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工人更应该获得奖金 反对不合理的高管薪酬方案

来源:可可英语 编辑:shaun   可可英语APP下载 |  可可官方微信:ikekenet

If bonus or “incentive pay” schemes work so well for senior executives and bankers, why does everyone not get them? After all, many jobs involve making important decisions or taking risks. Is there anything about corporate decisions and financial risks that makes these categories of work special in terms of how they need to be incentivised and rewarded?

如果奖金或“激励薪酬”方案对高管和银行家如此有效,为什么不让大家都得到这些?毕竟,许多工作都需要做出重大决定或者承担风险。企业决策和金融风险还有其他因素让这些领域的工作如此特殊,以至于它们在激励和奖酬方面需要得到特别安排吗?

The conventional answer is that a bonus scheme or incentive plan will indeed encourage the recipients to make more money for the shareholders or clients on whose behalf they act. And while there were some unfortunate abuses in the past, the schemes have been altered to focus on longer-term shareholder returns and to enable clawbacks. However, the conventional answer does not address my question: there are many workers acting as agents on behalf of others (taxpayers, shareholders, clients), so why are bonus and incentive schemes not more common?

传统的回答是,奖金方案或激励计划的确将会鼓励获得者为他们所代表的股东或客户赚更多的钱。尽管过去有一些令人遗憾的滥用,但这些方案已经调整为聚焦于长期股东回报和索回权。然而,传统答案并未解决我的问题:有许多劳动者在工作中都是作为其他人(纳税人、股东、客户)的代理人做事,那么奖金和激励方案为何没有更普遍一些?

A classic paper on the “principal-agent problem” (how you encourage somebody else to act in your best interests rather than theirs when you hire them) by Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom pointed out that the conventional answer makes the mistake of assuming that jobs are simple and consist only of one task. In reality, agents — such as executives acting on behalf of shareholders — have multiple tasks with many dimensions. Some of these will be easier to measure than others.

本特•霍姆斯特姆(Bengt Holmstrom)和保罗•米尔格龙(Paul Milgrom)在一篇关于委托-代理问题(你在雇佣其他人的时候,如何鼓励他们代表你而非他们自己的最佳利益)的经典报告中指出,传统答案犯的错误是,假定工作都是简单的,而且只包括一项任务。在现实中,代理人——比如代表股东利益的高管——承担着多项任务,有许多维度。其中一些任务和维度比其他更容易衡量。

As the two economists note, if you use incentive pay to get teachers, say, to raise pupils’ test scores, the test scores will go up, but other desirable, unmeasurable attributes such as intellectual curiosity or exploration of the arts will suffer. Better to pay a fixed salary to achieve effort across the whole range of desired outcomes. Despite their warning, we have, of course, ended up with incentive pay in education in the UK, albeit indirectly via school inspection criteria and national targets; pupils are being taught to pass tests to their detriment and the economy’s.

正如这两位经济学家指出的那样,如果你使用激励薪酬让教师提高学生的测试成绩,那么测试分数将会提高,但其他可取但不可衡量的品质(比如求知欲,或者对艺术的探索)将被忽视。不如支付固定薪资,让人努力实现希望获得的全面结果。尽管他们提出了警告,但英国教育界还是推出了激励薪酬制度,尽管是通过学校检查标准和国家目标间接推行的;以应考为宗旨的教育,对学生们不利,对经济也不利。

The point is that pay structures not only incentivise effort and direct risk-taking, they also determine the worker’s allocation of effort between different tasks. The design of pay schemes would be easier if jobs could be designed to separate the different tasks. But if not, the general conclusion is that incentive pay schemes are less desirable the harder it is to measure and monitor outcomes.

关键在于,薪酬结构不仅激励努力和直接冒险,而且还决定劳动者在不同任务间的精力分配。如果工作可以从设计上被分解成不同的任务,薪酬方案的设计将会更容易。但如果不能,一般的结论是,结果越难衡量和监测,激励薪酬方案就越不可取。

This clearly helps explain why bonus schemes and incentive plans tend to be tied to easily observable indicators such as the share price or a year’s trading profits. It also helps explain why such schemes so badly distort behaviour, incentivising short-term over long-term gains and quarterly share price increases over customer satisfaction.

