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Current trends in motivation to increase the labor potential of staff

Content

Introduction

In the conditions of modern innovative social development, the tendency to increase the role of labor of the company’s personnel is quite pronounced, since the introduction of innovations in production, the process of capital accumulation and its transformation during the technological revolution have changed the very approach of researchers to determining the place and role of labor and personnel as its carrier in the economic process. An indisputable fact at the same time is the fact that the life of any organization on an ongoing basis includes a systematic analysis and assessment of the effectiveness of the use of any available resources, including the effectiveness of the functioning of the personnel management system [1].

In a modern organization, employee labor acts as a necessary part of the production process. At the same time, the activity potential of the personnel of any modern organization can ultimately be presented as the basis for the formation of the labor potential of society as a whole, but at the same time, the accumulation of structural changes in the evolution of productive forces determines its dominant role in the process of creating and reproducing human capital, expanding labor potential in productive activities [2]. The employee’s labor potential is a certain combination of physical and spiritual qualities of an individual that determines the possibility and boundaries of his contribution to labor activity, the individual’s ability to achieve significant results under given conditions, as well as to evolve and improve in the process of labor [3]. At the same time, the forms and systems of increasing labor potential that are correctly selected by the organization will stimulate employees to achieve optimal labor results and will lead to an increase in the efficiency of the organization as a whole [4]. In the process of planning and introducing innovations in the organization’s personnel management system, changes in the incentive system, it is necessary to take into account not only the nature and degree of impact on the employee’s labor potential, but also possible consequences for the organization, which can be either positive or negative [5].

1. Analysis of employee incentive systems

In Russia and abroad, approaches to stimulating labor vary considerably, despite the use of identical theories of labor motivation that are based on them, which were created, as a rule, by foreign researchers. Rather consistent management of labor incentives is carried out in Japan and the United States of America. This circumstance allows us to consider in detail approaches to stimulating the labor efficiency of company personnel in these countries.

In the Japanese economy in the mid-60s. XX century significant changes took place, called the Japanese economic miracle. Japan achieved significant achievements in economic transformations, first of all, thanks to three fundamental principles of stimulating labor efficiency: lifelong recruitment, the use of the seniority system in determining wages and career advancement, and the introduction of internal trade unions. Using these principles, Japan began to lose significantly less time in protests organized by trade unions and, at the same time, more actively introduce innovative technologies and produce more high-quality products than other countries. The practice of lifelong hiring is also a feature of Japanese development, which satisfies the needs of personnel in constant status and financial evolution in proportion to the term of service in the company and provides a guarantee of employment until retirement. In addition, in the practice of life-long hiring, there is no resistance of the team to the introduction of innovative high-tech production equipment, which leads, as a rule, to a reduction in staff, since this does not affect the availability of jobs in the company – employees are developing another area of ​​work. The system of lifelong hiring is currently the main factor in stimulating efficient work in Japan. It also has such an indisputable advantage as the stability of employment, beneficial both to Japanese society as a whole and to the personnel of individual companies in particular [6].

In the United States of America, the use of human resources is characterized by significant costs that are not comparable with the concept of wages in its traditional sense: social insurance, personnel selection costs, their development, etc. Currently, there are two dominant tactics in the United States in the process of using staff with maximum efficiency. The first implies the company's desire to adequately meet the needs of its own production with high-quality personnel and thereby achieve significant competitive advantages for the organization. The second tactic involves additional material investments in the development and professional retraining of company personnel, as well as in creating optimal conditions for its more complete use. Significant investments in personnel determine the interest of companies in reducing staff turnover and in stabilizing employees in the enterprise.

The U.S. labor incentive system includes the following key elements:

Employees are encouraged through financial incentives and promotion up the career ladder. Bonuses, as a rule, are paid exclusively to the top management of the company. Promotion in the majority of cases is associated with advanced training through an established corporate training system. Moreover, the system of stimulation of labor efficiency of personnel was built in the USA in such a way that fixed wages could only increase. The flexibility of this wage system is due to the fact that a significant part of earnings is directly dependent on the overall performance of the company. This helps to avoid staff reductions and lower base wages, as well as increase the productivity of both individual employees and the team as a whole.

