Last week, there were a lot of refresh incidents in WeChat Moments. In addition to some being investigated, a company also announced to adjust its salary from 14 to 16 in two years, which won a lot of good feelings. However, in my opinion, this wave of salary increases is really disingenuous, even
Why do you say that? Come, first look at a few specific scenes, the following content is purely fictitious, if there is similar to that you consider yourself unlucky.
Scene 1: Xiao Wang, a programmer, has passed the interview of a company and is negotiating with HR about his salary
HR: You used to get 14, too. You know we are going to raise the salary to 16 soon, so you can only get 23k a month. But if you consider the total salary, it’s more than 30%. All right, I accept. HR: We are looking forward to having you in our company.
Scene 2: At the end of the year, after Xiao Wang has been working for more than a year, his boss communicates with him about the year-end bonus
Boss: How do you feel about what you’ve done in the past year? Xiao Wang: I… I think so… Boss: Well, your performance is not very good, and the overall year-end bonus is not very much this year. If you have such performance, I have tried my best to get you for two months, but other teams have got the same performance as you for less than two months. Xiao Wang: Good… Ok… Boss: don’t lose heart, as long as you work well, next year I must give you a change sister-in-law Z… I’m sure I’ll give you a raise and promotion.
Scene 3: Xiao Zhang negotiates with his boss about his salary increase during his promotion season
Boss: Congratulations on your promotion. Well done. I’m here to talk about your salary increase. Zhang: Thank you, boss. Boss: You see, we’ve already increased our salary from 14 to 16 this year. That’s about a 15% increase. So we won’t get much of a salary increase this time. Zhang: How much is it going up? B: Only 10%? I heard they generally went up 20% last year. Boss: The raise this time is generally low. Most people only get 3%. I tried my best to get 5% for you. Xiao Zhang: Thank you for your consideration.
Scene 4: Letter from all employees inside the company
Guys, I believe you have heard the good news that we are moving from 14 to 16, so there will be no general transfer this year…
Hope you guys continue to work hard…
So in these scenarios, it’s easy to see if 16 is a formula…
Distribution of year-end bonus
Let’s take a look at a common year-end bonus distribution pattern. In practice, the exact percentage may vary, but the pattern is basically the same:
10% of top performers receive up to 6 months ‘annual bonus.
20% of good employees get 4 months ‘year-end bonus.
40% of rank-and-file employees receive two months ‘annual bonus.
20 percent of the worst employees received 0 months of year-end bonus.
For enterprises, the average annual bonus is 2.2 months. It’s not a huge increase in compensation costs compared to giving employees two months of annual bonuses, but it creates a competitive environment in which you can work hard or not work hard and others can work hard or not work hard. So let’s look at the payoff matrix for you and for everyone else under these two strategies.
Which strategy do you choose in this situation? Hard work can also get a little year-end bonus, not hard work nothing. Some companies even set up a last-place elimination system, forcing the return of the no-effort strategy to a negative number, further intensifying competition.
Gee, does this matrix look familiar? Well, this is the famous prisoner’s dilemma!
The prisoner’s dilemma
Two men were arrested on suspicion of theft. The police suspected robbery, but they had no conclusive evidence to convict them of the robbery unless one or both of them confessed. Even if both men do not confess, they may be convicted of a misdemeanor charge of stolen goods. The suspects were examined separately and were not allowed to communicate with each other. The policy was stated as follows: if both men confessed, each would be sentenced to two years in prison for robbery plus burglary; If they both refuse to confess, they will be sentenced to six months in prison for theft. If one confesses and the other refuses, the confessor will be deemed meritorious and will not be punished, and the disclaimer will be sentenced to five years for robbery, larceny, and resisting harshness.
In the prisoner’s dilemma, it is always better to confess whether the other party refuses to confess or not, so the ultimate beneficiary must be the rule-maker (the police). Back to work, whether others work hard or not, it is the best choice to work hard yourself. There is nothing wrong with this in nature. Since ancient times, there is a saying that God rewards those who work hard. But some capitalists maliciously create a competitive environment (low base salary, high year-end, elimination system at the end…) for their own interests. To fully enhance competition and extract the surplus value of employees.
Prisoner’s dilemma of the nature of the compensation plan is to use part of the income to subsidize part due to the excellent staff, under this scheme, the rationality of all strategies are working hard, when you are at constant efforts and the total revenue, efforts to gradually will appear diminishing marginal returns, finally even may appear negative returns. Even at this level, most people are not willing to take the initiative to step back, so the inside scroll was born, to break the inside scroll is to break the rules.
Going back to the 14 to 16 situation, it depends on how it is implemented later, but it is definitely easier to implement it from 14 to 16. But I have a feeling that someone really doesn’t want to give their employees a raise. Otherwise, you would get a 10% salary increase in real terms…