Hello Sanjana, I admire your company’s courage in going down the pay for performance road. Your company will need to be very careful as many companies implement pay for performance and see motivation actually go down because of poor design and implementation.
A key reason for this is that the system needs to be both transparent and fair as well as the reward seen as worthwhile. There is no substitute for expertise in delivering in this difficult area. Any good book on HR will cover the basics of pay for performance systems.
I have a couple of comments on the system you are proposing. You may find that the number of grades is insufficient to distinguish the various performance levels. Five grades will be better, and for the quantity of reward, you could partly tie the amount of the reward with the degree to which the employee met/surpassed their measurable goals. And will you reward wanted behaviors, like customer focus and teamwork, or will you just reward performance. You will also need to decide whether rewards will be in the form of one off bonuses or salary increments or a combination of both.
As for skills, yes, some companies have implemented skills based pay to reward multi-skilling and flexibility, not necessarily to meet market relativities for skills in demand. Mixing reward for skills and reward for performance has its own challenges.
How will you balance and prioritize the different criteria? For example, who will be rewarded more: the employee with many skills but can’t reach their performance targets, or the employee with fewer skills but high in drive so that they surpass all of their targets? These are the types of questions that you will need to resolve. And resolve them in a way so that the system makes sense, is transparent and can be accepted as fair by employees.
Vicki Heath
Director
Business Performance Pty Ltd
http://www.businessperform.com