The main types of additional differentiated staff incentives in the United States include the following: additional payments for advanced training and work experience; premiums depending on the size of the company's profit; bonuses to top managers, special bonuses to middle managers, regardless of the success of their activities; compensation payments upon retirement; selling employees shares of the company. It is characteristic that in most enterprises with such a system, the problem of outstripping wage growth over productivity growth rates is noted [8].

In the process of staff incentives, modern American companies often use the merit system. This incentive system differentiates the amount of wages for personnel of identical qualifications with various indicators of labor productivity. At the same time, the indicators used to evaluate personnel can be related both to production and to the personal characteristics of an individual employee. Methods for assessing the merits of personnel according to the merit system are quite diverse: ranking employees according to the results of evaluating their work, questionnaires, simple point assessment of labor, expert assessment of production contribution, coefficient of useful participation, etc.

2. The practice of economic incentives for staff

Having analyzed the experience of industrially developed and rapidly developing countries of the East and West, we will offer recommendations for Russia in the field of stimulation and motivation to increase the labor potential of enterprise personnel. Russia, which is traditionally located at the crossroads of Western and Eastern cultures, needs to choose the most suitable model for staff incentives, not copying, but developing it on the basis of both its own experience and management theory and practice. This choice should determine the prospects for the development of the Russian economy for a long period of time. Currently, the most common methods of stimulating labor activity in Russia are as follows:

  1. Punishment as a repressive means of stimulating the labor efficiency of employees. The significance of the punishment depends primarily on the objectives of the impact. The main purpose of punishment is to prevent the re-occurrence of actions that could harm the company. Punishment is valuable, first of all, as a kind of barrier that prevents a given employee (as well as employees familiar with the situation) in a similar or similar setting from repeating actions that had a negative impact on the production process.
  2. Cash payments for the implementation of these goals. These payments are made with the strict compliance of the employee’s activities with pre-established criteria for the quality and quantity of the product. These criteria may include various quality indicators, an assessment of the employee's activity by other persons, and economic indicators. Each company, depending on the characteristics of the production process, sets its own criteria.
  3. Additional salary payments implemented to promote a healthy lifestyle for company personnel. Such additional payments are made to employees who did not take time off during the year due to illness; employees who are constantly involved in sports; smoking cessation staff.
  4. Special individual rewards – this is an additional reward, which is paid if the employee has exclusive skills used by the company at a certain moment.

The most important tool of economic stimulation in Russia is also the organization’s social policy, which, as a rule, is implemented in two forms:

The interest of the staff in successful activities within the organization, in its economic stability often directly correlates with the number of benefits provided by the organization. Adequate stimulation leads to a reduction in staff turnover, because the employee is not ready to lose numerous bonuses in the process of dismissal.

Foreign and Russian experience in conducting social policies in organizations allows us to compile an approximate list of benefits and social services provided in various forms:

  1. Material monetary form: provision on preferential terms of places in preschool and school institutions; payment and provision of study leave to persons combining employment with training; payment of additional training for employees at various courses or in educational institutions; provision of soft loans; the cost of private health insurance; employee property insurance; paid temporary leave; payments for the acquisition of property and company property; cash rewards and compensations provided in connection with personal celebrations or holidays, emergency cases – thefts, fires, etc .; food subsidies; Payment of utility services; Mobile Compensation provision of official vehicles; fare payment; progressive length of service payments; corporate pension; one-time compensation to pensioners from the organization (the so-called golden parachute).
  2. Material non-monetary form: free use by staff of social institutions: children's health camps, rest homes, sports centers; purchase of products manufactured by the organization at preferential prices; improving social working conditions; increasing the flexibility of the work schedule; improving the technical equipment and comfort of the workplace; the introduction of a shortened working week or day; provision of tickets to attend various cultural events; providing free subscription to any periodicals, etc. [9].

The generalization of the practical experience of Russian enterprises and organizations in the field under consideration demonstrated the importance of the material non-monetary form of incentives for company employees and to a large extent indicated the fallacy of opinions about the absolute value of exclusively material factors as a way to achieve optimal personnel labor efficiency. However, the system of material monetary form in the end always plays a dominant role.

