Treating people equally

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It is important to employees they feel that they are receiving reasonable reward for the work and effort that they are providing. If not they will feel demotivated and unappreciated.

In addition to what employees deem to be fair in isolation, people also use reference points to compare what they give and receive to what others give and receive.

Most employees will not be consciously comparing themselves against others on a day-to-day basis. However, at times when praise or reward is given out to colleagues they are likely to consider whether the colleague was worthy of the particular praise or reward by, thinking about it in the context of what themselves and the rest of the team delivered. If they consider the praise reward to be unfairly distributed they are likely to become dissatisfied and demotivated.

Remuneration

As well as pay, remuneration covers bonuses, commission and other fringe benefits. At some point most employees will consider whether their remuneration package is fair. They may compare themselves in relation to what other people do for their remuneration package in the organisation. They may also compare what they receive to what is being offered by other organisations.

Dissatisfaction and demotivation can set in if they feel that they are being treated inequitably.

How should you solve this? The important point here is that 'they feel like they are being treated inequitably'. You should try to find out what is causing this feeling - where and what is the perceived inequality? Once you know, you can address the problem.

You should of course try to ensure that remuneration is fair in comparison with that of other people doing a similar role in the organisation and in comparison with similar roles in other organisations (where possible).

Other factors

Equitable treatment is not just related to remuneration. Employees may compare a variety of different factors to build up a picture of whether they are being treated fairly. Examples include:

• size of desk/office space
• holiday allowance
• amount of time and attention given by the manager
• profile of tasks they are given to perform.

Have your say

How do you make sure that renumeration is fair? How do you make sure that the other factors are fair? How do you deal with disputes around this? Have you unwittingly treated a staff member in an inequitable way or been accused of doing so? What happened?

Talk to others on the Managing staff forum.