How can enterprises establish a perfect salary incentive system for knowledge workers to attract and retain excellent knowledge workers?

First, the concept and characteristics of salary incentive mechanism and system

(1) Definition of salary

In order to better establish a scientific and reasonable salary system, we must first correctly understand the meaning of salary and related basic concepts. Correctly investigate and define the salary range discussed, so as to avoid that the salary items that could have been an incentive factor are divorced from the theory and practice of salary management because of the narrow understanding of salary. On this basis, we can master all kinds of salary theories and find scientific theoretical basis for practice. ②

(B), the definition of salary

The word "salary" in English refers to the remuneration paid by the employer in the form of cash or cash equivalent, including the sum of wages, bonuses, commissions, allowances and other forms of interest returns obtained by employees engaged in labor. From the word formation point of view, the original meaning of "salary" is grass and firewood, which is an article with certain use value; In economic activities, "salary" refers to the cost of hired labor, which generally appears in the form of money, such as salary and wages. "Reward" is a reward given, with a certain color of praise. "Salary" refers to the recognition, reward and praise given by the organization to employees' labor.

The word salary has broad and narrow meanings. The narrow sense of salary is directly related to "labor", and the meanings of the two words "salary" and "money spent on work" just reflect the connotation of narrow sense of salary. Broadly speaking, salary is the remuneration paid by organizations or employees related to the above-mentioned employment relationship, including the benefits and other treatments of the employer, as well as the benefits and recognition obtained by other employees, and the content of meeting personal needs, such as participating in decision-making at work. The salary referred to in this article is salary in a narrow sense.

From the perspective of strategic motivation of enterprise human resources, salary is the objective function of employees as economic men, the source of employees' goals and work motivation, and therefore it is the key variable to determine the effectiveness of enterprise human resources motivation. For enterprises, salary is not only recognition and reward for employees' contributions, but also a set of management processes that transform the strategic objectives and values of the organization into specific action plans and support employees to implement these actions. Can form a unified situation within the organization.

(3) What are the characteristics of incentive compensation system?

1. Competitive salary

In order to attract and retain talents, enterprises need to provide employees with competitive salaries, so that they will cherish this job as soon as they enter the enterprise. Higher salary will bring higher satisfaction, which will be followed by lower turnover rate. The lack of market competitiveness of salary will lead to the brain drain of enterprises, and the result is a vicious circle in which enterprises continue to recruit people and old employees continue to leave.

2. A fair and reasonable internal compensation system?

Unreasonable internal salary will cause asymmetry of rights and responsibilities between different departments and individuals in the same department, which will make some employees feel unfair in comparison and cause psychological imbalance. From the perspective of enterprise service value chain, if the salary does not reflect internal fairness, employee satisfaction will be reduced, which will inevitably affect the service value provided by employees to customers that determines customer satisfaction, and then affect customer loyalty. Therefore, in salary management, internal fairness is a problem that managers must pay attention to.

3. Performance-based salary system?

A well-structured and well-managed performance appraisal system can not only retain outstanding employees, but also eliminate outstanding employees.

For employees with poor performance, it is more important to let employees do their best to bring their skills into play. In addition, after the implementation of performance pay, the focus of management is no longer to limit the task assignment and make it consistent with the post level. On the contrary, making full use of employees' existing abilities will become a new focus. The biggest advantage of this salary system is that it can convey information and let employees pay attention to their own development.

Second, the principle and necessity of establishing salary incentive mechanism design

(A), the principle of salary design

Before designing the salary that may be transformed into employees' work motivation, let's discuss the principles of effective incentive salary scheme. Combining Noe's "Basic Human Resource Management" and Mijlkovic's "Salary Management" and other books [4], the principles of effective incentive wage plan mainly include the following aspects:

First of all, employees should believe that they can meet the performance standards of earning extra income. The incentive function of salary lies in the confidence of employees or these rewards.

Second, the performance appraisal indicators for obtaining extra remuneration should be consistent with organizational goals. Otherwise, attractive incentive pay may make employees deviate from their work focus.