Matters related to wages as the monetary equivalent of labor participation have always been of considerable relevance for economic research. From an economic point of view, wages as such are the price of the factor of production. As a wage system, we can designate a method of calculating various remuneration for labor participation. Awareness of the processes, causes and laws of the formation and development of various wage systems is an important component of social and economic progress. For example, for several decades, due to low wages from organizations in the public sector of the economy, there has been an intensive outflow of qualified personnel in the market sector of the economy [10]. Since 1992, the remuneration of employees of budgetary institutions has been carried out in accordance with the Unified Tariff Schedule, introduced by Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of October 14, 1992 No. 785 On the differentiation in salary levels of budgetary workers based on the Unified Tariff Scale. The methodology for calculating wages included 18 categories of remuneration and was based on the principles of comparing the complexity of labor and the qualification level of employees in various industries. Changes to this provision occurred on December 1, 2008, when Decree No. 583 of August 5, 2008 at all federal budgetary institutions changed the payroll system for employees. In accordance with the introduced system, the remuneration of personnel of budgetary organizations directly depends on the educational level and professional qualifications, while taking into account work experience in this area, the presence of a qualification category, various ranks, the volume of work performed, and the list of official duties. In addition, the size of official salaries may vary depending on the direct order of the head of the federal budget organization. Thus, the current legislation to a large extent provides an opportunity for federal budget institutions to independently adjust the wage system. The Government of the Russian Federation establishes an exclusively basic salary for each qualification group. This was done in order to improve the quality of services provided by state institutions, and to optimize the process of attracting young specialists. However, this system has its own characteristic shortcomings, one of which is that the head of a budget organization is subjectively vested with significant powers in determining the size of employee salaries, as a result, in practice, a situation is often observed when employees of the same profession and qualification have significant differences in salaries [11].

3. General model of labor incentives

The economic situation in Russia over the past few decades has undergone profound qualitative changes. First of all, this is due to the collapse of the planned state economy that has developed over decades. At the time of the collapse of the USSR, a significant portion of citizens did not actually have a clear strategy for survival and effective work in an emerging market economy. This is due to the fact that the entire life of an individual, starting from the initial stages of socialization, took place in a situation of certain, strictly set standards, including a rather peculiar attitude to factors stimulating labor efficiency. In general, it can be noted that the incentive factor for effective work in the past period was largely symbolic: labor efficiency was largely achieved through non-monetary mechanisms, such as rewarding with honorary diplomas, badges, pennants, admission to the party, and the title of winner of socialist competition and so on. With the abandonment of administrative-planned management, this system was broken, previously significant awards lost their suggested value and the ideology of the dominant fin nsovoy stimulation.

At the same time, the nascent stratum of entrepreneurs managed to realize that the state has largely lost its leverage on the sphere of labor regulation, allowing in a situation of global unemployment to form relationships with workers with impunity on a not entirely legal basis. Elements such as official leave, paid sick leave, wages, and normalized working hours for some period of time acted as an exception rather than a standard. At the same time, additional incentive mechanisms for employees, such as free trips to sanatoriums, preschool institutions for children, providing housing from organizations, etc., have practically disappeared. This has become mainly the privilege of employees of budgetary organizations. At the same time, the general income level of employees in most of these organizations left much to be desired, not keeping pace with wage growth in the shadow sector of the economy, and the job applicant often had a choice – to send optimistic projections to employers from the market sector or to be content with rather quick revenues of a public sector employee. At the same time, that part of the budget sphere that really allowed achieving prosperity became practically inaccessible to the average applicant. However, in the economic situation, positive trends began to appear, suggesting a gradual optimization of the situation on the labor market. The opening of a significant number of enterprises in the first decade of the twentieth century. allowed to significantly reduce the unemployment rate. At the same time, a need arose for specialists in a new, market-based format, initially focused on making a profit for the organization. And in the situation of the need to attract and retain such specialists in the organization, the issue of labor stimulation began to acquire new relevance. However, different employees in the organization may have different dominant motives, according to which such incentives should be implemented. For greater clarity, we will build a general model of labor stimulation for Russia (Fig.).

