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Champions Fax ArchivePeople First Pays (and Besides,
It's Biblical) - Part
2 The last ChampsFax outlined three of the seven dimensions for putting people first in organizations. They were foster employment security, practice selective hiring, and implement self-managed teams and decentralization. Jeffrey Pfeffer's book The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First suggests all of the seven elements are required to maximize effectiveness. This ChampsFax will describe the remaining dimensions and offer possible applications to the local church. 4. Pay well for performance. Compare that principle with the common church staff testimony: "We could always make more in business, but this is a church." When the worker is due the wage because of exceptional faithfulness and effectiveness, compensation must be just. Various church salary surveys are available now to help test whether the package is competitive. Pfeffer reminds us that contingent compensation options can help add reward for missional impact. These include gain sharing, profit sharing, stock ownership, pay for skill and individual and team incentives. Some churches provide a year-end bonus for exceeding annual ministry targets. The reward for a successful project might be a $300 weekend away at the church's expense. It might be access to a rare training event. Since most of us are not called to forfeit a livable income, market pressures point us back to the Biblical principle of generosity. Higher compensation can also protect the congregation from losing their pastor to another church willing to pay more. 5. Provide extravagant training. Flat, flexible, high performance organizations are characterized by lavish training because decision making is pushed to the frontline servant. A recent study of automobile plants revealed that Japanese production workers receive 700 percent more training than their American company counterparts. The extensive training allows the worker to change quickly because of a deeper understanding of the company culture and practices. Motorola requires forty hours of training per employee at an estimated cost of $170 million annually. What do you invest in your staff? 6. Remove status barriers. "This is accomplished in two principal ways - symbolically, through the use of language and labels, physical space, and dress, and substantively, in the reduction of the organization's degree of wage inequality, particularly across levels." In some churches, the leaders are the ones with the robes on with all of the perks. In others, it would be difficult to pick the leaders out of the crowd by dress or by paycheck. If Galatians 3 is true, tear down the walls. 7. Knowledge is power - share it. Some companies like Whole Foods Markets and AES Corporation share so much information about financial performance, strategy and operational measures that every one of their employees are considered "insiders" by the Securities Exchange Commission for stock trading purposes. Whole Foods places a book in every store that lists by name the previous year's salary and bonus for all its 6500 employees, simply to build trust. Any staff person willing to lay their life down for Christ's mission in the church has earned the right to know. The Human Equation (1998) is available from Harvard Business School Press and can be found on Amazon.com. - Tom Tumblin, former executive pastor of Ginghamsburg Church, becomes associate professor of leadership and associate director of the D.Min. program at Asbury Seminary in July. You can contact him at TTumblin@juno.com.
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