While catching up on blogs post-holiday, I came across this piece by Neil Morrison. Neil is a well-respected HR Director with a household name company and member of the CIPD council, so when I read it I could only guess that his post was written to be intentionally provocative.

His argument, in a nutshell, is that when we in HR talk about “discretionary effort” from employees, we are in effect expecting them to do more than we are paying them for. If individuals just do the bare minimum, we don’t consider that satisfactory. In effect we want something for nothing – if we want more we should pay more.

At a very superficial level, that seems an attractive argument (and indeed a Marxist would argue that the essence of capitalism is that workers are not paid the full value of their work – as I pointed out in this post about Wayne Rooney)

But there are two strong points against this. The first is that many employers also offer “discretionary” things to their employees. If your workplace has a canteen or buffet bar; if you get paid your normal salary during sickness or any part of your maternity leave; in fact, even if a family member dies and you are given compassionate leave; then you are receiving something your employer does not have to offer. It doesn’t matter why the employer is doing this, they are giving you something more than you are legally entitled to. So to expect in return that you as an employee might give a little extra back is not, in my view, unreasonable. In fact, if we want to view work as a purely economic transaction, then I’m damned if I’m going to say “thank you” for a piece of work – after all it’s what you’re paid to do. And to take Neil’s analogy, if you ask for two scoops of ice-cream and it’s poor quality mass produced tasteless stuff, you’ve no grounds to complain – it’s what you asked for. I don’t have to give you hand-made full cream Italian gelato.

And secondly, while paying a decent level of pay is important, it’s been well recognised for decades that individuals value things like recognition, career development and personal satisfaction from work. Even if you consider someone like Dan Pink, with his suggestion that what people want is autonomy, mastery and purpose from work, is a bit too much of a modern fad (despite his very well researched books) then I’d direct you to that old HR staple, Herzberg, who 50 years ago suggested that pay was not enough on its own to provide satisfaction at work.

To put it simply, as a well-known band once said “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love”