Third, employees should pay attention to the remuneration provided by the organization.

Fourth, when designing salary, we should consider that employees will ignore those unpaid goals.

Let employees believe that the salary system is fair, and the principle of fairness has been mentioned at the beginning, that is, internal fairness, external fairness and personal fairness.

(B), the necessity of establishing a salary incentive mechanism

What do enterprises care most about? It is performance! Enterprises can only survive if they have good performance. If an enterprise wants to have a higher performance level, it requires employees to have a higher personal performance level. In enterprises, we can often see that the performance of some talented employees is lower than that of some people who are obviously less talented than themselves. It can be seen that a good performance level depends not only on employees' personal abilities.

In the past, enterprises in China overemphasized the personal ability of employees, and thought that the benefits of enterprises were completely determined by the quality of employees. In fact, this view is very one-sided. From the "performance function" (as shown below), it can be seen that personal performance is also closely related to the level of motivation and working environment. The level of motivation is also a decisive factor in the performance of work behavior. No matter how high the ability of employees is, it is impossible to perform well without enthusiasm.

P = f(m×ab×e)p- personal work performance m- motivation level (enthusiasm) ab- personal ability e- working environment.

After our long-term management consultation, it is found that due to the short accumulation time of human resource management experience in Chinese enterprises, enterprises have not paid enough attention to this management work, and there are serious defects in the basic work of human resource management, and the salary contradiction in enterprises is very prominent. Enterprise science. A reasonable salary system should achieve three purposes: the first is to provide competitive salary in the market to attract talents; The second is to determine the fairness within the organization and reasonably determine the relative value of each position within the enterprise; Thirdly, salary must be linked to work performance, which can stimulate employees' work motivation, reward excellent work performance and motivate employees with monetary rewards. Whether the salary level of enterprises is reasonable or not directly affects the competitiveness of enterprises in the talent market. Only when the salary is competitive with the external environment can enterprises attract all kinds of outstanding talents needed for development.

For example, in the early days of its establishment, a client company attached great importance to the standardization of management and fully mobilized the enthusiasm of employees, and formulated a more scientific and perfect salary management system, which made the company develop rapidly. In just over two years, the company's business grew by 1 10%. With the increase of business and the expansion of scale, the number of employees has also increased a lot, reaching more than 220. However, the company's salary management system has not been adjusted in time with the development of the company's business and the changes in the talent market, and it still follows the previous one. Company leaders believe that the company has developed to a certain scale and its operating performance should be better than before. However, in fact, the operating performance of the whole company has been declining, and customer complaints have been increasing. Employees have lost enthusiasm for their work, some technical and management backbones have left their jobs, and others have shown signs of instability. Among them, the company's engineering manager felt unfair when he learned that his income was not much different from that of the logistics department manager. He believes that the position of engineering manager is more difficult and more responsible than that of logistics manager, and this difference should be reflected in salary. So he didn't work as hard as before, and then he resigned. Because of the loss of employees, employees' enthusiasm is not high, and the company's operation was once difficult. In this case, the company leaders are aware of the seriousness of the problem, and after in-depth understanding and diagnosis of the company's internal management, they find that the problem lies in the company's salary system, and the salary level of key technical backbones is obviously lower than the market, so they are not competitive externally; The company's salary structure is unreasonable, and the internal lack of fairness leads to the lack of technology.

The backbone of the operation and some middle-level managers are lost. In view of this specific problem, the company conducted market research and analysis on the salary level, adjusted the company's original salary system, formulated a new salary scheme that matched the enterprise strategy and organizational structure, stimulated the enthusiasm and creativity of employees, and the company's development began to recover.

