Barclays awards top executives massive share options…
... Surely this would have a negative effect on employee morale?
Fin24 reports that Barclays has awarded their top managers a total amount of £32 million (approximately R570 million) in share options. One just has to wonder if this will have a positive or negative effect on employee morale.
Entrepreneur offers some very useful tips about how to boost your employee's morale. Among others, they suggest that you need to train your employees to develop positive attitudes towards their work.
Marcus Erb, who wrote the article Seven ways to boost employee morale, recounted the story of how a company which manufactures promotional products decided to boost their employees' morale. They decided to set up classes for their employees to watch videos with inspiring themes such as Lance Armstrong's comeback from cancer. What they were obviously trying to do is to boost employee morale by inspiring their people to strive to be better and overcome obstacles like Lance Armstrong did.
In the Barclays example I spoke about above, managers at the bank are implicitly telling their employees that to get to a position of importance at the bank their performance has to be so outstanding as to deserve such a huge bonus – something which most employees aren't able to achieve.
So I would warrant that by giving the £32 million in bonuses would have a very negative effect on employee morale because the staff complement would look at the example set and wouldn't bother even try because the goalposts were set too high. What do you think?
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Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company. |
