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Writer's pictureRAPHAEL COSTA

Salary and experience savings

Have you ever wondered whether it is better to have a good salary or quality of life? If you have, you have met one of the most famous management myths. This is because one activity does not exclude the other, in fact perhaps the balance between social and professional life is one of the greatest factors for career success, and maybe you have already read about it, but I bet you have never read an economic explanation about the importance of this balance.


Our form of management has evolved over the years.

We needed to guarantee the supply, and to guarantee the supply we started to control the time we spent producing and the time we spent selling.

We evolved to a manufacturing service, the knowledge for the production of a good was already more widespread, there was already some specialization, the industry focused basically on the creation of goods, and the main management premise was, therefore, to control costs.


We then moved to an economy focused on machinufacturing, basically the specialization of human service in specific classes of work, where each one was responsible for a small part of the whole, here we cared about the service provided, and our focus was on ensuring the quality of that service. Fordism is a great example of this.


Although we have already gone through these production systems, the roots of this management still linger in many organizations, varying according to the maturity of the business. That is why some companies still want to control the time an employee spends on each task, others keep a payroll of junior employees seeking to reduce costs, and others seek to supervise each job that is generated in order to ensure quality.


This is not to say that we should not control time, cost, and quality; on the contrary, these are fundamental parameters in any project, but does directing people management to this end bring results?


According to Joseph Pine author of "The Experience Economy", we are living an industry transformation, watching it become increasingly digitalized, and what should we manage in the digital economy era? According to the author our focus should be on experience, and we should manage how well we are able to create that experience. This is why so many companies talk about Consumer Experience and Employee Experience. At the end of the day, you can't create the former if the latter doesn't exist.


Imagine if a stressed, unmotivated, and pressured employee is going to worry about engaging the customer, creating an experience with him, generating a "wow moment", it just doesn't happen.


Within Management 3.0 - one of the many organizational agility practices we have - we learn and use several techniques to motivate the team, techniques that range from understanding the "motivators that move you", exploration days, personal maps, and celebration boards, all to create a healthy and stimulating environment, doing well for the team so that the team does well for the customer.


The idea behind this practice is to provide meaningful, purposeful work. Studies, such as the one by Shawn Anchor and Andrew Reece for the Harvard Business Review in 2018 indicate that 9 out of 10 workers would accept being paid less to do more meaningful work, in fact 80% of respondents would even accept up to 23% less in pay to do more meaningful work. Which means that purpose is such a powerful driver that people would even accept to earn less, to have it.


But here's the trick, it's not because the person would accept to be paid less that one should pay less, this driver doesn't work if the remuneration is not compatible with the social condition of the person, and the reason for this was explained a long time ago with Maslow's pyramid of needs, which basically discovered a hierarchy between people's needs, where basically one should suppress the needs at the bottom, and then work on the needs at the top. At the top of the pyramid are personal fulfillment, esteem, and social needs. The bottom of the pyramid, on the other hand, has safety and physiological needs.



So no matter how much we have techniques that work on the notion of purpose, of professional fulfillment, of esteem, and a welcoming environment, if we don't have a team that feels financially secure, our efforts would be in vain. We would be being unfair, talking about professional fulfillment, for people who can't even maintain their lives with the money they receive.


After all a worker who can only be happy during his work, and not in his personal life, is not a worker, but a dependent. This is about principles. People may even accept the low pay, because they are dependent on it, or even because they are in the beginning or transition of their career. But in the long run, as soon as the needs and life plans change, the satisfaction with the job also changes, and the person leaves for a better opportunity.


Another aspect of the business that suffers with this posture is innovation, the lower your remuneration the greater your dependence on your job, the greater your dependence the greater your fear of making mistakes, and if the organization has no room to make mistakes, it also has no room to innovate. It's as simple as that.


Below-average pay may even be a business necessity for a brief moment, but making it a corporate policy is a sign of low organizational maturity. The result is that while focusing on costs, the competitors delight the customer. In the long run it is a strategy that does not hold up.


Joseph Pine talks about economics, but his model explains management maturity very well. If your result is something handcrafted, you probably control the availability, you believe that hitting point is what will bring result at the end of the month. If the result is the quantity of goods produced, probably the company is concerned with the cost of the units produced, the lower the production costs, the better for the business. If the result is a service, it is probably concerned with its quality, it has teams reviewing each delivered result. If the result is an experience, you are concerned about creating more and more authentic experiences.


Creating an authentic relationship with your client involves creating an authentic relationship between your team, both are intrinsically linked, more than a member with purpose, we need to have a member that also feels safe in his work, and that has his basic needs met, from there we build the notions of social needs, esteem and purpose. That's why the salary vs. quality of life relationship is not a trade-off, it's actually a sign of a highly mature management, which is concerned about generating the best experience for their customers and do it by managing the best experience for their employees.

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