The library has a board policy that includes a token recognition for employees for every 5 years of employment at the library. By token, I mean that at 10 years the employee was awarded $25, and at 20 years the award has climbed to $50, and at 30 years it hits $100. A nice recognition, but nothing to change minds when considering a change in employment. Based on a recommendation from employees, a board policy change was put into play and passed the policy review subcommittee. The new policy award amounts were increased roughly by 10x. So under the new schedule, at 10 years the employee would be recognized with a $200 bonus. At the high end, 30+ years, employees would see bonuses over $1000 every five years. While I'm sure our long-term employees love this, as a board member, I see issues with a 10x increase in monetary bonuses for longevity and the message it sends:
1. In my experience in large corporations, we had token recognitions similar to those in the original schedule. My spouse works for the local park district and received much less for her anniversary than our original schedule provided - a true, non-monetary token. I don't understand why library workers should be rewarded so generously when other workers don't see these kinds of bonuses in similar public and private jobs. I understand that some companies do pay more generous bonuses, but that hasn't been my experience at all. In sum, it's too much!
2. One of the reasons purported for this increase is to increase retention. We don't have a retention problem during normal times, and in these hard economic times, we really don't have a retention problem. I believe a case could be made that a little more turnover could be good for us -- many of the good ideas we've heard from employees are coming from recent hires.
3. While the original schedule is mostly a token, this new money is not a token -- it is really additional compensation. This would apply to all employees, and we have a large percentage of part timers. So at 10 years, this bonus might amount to a week's pay! For the full-timers, this is probably closer to a day's pay at 10 years, but would be closer to a week's pay at 30 years. This seems unfair to me, although other schedules that take differences in pay into account would likely be much more complex -- this isn't good either. Another point this brings up is that this has not been treated like a compensation policy. We approve salary ranges yearly, but this move did not consider the impact to salary ranges. If an employee is at the top of their range, do they get the bonus? I don't know, and I can see arguments on both sides of that issue.
4. This costs money. Our financial person estimated that we would increase our expenses roughly .1% of our budget, or roughly .2% of our budget for salaries and bonuses. While this appears minimal, it's another step to spend more money on employees and less elsewhere, like programs and books. And as mentioned above, this doesn't appear to be an investment with positive payback. It also pays out more as the employee nears retirement. Does this increase retirement costs for these employees? That's my bet. Was that taken into account in our numbers? I doubt it.
5. Any increase of 10x in a cost seems excessive in the current economic and political environment. I'm not sure if any of our local taxpayers are seeing such an increase in any of their compensation/bonus plans.
Preferred Alternative
I understand that employees don't see much benefit to receiving a token bonus. However, I feel the bonus is only a token of our appreciation and shouldn't be considered a way to get a windfall every five years and to juice retirement pay. My preferred alternative is to keep the schedule as it is, and to offer other forms of compensation or bonus that aren't tied to staying in a job, but are rewards for good ideas and for work behaviors that we want to see more of, merit rewards. I feel that the library director would be responsible for details about this kind of bonus program, and for operating it. The library gets value out of this kind of program -- better customer service, new ideas, more qualified and informed employees, etc. Examples of ways to accomplish this that I would prefer would be expanding the top of the salary ranges to allow higher performers to earn higher salaries without promotions, or a bonus program for ongoing education and certification, including library topics and customer service skills. With these incentive plans, at least we would be making an effort to follow our values with respect to the library and to the librarian.
With a high-payout anniversary bonus program, the value the library receives appears to be possibly retaining employees with more than ten or fifteen years of experience at the library, at least until after collecting an anniversary bonus. While there are savings in hiring and training, there are costs, especially lost opportunity costs, bad pr, and program costs, that weigh against this program, in my mind reducing or eliminating value to the library. If we're investing new money in a compensation program, I'd prefer it to provide value.
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