It can be seen from this case that whether the salary system of an enterprise is scientific or not has a great or even fatal impact on the development of the enterprise. The salary level of enterprises in the above cases is low, especially the salary level of key technical backbones is obviously lower than the market, which leads to the loss of technical backbones and some middle managers. Salary lacks market competitiveness, and the consequences of brain drain in enterprises are extremely obvious. As a result, enterprises constantly recruit new employees to meet operational needs, while old employees constantly leave their jobs, which is a great waste of human resources. How to establish a scientific and reasonable salary incentive mechanism, how to give full play to the best incentive effect of salary, so as to attract and retain talents, build an efficient and stable workforce, and realize the sustainable development of enterprises is a very important task of enterprise human resource management. ?

Third, scientifically and reasonably establish the salary incentive system of modern enterprises.

First of all, salary incentive plays an important role in modern enterprise incentive mechanism. William james, a professor at Harvard University in the United States, found that in the absence of a scientific and effective incentive mechanism, people's potential can only be played by 20-30%, while a scientific and effective incentive mechanism can enable employees to play another 70-80% of their potential. Therefore, whether an enterprise can establish a perfect incentive mechanism will directly affect its survival and development. Incentive is the core of management, and salary incentive is the most important incentive means in enterprise incentive mechanism, which is widely used by enterprises at present. Compared with internal incentives, managers are more likely to control and measure their use effects. If we can really give full play to the incentive effect of enterprise salary on employees, we can achieve the goal of "win-win" between enterprises and employees. The above case statement: "In the early days of its establishment, the company attached great importance to the standardization of management and fully mobilized the enthusiasm of employees, and formulated a relatively scientific and perfect salary management system, which made the company develop rapidly. In just over two years, the company's business grew by 1 10%. " This is the full embodiment that the scientific salary system plays an incentive role, which shows that the effectiveness of enterprise salary incentive cannot be underestimated.

Nowadays, salary incentive has become an important part of modern human resource management and plays an important role in improving the competitiveness of enterprises. The salary employees get is not only the affirmation and compensation for their past efforts, but also the expectation that their future efforts will be rewarded, encouraging them to work hard in the future. In the minds of employees, salary is not just their own labor income, it represents the employees themselves to some extent.

The value of the company represents the recognition of employees' work, and even represents employees' personal ability, conduct and development prospects. Therefore, salary incentive is not only a monetary incentive, but also a complex incentive method in the enterprise incentive mechanism, which includes performance incentive, status incentive and so on. Therefore, salary incentive can stimulate employees' strong desire for work from many angles and become one of the main driving forces for employees to work. Employees expect that through positive performance and hard work, on the one hand, they will improve their work performance, on the other hand, they will strive for salary increase. In this process, employees will experience the sense of self-realization and the joy of being respected brought by promotion, thus stimulating work creativity. Rewarding every employee who contributes to the enterprise objectively, fairly and reasonably is not only conducive to the development of the enterprise, but also can ensure that employees get economic and psychological satisfaction from the salary, which is conducive to improving the enthusiasm of employees in the enterprise.

Second, establish a competitive salary system for enterprises. In the long-term management practice, due to the short accumulation time of human resource management experience in Chinese enterprises, and the lack of attention paid by enterprises to this management work, the basic work of human resource management has serious defects, and the contradiction of enterprise salary has become increasingly prominent. The ideal salary system of modern enterprises should achieve three purposes: the first is to provide competitive salary in the market to attract talents; The second is to determine the fairness within the organization and reasonably determine the relative value of each position within the enterprise; Thirdly, salary must be linked to work performance, which can stimulate employees' work motivation, reward excellent work performance and motivate employees with monetary rewards. Whether the salary level of enterprises is reasonable or not directly affects the competitiveness of enterprises in the talent market. Only when the salary is competitive with the external environment can enterprises attract all kinds of outstanding talents needed for development. The salary level of enterprises in the above cases is low, especially the salary level of key technical backbones is obviously lower than the market, which leads to the loss of technical backbones and some middle managers. Salary lacks market competitiveness, and the consequences of brain drain in enterprises are extremely obvious. As a result, enterprises constantly recruit new employees to meet operational needs, while old employees constantly leave their jobs, which is a great waste of human resources.

