Employee motivation: Recruitment favoured over staff pay, incentives and recognition, says HECSU

Date: 04/05/2011

Staff incentives and recognition are being put on the back burner while employers focus on recruitment, the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU) has claimed.

According to Charlie Ball, deputy director of research at the organisation, through the recession, many businesses were keen to avoid redundancies or recruitment schemes, which had an impact on pay rises.

But now, he says: "[Businesses] have learned their lessons from that period; when the recession ended many of them found they didn't have the talent to capitalise on improved conditions, so their own corporate recoveries were quite slow.

"People are very keen to avoid that again, but in order to provide more employee places you put pressure on the salaries budget."

Mr Ball's comments follow research published this week by XpertHR, which found that pay awards fell in the first quarter of 2011.

The study said that employees have gone two years of little or no pay rises and want to see some recompense for this through a pay award or incentives and recognition.

Posted by Elizabeth Mewes 

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