should be developed and properly maintained in order to distribute bonuses fairly.

In order to make a clear conclusion about why the pay-for performance offer is not yet successful within the education facilities, we should understand the possible ways in which the analytical evaluation of the program effectiveness can be made. First of all the management should consider the exact ways of teachers’ performance evaluation. Moreover, this should not be limited by grading system only, since “beyond basic academic skills, corporate leaders have consistently cited the need for critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and collaboration, communication skills, and good work ethic as the keys to worker success” (Laine, Grubb, 2009). Thus, in order to evaluate the performance properly the different feedbacks are supposed to be collected: from students regarding the teachers’ performance, from parents regarding the children’s development, from teachers regarding their colleagues, the grading results, regular knowledge tests to track teachers’ improvement etc. An “individual success can and should be measured by organizational success” (Yerre, 2012). Thus, the success of the program can be seen with the help of the comparative analysis of the achieved and measurable goals of the organization. By conducting the comparison of how fast and productive the changes are implemented and the targets are achieved, with the introduction of the new techniques and solutions to the daily issues, and by the increased number of positive feedbacks can the organization evaluate the effectiveness of the P4P program.

When thinking of why is the P4P program within the educational facilities not yet successful, I have come to the conclusion of two reasons. First of all, the entire motivational prejudice that teachers “must value the financial rewards more than student success” should be reviewed (Laine, Grubb, 2009). As if teachers know exactly what to do in order for the students to succeed, but they are not doing so intentionally, because nobody offers them a bonus. “Some teachers could certainly do a better job, but they mostly need mentoring, support, supervision, and training in new techniques – plus opportunities to learn, grow, and take on additional responsibilities” (Laine, Grubb, 2009). Thus, the entire motivational approach for pay-for-performance within schools should be reconsidered. Secondly, “there is an implicit negotiation between what management wants and expects, and what employees want and expect” (Lagace, 2003). In order to settle this part, “to strike the right balance, leaders need to understand the behaviors of each employee group responsible for creating or preserving organizational value and use that knowledge to develop reward programs that encourage those behaviors” (Yerre, 2012).

References

Laine, S., Grubb, N. (2009). Raise Teacher’s Salaries. Bloomberg Business.

Retrieved from: http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2009/03/raise_teachers.html

Lagace, M. (14th of April, 2003). Pay-for-Performance doesn’t always pay off. Harvard Business School.

Retrieved from: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/pay-for-performance-doesnt-always-pay-off

Yerre, B. (3rd of January, 2012). Effective pay-for-performance Strategies. Human Recourse. Executive online.

Retrieved from: http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/view/story.jhtml?id=533344245