薪酬与环保挂钩行得通吗

    他说：“激励本来是萝卜，但在这种情况下却更像是大棒。”激励的危险在于，员工会带着薪酬被扣除的恐惧心理去工作，从而导致对奖励机制的负面、而不是正面看法。比尔指出，要想让员工对奖励机制形成正面的看法，公司的领导者必须制定清晰的目标，然后让员工明白，实现这些目标会使他们更有机会得到晋升或股票期权。

    “发薪水时，应该让员工觉得这是在感谢他们为公司所作出的贡献”比尔说。“这就是股票期权的价值所在，这就是分红的价值所在。通过这些松散的挂钩机制，我们可以使员工明白，他们也是这个集体的一部分。这是一种截然不同的心理。”

    比如，斯普林特（Sprint）就采用了松散挂钩的奖励机制。这家公司没有将高管薪酬与环保项目直接挂钩，但企业责任通信官马可•维尔布鲁根•兰德在邮件中写到，该公司里的一些部门在调整员工薪酬时会考虑许多不同的因素，而可持续性就是其中之一。斯普林特CEO丹•海塞曾说，他希望斯普林特的环保计划能使该公司有别于电信行业里激烈的竞争对手。

    现在，越来越多的企业都加入了环保的行列。“我不认为这种情况只是昙花一现，”美世咨询公司的瓦格纳说。“我想，更多的企业和投资者正开始关注除了财务风险之外的其他风险。我们已经看到越来越多的公司都发布了自愿可持续性报告。”

    不过，在环保到底有何意义的问题上，企业、股东和消费者仍然有一些疑惑。美国铝业公司属于历来最不环保的行业之一，而其薪酬激励方法正是试图为这样一家公司设定积极的目标。但问题是，在采用这种方法的公司里，员工是否会真心支持环保，或者正如比尔担心的那样，员工是否会局限于数字，结果只见树木，不见森林，反倒忽视了大局。或者就美国铝业公司来说，忽视了对铝土矿的开采。

    译者：千牛絮

    "An incentive is a carrot, but it works like a stick," he says. The risk in incentives is that employees will act out of fear that their pay will be docked, which creates a negative instead of positive rewards system. A positive rewards system, Beer says, would require leaders at a company to outline clear goals and then communicate how meeting those goals could result in an increased chance for a promotion or stock options.

    "You want to get the compensation to them in a way that's a recognition of their engagement with the company," Beer says. "That's the value of stock options, that's the value of profit sharing -- those are loosely coupled ways in which we remind people they are part of this community. It's just a whole different psychology."

    Sprint (S), for example, uses a loosely coupled reward system. The company does not tie executive pay directly to its environmental projects, but corporate responsibility communications officer Marci VerBrugge-Rhind wrote in an email that some of its departments use sustainability as one of many different elements it considers when it adjusts its staffers' salaries. And Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has been vocal about how he hopes Sprint's green initiatives will distinguish the company from its fierce telecom industry competitors.

    Increasingly, companies are getting on board with green movements. "I don't think it's a fad at all," says Mercer's Wagner. "I think more boards and more investors are starting to ask about risks beyond financial risks. We've seen more and more companies issuing voluntary sustainability reports," she says.

    Yet there is still some confusion among corporations, shareholders, and consumers about what sustainability truly means. Alcoa's incentive pay approach is one attempt to set aggressive goals for a player in one of the most historically un-green industries. The question is whether or not employees at companies that use this method truly support a green mentality, or, as Beer fears, narrow in on the numbers and wind up missing the forest for the trees. Or, in Alcoa's case, missing the mine for the bauxite.