Employee Incentives

One must balance the draining of employees lives with incentives to ensure that the employee has something to look forward to over the next ten years. My previous company offered a Rolex watch to anyone with 12 years service. For reasons unknown, they went insolvent after exactly 11 years 355 days thereby forgoing the need to ever buy a single Rolex, but they had a 100% retention rate for that duration and a lot of pyromaniac employees a few days later. My next employee offered a blunt pencil with the company logo after five years slave labour. The only use for this pencil was to create fictitious expenses until I could afford a Rolex.

As a manager I was expected to be on call for every minute of every hour of every day…without pay. The incentive for being woken up at 3:00 every morning was an extra 30 minutes sleep by being allowed to arrive late the following work day. My wife is disturbed each time I receive a call, my kids have violent fits whenever they hear the ringing tone of a blackberry and my goldfish couldn’t stand it any longer and committed suicide by leaping out of his fish tank. All for an extra 30 minutes. Oh yeah, and guess who’s to blame if the backups fail to run because some sleep deprived employee didn’t answer the phone?

If companies want to motivate their employees, then incentives should reflect modern times. For example, provide al the spotty geeky computer nerds with the incentive of a night with the hottest hooker in town and I will guarantee they will give 150% effort each day. Cost – roughly 150 quid per hooker. Cost saving, immense unless all return with Aids and the health insurance plan bankrupts the company. For women, maybe a breast implant, surely a win win situation for the company.
So when you are next deciding on incentives they need not be expensive but something that may change IT employees life forever.

Software upgrade Scam

A software upgrade is simply a legal form of extortion run by software houses with colouful imagination skills resulting in the extraction of huge sums of money from companies for doing little or no work.
If your company relies on external 'technical expertise' then the software house will squeeze your every last dollar. For example, they may state that you’re required to migrate from version 4.1.5 to 4.1.6 as they are no longer supporting version 4.1.5.
They will then highlight all the advantages of the new version such as:-

Increased Reporting functions (a print function has been added)
Performance Advantages (crap programs replaced by less crap coded programs)
Etc

The software company will then dispatch two trainees to carry out the upgrade and hand over a support pack with the only change from last year’s being the year printed on the cover. The upgrade will result solely in a description field being extended by 10 characters and just for good measure, the two trainees will charge you for travel, food, accommodation, smoking cannabis and watching porno flicks in their hotel room.

You will be charged several thousand of pounds for ensuring you still receive second rate support as you are now on the latest version (until the next version comes out in three months times and you do this all again), and have to pay your own staff extra for working weekends just to watch two semi drunk trainees put a cd in a server and press GO!

Appraisal to signal the end is nigh

The content of the post below relates to actual events....loosely. The names have been omitted to protect the innocent and save embarrassment.

Scene - Manager has called in an Employee for their annual review

Manager – I see you’ve met all your 35 objectives for the year.Thanks for all your hard work, now what objectives can we set for the forthcoming year.

Employee - Well, considering we’re migrating away from the current system and moving to a completely new platform, I think my work will be considered obsolete

Manager - You have a good point there. We are looking to move to a more modern system which should reduce the workforce and migrate all technical positions to Mozambique since they are cheaper than India, although we all need to learn their native language. Nevermind, that’s a minor problem.

Employee – So you’re basically saying that I will be made redundant at some point in the forthcoming year

Manager – I suppose I am

Employee –So is that my only objective?

Manager – I guess so, should we write that down to give you something to work towards?

Employee – Errmmm, okay

Manager – Great! And good luck with your objectives for this year

Employee – Thanks, I’m sure my wife and seven kids will be pleased.