[peter12]

Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee

Exactly.

The problem is HR departments and their obsession with “the brackets”. What this really is, is that they are scared that if they pay high performers what they are actually worth, they might tell other crappy people who will then demand they need more money.

What is so confusing about this fear is that there is an extremely simple solution. It’s two steps, as follows:

1. Tell your crappy performers no, the other good performers are being paid well because they are outperforming you; and
2. Don’t pay crappy performers well.

Instead HR will pretzel logic their way into not understanding the value of high performers who get fed up waiting for their raise that they should get and quit and leave to work for a competitor, who will. Now HR has to go spend more money replacing good performer and is still stuck with crappy performer.

So, this is where management needs to tell HR what to do and not let tail wagging the dog stuff happen and ruin your company by letting good performers leave. 99.9999% of the time your good performers are going to bring in way more money than any good raise you’d give them anyway and your stupid brackets are dumb, convoluted messes of matrices that lack context or real time understanding of the key issues facing given departments. Yet they still go get their mercer and stick to them for some dumb reason and watch good people cruise out the door. Just idiotic, really. Same idea with bonuses. “Oh, we max out bonuses at +/- 15% so your good performers can only get skewed up 15% and your bad ones down 15%.” Wtf? Why? They should get $0 and the good performer everything, they did all the work and added all the value.

In conclusion, HR depts suck, in my experience and ruin things, generally.

Yes. HR is the worst.