这显然有助于解释为何奖金方案和激励计划往往与股价或者全年交易利润等容易观察的指标密切相关。它也有助于解释此类计划为何如此严重地扭曲行为,刺激高管重视短期而非长期效益,重视季度股价涨幅而非客户满意度。

The more complex the job, the more dimensions involved — as in being a corporate chief executive, say — the less justification there is for an incentive reward scheme. This is reinforced in the specific context of shareholder principals and chief executives, when the latter are responsible for the value of the assets they are managing on behalf of the company’s owners. Incentives linked to whatever can easily be measured lead agents to turn their efforts away from maintaining and enhancing the value of the asset over time.

工作越复杂,涉及的维度越多——比如说企业的首席执行官负责的工作——激励奖酬方案的理由就越不充足。就他们作为股东代理人和首席执行官的角色而言更是如此——后者负责其代表公司所有者所掌管的资产的价值。随着时间的推移,与可以被轻易衡量的指标挂钩的激励,导致代理人不再努力保持和增强资产价值。

Professor Holmstrom and Prof Milgrom thought they had done a good job of explaining many pay structures that were puzzling from the perspective of the simple view that people will work harder in exchange for pay that rewards the effort. For example, sales commission is found in industries where the output is easy to measure, but not so often in those where there is a quality dimension. But they went badly wrong when they diverted sales peoples’ efforts away from quality, as in financial services mis-selling. As the economy becomes increasingly complex and intangible, monitoring and measuring seem ever harder. The simplistic case for bonus and incentive pay schemes grows ever weaker.

霍姆斯特姆教授和米尔格龙教授认为,他们很好地解释了许多从简单观点看令人困惑的薪酬结构——这种简单观点是,人们将更努力工作以获得奖励这种努力的薪酬。例如,销售佣金在产出容易衡量的行业很普遍,但在那些具有质量维度的行业就不是那么常见了。但是,当佣金促使销售人员不关注质量的时候就会出大问题,就像金融服务业的不当销售一样。随着经济日益复杂和无形,监测和衡量似乎越来越难。奖金和激励薪酬方案的简单化理由越来越站不住脚。

Indeed, the best arrangement would seem to be the opposite of the pattern we observe now. Corporate executives and senior bankers doing complex jobs involving many impossible-to-monitor activities are the last people who ought to be paid via an incentive scheme; while bonuses for fast-food workers or shop-floor employees make more sense.

的确,最好的安排似乎与我们现在观察到的模式相反。企业高管和资深银行家的复杂工作包含许多不可能监测的活动,他们是最不应该通过激励方案获得薪酬的人,而对快餐工人或者车间雇员支付奖金更有道理。

Shareholders are right to be rebelling against ludicrous executive pay packages. But the rebellion needs to go much further and demand fixed salaries for the most senior people. If the chief executive of a company seriously tells me, as a shareholder, that he will not put in as much effort as he otherwise would unless I link his pay to a handful of metrics, I have every reason to be doubtful about hiring him to do the job.

股东反对不合理的高管薪酬方案是正确的。但这种反对需要更进一步,要求对顶级高管发放固定薪资。如果一位首席执行官严肃地告诉作为一名股东的我,如果我不将他的薪酬与一系列衡量标准挂钩,他的努力就会大打折扣,我完全有理由怀疑要不要雇佣他做事。

重点单词   查看全部解释    
unfortunate [ʌn'fɔ:tʃənit]

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adj. 不幸的,令人遗憾的,不成功的
n.

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conventional [kən'venʃənl]

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adj. 传统的,惯例的,常规的

 
rebellion [ri'beljən]

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n. 谋反,叛乱,反抗

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senior ['si:njə]

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adj. 年长的,高级的,资深的,地位较高的

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inspection [in'spekʃən]

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n. 检查,视察

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intangible [in'tændʒəbl]

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adj. 难以明了的,无形的
n. 无形的东西

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separate ['sepəreit]

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n. 分开,抽印本
adj. 分开的,各自的,

 
corporate ['kɔ:pərit]

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adj. 社团的,法人的,共同的,全体的

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puzzling ['pʌzliŋ]

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adj. 令人迷惑的,茫然不知所措的,莫名其妙的

 
pattern ['pætən]

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n. 图案,式样,典范,模式,型
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关键字: 奖金 工人

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