LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

Ok, this is not exactly actuality anymore; I set this article aside in June and forgot about it until now. 

Cuba is to abolish its system of equal pay for all and allow workers and managers to earn performance bonuses, a senior official has announced.

 
How can it be justified to undertake long studies, work long hours and stressful job, while getting paid the same as someone with no education and a 9-5 job?  People need to be recognized to perform well.  I talked about a research which studied how performance could be driven by the size of the reward compared to peers.  Most people would prefer having less buying power if it meant having more than their peers, rather than having more buying power, but less than their peer.  In Cuba, with a doctor earning the same as a farm labourer - about $20 a month - there is not much incentive to choose a difficult career path, or to try to excel.
 

It’s harmful to give a worker less than he deserves, it’s also harmful to give him what he doesn’t deserve.
- President Raul Castro

Yes, earning what you deserve is key and I’ve read tons of studies demonstrating how most people think they deserve more than they do.  It’s hard to get a sense of what your own market value is.   I got a taste for salary inequity in my first job, when I first traveled to the US from Canada to work on a project.  That’s when I realized that US colleagues with less experience than I had, were earning more than 10k extra… Not fair.  Maybe I was a source of motivation to them, maybe the inequity existed because cost of living is (perceived?) to be lower in Canada… but it was frustrating.  That’s why I have been working in the US for the past few years. 

SuccessFactors were on the ball when this article came out, and as they named their own blog post, “Viva Pay for Performance! Even Cuba gets it!”.