Salary is a very important tool in human resource management. If properly used, it will stimulate employees' high enthusiasm for work, achieve the goal of reasonable labor costs, and help enterprises achieve good economic benefits. With the acceleration of China's marketization process, the labor market is becoming more and more perfect. As one of the resource elements, the allocation of talents must meet the requirements of market economy. The flow of talents is bound to be affected by price and salary, and the flow of talents to high-priced regions and enterprises has become a common phenomenon. In this sense, whether the salary level of an enterprise is competitive in the talent market is a key factor. The salary management of enterprises plays an important role in attracting and retaining talents. Therefore, when making salary standards, enterprises must consider the salary level of enterprises with similar scale in the same industry in the region and the average salary level in the same industry market in the region, so as to make the salary of enterprises competitive and attract and retain the talents needed for enterprise development.

Thirdly, strengthening the research on the internal fairness of enterprise salary shows that from the internal point of view, employees are more concerned about the salary difference than the salary level, but their personal abilities, jobs and work attitudes are different.

It does not necessarily bring personal salary differences. How to make this "difference" not only encourage the advanced and be accepted by most employees, but also reflect fairness is becoming more and more important for salary management. In the actual salary management, this point is often ignored. In the case, the manager of the engineering department of the property management company resigned because the salary between posts was unreasonable, which did not reflect the relative value of posts within the enterprise and caused unfairness. The position of engineering manager is more difficult and more responsible than that of logistics manager, which should reflect this difference in salary. In fact, there was no such difference, which led to the project manager's lack of enthusiasm before and later resigned. The salary design of enterprises should follow the principle of "fairness and justice", especially internal fairness. The salary level must reflect the size of post responsibility and ability between different departments or between different people in the same department, that is, the salary difference must be reasonable. Unreasonable internal salary will cause asymmetry of rights and responsibilities between different departments and individuals in the same department, which will make some employees feel unfair in comparison and cause psychological imbalance. In order to strengthen the internal fairness of enterprise salary, it is necessary to reasonably determine the relative value of different positions within the enterprise, that is, to do a good job evaluation within the enterprise, and to quantitatively evaluate the value of positions from the aspects of post complexity, responsibility, control scope, required knowledge and ability. This is the key to fundamentally solve the internal unfairness of salary.

What kind of salary system and salary structure enterprises adopt will inevitably be different. Only by establishing a reasonable salary structure according to its own characteristics can we give full play to the incentive role of salary. The goal of salary structure design is to make the amount of salary paid by employees directly proportional to their contributions. Through the performance appraisal of employees, enterprises can get the quantitative assessment data of promotion or demotion between posts, so that employees can concentrate on hard work, improve performance, avoid the negative situation of doing well or not, and thus better play the incentive role of salary. In order to solve this problem, the company mentioned in the case conducted market research and analysis on the salary level, adjusted the original salary system, and formulated a new salary scheme that matched the enterprise strategy and organizational structure, which stimulated the enthusiasm and creativity of employees, and the company's development began to recover.

Fourth, establish a dynamic compensation management mechanism. Psychologists' research shows that when an employee is in a lower post salary, he will actively perform and work hard, on the one hand, improve his post performance, on the other hand, strive for a higher post level. In this process, he will experience the sense of value realization and the joy of being respected for promotion and salary increase, so as to work harder. Therefore, dynamic compensation can stimulate the enthusiasm of employees in most cases.

For a new enterprise, if the development prospects are promising, all kinds of talents will go. At this time, in order to fully mobilize the enthusiasm of employees and increase the pace of the company's development, we should choose a strong incentive salary system; However, if the weak brand of this new enterprise makes it difficult to recruit, then we can adopt a high and stable salary model and increase the fixed components in the salary to make employees feel safe.

For mature enterprises that want to be content with the status quo, it is relatively important to stabilize existing employees. At this time, the stability of the salary system can be higher, but some differences should be kept to give employees hope.

