Yesterday, a Google employee leaked an internal memo from CEO Eric Schmidt announcing that every Google employee would receive a 10-percent raise AND a $1,000 bonus in the New Year. While the memo says the reason for the raise and bonus was "...to recognize the contribution that each and every one of you makes to Google," I can take a wild guess that the REAL reason was to improve employee satisfaction in hopes of keeping employees from jumping ship to the competition. If this is really the case, then chances are this plan is not going to work.
When I first saw the news about Google's across-the-board raise and bonus, I was reminded of the story my friend and coauthor Bob Nelson tells about what happens when you give all your employees the same reward. The outcome is rarely what managers anticipate, and definitely not what they hoped for.
Imagine for a moment a large aerospace company in Southern California, that must go unnamed. The leaders of this company decided that it would be a good idea to reward its thousands of employees by giving everyone a turkey for the holidays. Management passed out thousands of holiday turkeys only to receive letters of complaint from some employees. "So-and-so got a bigger turkey than me," they said.
In the second year of the turkey program, they hoped to avoid the problem of different-sized turkeys by trying to order turkeys that all weighed exactly the same. When they learned that this was not possible, they provided a letter with each turkey that stated that "The exact weight of your turkey is not reflective of your performance over the last year."
Still employees were not satisfied. "I don't even like turkey," some said. Others chimed in with "Why can't we get a choice of turkey or ham?" And the vegetarians wanted fruit baskets, and on it went. The company hired an administrator to manage the program as it spun out of control. He aptly became known as the Turkey Administrator. Finally, the annual holiday turkey program came to a crashing halt when management discovered that certain employees were so disillusioned that they were dumping the turkeys out of their boxes, filling the boxes with company-owned tools, and then sneaking them past security.
The point of this story is that the turkey program didn't motivate anyone, and for many employees it became a joke. When you give everyone the same reward -- whether or not they have earned it -- it becomes equivalent to getting no reward.
As it turns out, there is one Google employee who will not receive the 10-percent raise and the $1,000 bonus: the engineer who leaked Google CEO Eric Schmidt's memo to the press.
His reward?
He was fired.
