Why Equal is Sometimes Unfair
Posted on July 19th, 2009
Most company has employees who complain that the treatment to them is not being equal. You can treat your employees unequally but make it sure that you are still being fair. You will find out that it is not a good decision to treat your people equally through these examples.
Expectations should be different- if for example you have two employees doing the same work but the other one has been doing it for years already while the other has just been doing the work for months. Of course, you wouldn’t expect them to work in the same level especially if experience is a factor in the improvement of performance. In this case, higher work performance should be expected to the employee with more experience than with the less experienced person. This may not be an equal treatment but definitely it is a fair treatment.
Salary should vary- one of the common complaints that a company receive is that one person is receiving higher pay than the other despite the same work load that they have. In an investigation made, it was found out that the person who receives a higher salary has more experience or more degree (college or masteral degree) than the person who is complaining. So it wouldn’t be fair if the two people will have the same salary.
Reductions of salary- Doing across-the- board salary decrease is what most company thinks as solution to the economic crisis that we are experiencing. This is not fair to the opinion of many. Cutting off a salary will have a big impact, may be not to high paid executive, but definitely to the employees who are at the bottom of the organization. What would be fair is to reduce the number of employees, especially those who are not performing and those who have been protected for years due to the politics within the company.
Office space- believe it or not, even this often becomes an issue in some company. Deciding what office to give an employee or the size of the office space becomes a big deal. Though equality rules, common sense should also be used when designing and assigning offices. There are certain positions which require privacy like your HR. Other might require bigger space like the IT team which needs a workspace in repairing computers. For some, to apply the rule of equality they just simply use cubicles.
Promotions- Allowing some time to pass before promoting somebody is reasonable. Others wait for about six months to one year or sometimes even longer before they get promoted. This makes sense because it encourages employees to maintain the level of performance that they have. There have been instances that the performance of an employee drops once he is already promoted. You wouldn’t want this to happen, so you are making them wait for quite sometime to establish their performance level rather than allowing them to just simply aim for the star. No matter how long it would take them to achieve their goal, promote employees who have established milestone from the expectations that you set.
Equality’s impact in a company should be to inspire workers to do and be their best and not to make them feel that they are simply being treated as average employees.
I totally agree in your article, based on my experience. I worked for almost 3 years in company with my co-employee. We are both new in that company but they treated her more especial. Too much expectation as if we have the same level of knowledge.Nice article.