UNPLANNED SALARY INCREMENT CAN BE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE

Everest Turyahikayo
Human Resource Consultant


There is demand on government from teachers and lecturers of public teaching institutions to increase their salaries. The rationale for this demand is based on the fact that costs of living and inflation are high. The justification is satisfactory premafacie. This explains why the legislators have recommended a higher salary increment for teachers. Unfortunately, inflation and high costs of living manifest the poor quality of human resources. These resources are molded by teachers and lecturers. Salary increment without due evaluation of the contract of employment with emphasis on performance review can be counter-productive.
Every employee is in contract with government in which case, each party has to fulfill certain obligations. The government pays salaries and allowances and provides an enabling environment in which teachers perform their duties and responsibilities. Teachers and lecturers on the other hand are supposed to perform work as per the contract of employment.
Before increasing salary, it is important that the contract of employment be reviewed to ascertain whether these obligations have been fulfilled. One important for review is employee performance. This is a critical milestone in the employee-government relationship. Employee performance is what cements the relationship between these two parties. Employee performance and remuneration should balance on the weighing scale of performance review. To that end, the link in the employee performance chain should always be evaluated. This chain relates to employee’s input, output and outcome.
Input relates to the positive application of the employee’s knowledge, skills and experience in performing daily tasks. This is always guided by good attitudes, innovation and creativity. The amount of input can best be measured by assessing the effort of the employee in doing the assigned work on a regular basis. Output relates to the tasks in totality accomplished at the end of a given agreed period. Output of a teacher can be measured by assessing the performance of pupils on a termly basis and grades scored at the end of primary seven. This puts into consideration inevitable factors. Outcome on the other hand relates to the impact of the output on the environment. Outcome can be positive or negative. It is negative if the input and output are negative. Periodic performance assessment enables the employer ascertain whether the outcome is positive or negative. It is makes no sense to retain an employee if his input and output do not result into positive outcome. The world cannot be a better place if there is no positive outcome in what people do. The contribution of graduates in improving society is directly related to the quality of training they underwent.
If a university has been producing engineers, computer scientists, pharmacists, agricultural scientists, the impact these professionals have had on the community should be one of the important determinants for salary increment. The employer should have a mechanism for measuring this important component before any attempt to increase salaries. Without this approach, employees will periodically demand for salary increment based on subjective justifications. This will leave the employer in the compromising situation.
It is important to bear in mind consequences arising from raising salaries of unproductive workforce. Some of these include inflation due to a lot of money paid for no work done, absenteeism from work because employees invest the money in private businesses and spend more time doing private work, slowed development as the government loses the money in salaries it would have invested and poor quality human resource due to the ill-training obtained from less performing workforce.
In order to maintain value for money, performance management mechanisms should reveal whether demands for salary increment are justifiable.