AltInst: Allocate raises through co-worker voting

Here's something that I thought of today. We all know that at work,
raises often aren't allocated fairly, and it frequently happens that
people who do little work get big raises. Everyone in any given office
knows who works hard and who doesn't, who's valuable and who's not, who's
critical to operations and who's expendable.

My idea is this: why not have co-workers vote on each other's raises?
(anonymously, of course!) And naturally , you don't vote on your own
raise. The company determines the size of the "raise pool", has a series
of anonymous votes, and then scales the raise money according to a
pre-determined formula towards the people who got lots of votes from their
co-workers. This would work especially well in an employee-owned company
where each person has a direct financial stake in how well the company
does and so would have incentive to vote for the people who were most
productive or innovative.

I think this idea would help to reward the people who everyone knows work
very hard, and penlize the people who spend too much time around the water
cooler. It would reward technical people who know their stuff versus
people who are only technical on paper. It would reward people who make
things work smoothly, get along well with their co-workers, and generally
make work more efficient, and penalize the people who always have dumb
ideas, who schedule useless meetings, who make ridiculous rules, and so
on. You all know these types - how many offices have you worked in where
there *wasn't* at least one under-appreciated workhorse and one useless
deadweight?

The big, obvious, danger is that it might turn into a popularity contest.
But I think that anonymity goes a long way towards alleviating that,
and in the end people would vote more money towards the folks they knew
worked hard.

--- Doug Linder ---------------------------------- faust@access.digex.net ---

"Doug Linder, thanks for taking the Nerd test!
 Your score is: 650 Your rating is: 98.99%.
 You got an extra 400 points because you are running Linux right now."

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Received on Tue May 19 11:22:00 1998