Picture 1 – General model of labor incentives
(animation consists of 8 frames with a delay of 500 ms between frames, the number of playback cycles - 3, size - 40 kilobytes)

In this scheme, the block of motives Safety and stability stands out as a separate one due to the protracted crisis in Russia and, as a result, the frequent forced change of jobs by employees. Stability as such will allow employees to focus on active self-realization within the framework of this organization even when more favorable offers arise, but from less stable companies. The block of motives Improving material well-being is necessary so that an employee can maximize his labor participation in the framework of this company without having to focus his attention on other areas of activity in search of additional income. The block of motives Self-realization not only stimulates the employee to work efficiency within the organization, which positions his professional and personal development as significant, but also allows you to adjust the process of professional burnout. We recognize the block of motives Recognition in a team as one of the main ones in connection with the peculiarity of the Russian mentality – if in Western culture material incentives are the leading ones in deciding to continue working in the company with little or no emphasis on interpersonal relationships in the team, and in the East – the principle of continuity, the Euro-Asian mentality of Russia orientates employees towards belonging to a team with a more moral and psychological climate, even with a loss in the level of financial incentives. The block of motives Recognition in the team is indicated in this scheme as one of the dominant ones. However, in general, this motive is somewhat broader in content, because in practice, individual employees put various characteristics into the concept of recognition in the team. As a survey among 100 employees of Astrakhan organizations showed, the largest number of respondents (44%) implies recognition in the team as a rather favorable socio-psychological climate, that is, recognition in the team as an equal partner in communication, and this applies not only (and not so much) to communication in the field of realization of professional interests, but also to the sphere of everyday interpersonal communication. As the internal content of the block of motives Recognition in the team, 23% of employees identify such a characteristic as recognition not by the whole team, but by its leader, that is, communication with direct management as part of the on equal terms position, lack of dictatorship, critics of elevated tones, unfounded claims. 19% of respondents are more interested in recognizing themselves as a person in the team, that is, as a person endowed in the perception of other employees with some qualities of positive modality &ndsah; as a cheerful, kind, friendly, correct, honest, etc. communication partner . And only 14% of respondents put in the concept of “recognition in the team” the meaning of professional recognition itself, that is, perceiving themselves by other employees as a high-level specialist with developed professional competencies and the ability to solve almost any tasks that lie within the framework of specialization. To a large extent, this understanding in modern Russian reality may be due to the conflict social situation as a whole, in which professional activity for the individual in most cases is not a space for personal self-realization within the preferred sphere, but a means of survival, and this is largely based on the policy of fierce intra-collective competition for resources. In such a situation, a high level of conflict is often manifested within the team, which leads to negative personal experiences, stress, and, as a result, to a violation of the psychological well-being of employees, therefore, the majority of respondents show significant expectations for a positive attitude within the collective interaction.

Thus, all the above complexes of motives, in our opinion, will allow us to achieve optimization and stabilization of labor efficiency in modern Russian companies.

Conclusion

The activity of any modern organization involves a systematic analysis and assessment of the efficiency of resource use, including the effectiveness of the functioning of the employee’s labor potential management system as a combination of the individual’s physical and spiritual qualities that determine the possibility and boundaries of his contribution to labor activity, the individual’s ability to achieve significant results under given conditions, as well as evolve and improve in the process of labor. Labor stimulation is the main factor in increasing the employee's labor potential. In Eastern culture, incentives are built primarily through the system of lifelong recruitment, the use of seniority in determining wages and career advancement, the introduction of intra-company unions; in Western culture, staff incentives are provided through material remuneration (a system of joint wages, payment under individual contracts, payment of collective and individual allowances to the industry tariff rate) and career advancement. In general, the experience of optimizing the level of labor efficiency of personnel is carried out in two main forms – material monetary and material non-monetary form of incentive. Given the mentality of modern Russians, we propose a distinction between the general system of labor stimulation in Russia into four main blocks: security and stability, improving material well-being, self-realization, recognition in the team – which, in our opinion, are necessary and sufficient in modern Russian market reality and will lead to optimization and stabilization of labor efficiency in companies.

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