As the economy continues to slowly churn, many organizations have made their cuts, and are now turning their attention to the survivors. While these folks may be glad to have a job, some of the star performers may be waiting for the turn-around to make their get-away. If they haven’t been recognized for their extra efforts and rewarded for maintaining excellence in performance, they may well look for greener pastures as soon as the market begins to recover. So the time is now to find ways to re-balance the total rewards equation, and make the most of the monetary tools at your disposal.

In the last two posts, we discussed some ideas for engaging high performers and customizing non-monetary rewards to their personal needs and circumstances. Today’s idea deals with allocating increase dollars first to the top performing individuals:

• Instead of dividing a minuscule merit increase pool across your entire employee population as a means of spreading the rewards, make sure that your star individuals get half or more of the total merit budget. While each individual’s portion may still be small, you are demonstrating by your actions that their performance has not gone unnoticed. If you have communicated properly, the top tier individuals will see that while the funds are limited, the management is doing what they can to put the rewards in the hands of those who are stepping up and carrying the load to hasten the return to normalcy.

So…….What do you think? Will allocating the largest percentage of your merit pool to your highest performing team members serve to strengthen their intrinsic motivation? How would you communicate with the others who receive a much smaller share of the overall merit budget?

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