In praise of pay checks

The issue of rewards has been at the top of the UK’s political and social agenda for the past two years. This debate is set to intensify even further as the coalition government’s programme of public sector cuts kicks in and will no doubt infect the engineering sector if it hasn’t already.

Some of this is healthy. It is actually a useful exercise to ask people ‘what do you bring to the table?’ Sometimes it becomes abundantly clear that they bring very little and what they do bring is over-inflated by past misjudgements and present-day ego.

This view informs my take on BBC chat-show hosts: any idiot (and I’ve seen idiots do it) can learn to read from an autocue and chat to people after a team of researchers have dug out some vaguely plausible questions. The counter-cry from (similarly overpaid) BBC executives is that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys… like they don’t have that already through paying millions?

However, in present-day conditions, it’s quite hard to advocate a radical equalisation of pay and rewards across all sectors, partly because the focus always seems to be on levelling downwards rather than levelling up, which is hardly a surprise.

The real nub of this issue is outcomes. People look at inflated bankers’ bonuses and compare that to the havoc this sector has wreaked on the world economy. Similarly, people are now pointing the finger at over-hyped and over-paid English football players after another fruitless summer of dashed hopes at the World Cup. You and I could no doubt do it across our own businesses and draw similar correlations. The problem here is that potential, hopes, expectations, job descriptions and contracts sometimes don’t add up to an awful lot in the real world.

So, I’ve got nothing against people earning big rewards but please be prepared to tell me what you actually create, okay?