I hope to get the post level and work hard. For enterprises that want to grow and develop, the situation is different. The development of an enterprise may be scale expansion in a simple sense, but more often it means the change and diversification of business focus. So at this time, the enterprise is facing a major personnel reorganization, and it is not too important to stabilize employees at this time. Although in order to continue to maintain the competitive advantage of the original company, we should try our best to retain the backbone employees of the company; But for ordinary company employees, what is needed at this time is a kind of enthusiasm and enthusiasm when starting a business again. Therefore, we should choose a salary system with strong incentive function. Fifth, a reasonable post salary system. Some enterprises adopt a "one-size-fits-all" policy for the salary of the same post in different departments, but in fact, there are great differences in the requirements of different departments for professional skills, employee contributions and employee problem-solving ability. Giving the marketing manager the same salary as the logistics manager will obviously dampen the enthusiasm of the marketing manager. So enterprises should pay different wages for different jobs. When determining the relative value of different positions, job evaluation can be used to quantify the value of a position from the aspects of complexity, responsibility, control scope, required knowledge and ability. In the process of quantification, employees are trained and communicated, and relevant personnel are invited to participate in the evaluation, so that the evaluation results are convincing, and then the salaries of different positions and positions are determined with reference to the evaluation results.

Sixth, establish a perfect non-monetary incentive system. With the same salary, a good working environment can attract more talents. For enterprises, we should focus on long-term development, establish a positive corporate culture, provide a United and cooperative work team, a good promotion system and a timely reward system for employees' achievements. Corporate culture is the reflection of corporate image. A positive corporate culture has established an upright, enterprising and responsible corporate image for the enterprise. Employees will be proud to work in such enterprises, which can improve their work enthusiasm. A cooperative team can improve the enthusiasm of work. A good promotion system and timely rewards are recognition of employees' work, which can also improve their enthusiasm and play an incentive role.

To sum up, although salary is not the only means to motivate employees, there are other material incentives and spiritual incentives besides salary incentives, but salary incentives are very important and easy to use for managers. Enterprise managers must realize the importance of salary to motivate employees. Salary management is not concerned with money directly, but with how to use salary correctly as an incentive. Even if the total salary is the same, different payment methods will achieve different incentive effects. Therefore, how to maximize salary efficiency is a management art worthy of discussion. What is incentive? Motivation refers to a psychological process that stimulates people's motivation.

Motivation is effective because people pay special attention to the success or failure of things when they are concerned about their own immediate interests, and the instinct of seeking advantages and avoiding disadvantages will turn the pressure they face into motivation. The diversified needs of employees are the basis of motivation. Incentive measures must be targeted at the needs of employees to produce positive results. In addition, good incentives should also guide the needs of employees to develop to a high level. In short, only incentives that satisfy employees are effective. To establish incentive measures to satisfy employees, we must base ourselves on the needs of employees.

What kind of salary system and salary structure enterprises adopt will inevitably be different. Only by establishing a scientific and reasonable salary structure according to its own characteristics can we give full play to the incentive role of salary. The goal of salary structure design is to make the amount of salary paid by employees directly proportional to their contributions. Through the performance appraisal of employees, enterprises can get the quantitative assessment data of promotion or demotion between posts, so that employees can concentrate on hard work, improve performance, avoid the negative situation of doing well or not, and thus better play the incentive role of salary. In the minds of employees, salary is not only their own labor income, but also represents their own value, the recognition of employees' work by enterprises and even their personal ability, conduct and development prospects to a certain extent. Therefore, salary incentive is not only a monetary incentive, but also a complex incentive method in the enterprise incentive mechanism, which includes performance incentive, status incentive and so on. Therefore, salary incentive can stimulate employees' strong desire for work from many angles and become one of the main driving forces for employees to work. Employees expect that through positive performance and hard work, on the one hand, they will improve their work performance, on the other hand, they will strive for salary increase. In this process, employees will experience the sense of self-realization and the joy of being respected brought by promotion, thus stimulating work creativity. Rewarding every employee who contributes to the enterprise objectively, fairly and reasonably is not only conducive to the development of the enterprise, but also can ensure that employees get economic and psychological satisfaction from the salary, which is conducive to improving the enthusiasm of employees in the enterprise.