adminThe survey carried out by Industrial Psychology Consultants discovered that the majority of respondents (54,7 percent) indicated that there was need to factor in the three elements (PDL), productivity and inflation.
Individually the major factors received the following support: 28,5 percent indicated that salaries should be linked to productivity, 9,5 percent said the PDL and 6,1 percent said inflation should be the main factor.
Interestingly the remaining 1,1 percent (although somewhat negligible) indicated that they did not have any opinion whatsoever on what salaries should be linked to.
The issue of wages is particularly contentious in Zimbabwe emerging from dollarisation of the economy following a protracted period of hyperinflation, which has resulted in a liquidity crunch.
Economists contend that it is prudent for businesses — in the context of Zimbabwe’s challenging environment — to link the measurement of performance to the reward systems.
Others are, however, of the opinion that present wages are too low and should therefore be in line with the PDL, which is around US$600.
IPC managing consultant Mr Memory Nguwi however believes that pegging salaries to the PDL is a dysfunctional model for Zimbabwean companies that are currently suffering from constrained production capacities.
He believes that productivitybased remuneration and incentives that are taxed at half the normal tax on remuneration can greatly benefit employees from productivity gains.
In respect of the inflation factor, most observers believe that it is not necessarily reflective of the prices prevailing on the ground and therefore cannot be used to determine wages.
The survey was conducted to ascertain what employees think about pay and performance issues in their different workplaces.
It was also noted that when it comes to pay confidentiality, the majority of the employees want their salaries to remain confidential.
On average, employees feel that chief executive officers should get a salary 10 times more than that of the lowest paid employees though others feel that salaries shouldn’t differ so much, rather the benefits and allowances should.
Employees also feel that that they would rather earn a lower and reasonable salary and keep their jobs for a long time rather than earn a higher salary not in line with what the company can afford and then get retrenched a few months later.
When asked what a company should do when faced with challenges, the majority of the employees indicated that the company should get rid of nonperforming employees while a few felt the CEO should be the one to get all the blame and should be fired.
In terms of performance management, most employees feel that senior management do not prioritise it and believe that the systems they currently use are flawed and lack objectivity.
They attributed this to the fact that top performers do not get rewarded better than non-performers hence most of the employees are not happy with their different performance management systems as they do not serve what they claim to do.
The survey also revealed that employees believe that their current performance management systems are based on measuring objective targets, though they do not implement consequences for either good or poor performance.
Online Reporter