January 31, 2000 New Thinking:
Performance-related pay
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January 31, 2000
Performance-related pay
By Gerry McGovern
In the last week or so there has been a heated public debate in Ireland in relation to performance related pay for teachers. Many teacher organizations have refused point blank to even discuss the issue, while others have grudgingly said they will ‘listen’ to proposals put forward.
It is somewhat ironic that teachers are so opposed to performance related pay considering that their students futures depend on performance related exams. The educational system tests students in a most thorough way; you fail, you pass, you get honors. Yet teachers feel that there should be no measurable link between their pay and their performance.
The world around us has moved on, but very often the language and thinking we use reflects the past, not the present. In cities where every hour has become a rush, we still say ‘rush-hour’. We talk about the ‘working class’ to refer to those who are not working. Our very concept of work is still too rigidly linked to hours on the job.
By and large, Irish teachers do a very good job. However, they are afraid to be measured. Much work in the Industrial Economy was difficult to measure except in a very crude way. That will all change in the Digital Economy.
For the information worker, it will become largely irrelevant where they are or how many hours they have put in. Rather, the organization will measure the information value they have created.
There is perhaps another new issue we need to consider as we enter this information society: How to penalize those who continuously contribute irrelevant information? You see, information overload is the single biggest challenge facing the information worker.
Information overload is digital pollution and the polluter should be made to pay. People should know that there is a cost for clogging up the system and wasting people’s time.
The basic goals outlined above are legitimate but many will worry that no one person, or even group of people, can have the ability to decide what is good and bad information. That is only partly true.
We are information workers in an information society working for information organizations. If an information organization cannot define the core set of information that will help it achieve its objectives, then it will not survive long.
However, with the Internet, we have a much wider web of measurement tools. Every person that views your article is a plus, every website that links to your article is an even bigger plus. Even one of your ideas that gets taken up by the discussion forum in a long, excited debate, shows in the most explicit way possible that your ideas are relevant.
We should not be afraid of being measured unless we are afraid that we will not measure up. Certainly, it is vital that the proper measurement tools are put in place. But in this new age of new tools and much greater openness and visibility, surely that is not impossible. After all, we have found ways to measure our children for thousands of years.
Gerry McGovern
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We should not be afraid of being measured unless we are afraid that we will not measure up.
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