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At work, the meter's running. Are you?

By Robert Trigaux, Times Business Editor
Published April 9, 2007

Given recent workplace trends, it's only a matter of time before we're all required to wear some high-tech "Work-O-Meter."

The device will fit snugly on our belt and wirelessly monitor the value of our output in real time, adjusting our pay continuously up or down based on our productivity or sloth, innovation or dullheadedness, maybe our bladder control but certainly our ability to lead or follow, augment or diminish the bottom line.

Say you're supposed to "make" $20 an hour. The Work-O-Meter starts you off each day at that rate - that's about 33 cents a minute. Stop in the hallway to chat about last night's baseball game, and pay drops to 15 cents for the first minute, 12 cents for the next. Attend a meeting actually prepared, and pay soars to 75 cents a minute. Weak bladder: 20 cents. You get the idea.

But the next day at work, the pay scale gets just a bit steeper. Gossip time earns you only 14 cents for the first minute. And finishing that big project yields a juicy 99 cents per minute - even though the same task was worth $1 the week before.

In other words, without constant efforts to improve, the good job you did today becomes only a decent job tomorrow.

I'm sure somebody, somewhere, is busy conjuring up a real-time tool to track workers.

The Publix pay plan, detailed in the story to the left on this page, is kind of an early version of the Work-O-Meter. It rewards workers the company recognizes as improving working harder, smarter and providing better service to customers.

That sounds traditional enough. But the plan empowers Publix to take away some of the pay of workers whose performance has declined or simply plateaued - even if their performance is superior.

The supermarket giant calls it the "Tie Pay To Performance" plan. I'd like to suggest a less clunky, snappier name: The "What Have You Done For Me Today?" pay plan.

At first glance, it seems unfair that an employee can work hard, get good reviews and receive a cut in pay. It seems to go against the history of how basic work is compensated. It smacks a bit of humans as automatons.

It also appears to undermine worker loyalty. It feels mercenary. It strikes at a basic middle-class fear that job stability and security is, increasingly so these days, under attack.

Better get used to it.

Publix is very good at what it does, but it rarely comes across as a cutting-edge company. In this case, Publix is surprisingly bold. And taking some public heat as a result.

Don't snicker, but Publix's decision to peg pay up or down based on a performance trend is a byproduct of globalization. As more and more jobs become commodities - meaning they will end up being handled by the person offering the best skill at the lowest price, increasingly regardless of physical location - companies will embrace methods that compel more and better work from the people it pays.

Don't for a moment think the Publix pay strategy is some fluke. It's just the beginning of introducing new business ways to monitor and separate the best from the better and those deemed only adequate. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but like the Work-O-Meter, it sure seems Darwinian.

Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.

[Last modified April 6, 2007, 22:32:27]