Recently I’ve been reading about rewards and engagement with the obvious assertion that positive rewards lead to an increase in employee engagement and performance. Of course, over the years there have also been many studies refuting this idea with some even implying that rewards, especially pay, may actually decrease performance.

I’m sorry, but I am not going to put an end to this controversy. Instead, I would like to look at this from a different angle. Part of the problem with this issue may be the simple concept of “Different strokes for different folks.” So, being a survey researcher, I would like to look at this from the perspective of finding out what is important to the specific employees in question. That is, forget for a moment the general philosophical concept and focus on a specific concept – what do my employees want?

I know that this seems obvious and after all this is the basis for conducting employee surveys, but sometimes organizations just don’t get it.

Many years ago I was working with a large organization in the service sector. Although they were still doing well they had a significant number of unfilled positions on the books. It didn’t used to be that way so they wondered what was going on, what had changed. They decided that an employee survey was the way to proceed. They were sincere in wanting to know what their employees were thinking.

One of the key findings was that employees were very dissatisfied with their pay. (No, this is not always the case in employee survey research. And, by the way, benefits were given a very positive rating by these same employees.) However, management didn’t buy into this. They thought that their pay structure was fair. Remembering that they had conducted an employee survey a few years earlier, they wondered how this finding compared to that earlier survey. Basically, that survey had shown the exact same thing. Nothing had changed. Still, they didn’t buy it.

But there was even more information at their fingertips. One of the managers mentioned that they had conducted a compensation benchmarking study recently which showed that their pay scale was not in line with other organizations in the area. The president mentioned that he had run into an old friend who had worked at this organization for several years. In the course of their conversation, the friend noted that he could go to work for their prime competitor and make more money as a new hire than he was making here with his years of seniority. Still, they didn’t buy it. They never did. They were locked into their way of thinking and nothing was going to shake them loose.

They are still in business but the sense of family is long gone. Many employees have moved on; jobs remained unfilled. Many see the organization as a mere stepping stone in their career and not the final destination. Too bad. They have the information that they needed but they just couldn’t accept it.