"Best Place to Work" vs. "Best High-Performance Place to Work"

I just finished reading High Performance Pay by Patricia Zingheim and Jay Schuster.  While the book covers a lot of good ground about connecting pay to performance, what particularly resonated for me was a section in their final chapter about some of the better known "best place to work" designations.  They challenge the notion that the best employers are those which push family-friendly initiatives (while often working diligently in the background to pass health care and retirement costs on to employees). 

The authors say:

The most startling missing element from best places to work initiatives is that they are silent on issues such as creating a workplace where skill and competency growth is meaningfully rewarded.  Probably most important is a lack of recognition for organizations that are successful in really and meaningfully creating a workplace where performance excellence is transparently and consistently rewarded and encouraged.

And,

What comes first -- the performance or the programs?  Indeed, the usual route to trying to become a preferred workplace is to first be a successful enterprise and then or concurrently implement what leadership believes is an employee-positive work environment.  Few poor-performing organizations report that they obtained top performance from employees or attracted people of great value by a turnaround strategy driven by sabbatical leaves for employees.

The intent here is not to build a case against being a best place to work, but rather to ask some questions about what that goal entails, and whether it takes organizations in a direction that ultimately supports employee and employer success.

A client company of mine, whose management team I greatly admire, does not offer sabbaticals or massages or gourmet food on site, but they treat their employees with honesty and integrity and work very hard to tie rewards to performance (and it is a challenge for them, like it is for everyone).  As they are able to make incremental improvements to their compensation and benefits programs - even so simple a thing as adjusting salary ranges upward - they are careful to communicate that it is the hard work and results produced by employees that have enabled these changes and new offerings.  They make it clear that the continued availability of these improvements, and any additional ones made available in the future, are dependent on the ongoing efforts of all staff to help the company meet its mission.

I have to believe that this is the kind of partnership, employees and employer working together and sharing the benefits of their combined success, that Zingheim and Schuster had in mind when they coined the term "best high-performance place to work".      

Comments

[Frank Giancola]

This sounds like a classic case of sour grapes, where Zingheim and Schuster are upset that worklife programs are getting more attention than their programs, like skill-based pay.

They should use occasions like these to examine their ideas to see why they aren't having more impact in the real world. I have read their books (not this one) and found that they have little in the way of insightful ideas that make a difference.

Did you get any breakthrough ideas from their latest?

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AB - No, no breakthrough ideas and, in truth, very little in the way of helpful, practical information. This is the first of their books that I have read and I have to admit that I came away more than a little disappointed.

Yet, I thought that their concept of "best high-performance place to work" had real merit, at least in the way that I look at it - that it is about a mutual, value-creating relationship that features real truth and transparency. That's the reason I featured that particular excerpt (and largely ignored the rest of the book).

Thanks, as always, for your comments!