The importance of fairness and equity

Fairness and equity play such an important role in terms of ensuring high levels of employee engagement.  That feeling of being treated as equals, respected and trusted.

So, to see an organisation such as Goldman Sachs make a decision around introducing unlimited holiday for only their senior staff looks like a sure-fire way to disengage and demotivate a significant number of their people.

As a colleague of mine, Max, stated yesterday “How do decisions like this make it through an organisation?”.

There are so many things to consider here.  Who thought this would be a good idea?  Did anyone consider the consequences of implementing such a policy?  As the suggestion moved up through the organisation, did no one question it at all?

Also, and most crucially, I wonder if any of the junior staff that this policy doesn’t apply to were consulted before this was put into place?

It is fair to say that you cannot treat everyone exactly the same, this is a given.  But you can treat people fairly and consistently.  We know through years of research that fairness plays such a crucial role in creating an environment where people can engage and go above and beyond and give their absolute best.  Yet many employees perceive their organisations systems and decision-making processes are not fair, trustworthy or unbiased.

This ranges from performance reviews and annual assessments (see McKinsey: “Amid ongoing dissatisfaction and experimentation, our research suggests that there’s a performance-management issue that’s hiding in plain sight: it’s fairness.”), through to implementing flexible working and how managers often don’t apply rules and procedures in a fair and consistent way – this is something that comes through in our employee engagement survey research work on a regular basis.

No doubt Goldman Sachs is implementing its unlimited holiday approach to try and alleviate stress and pressure on its senior staff (this is laudable given that wellbeing plays a role in employee engagement as well) but this implies its junior staff may not suffer from stress or burn out.  Did anyone stop to consider that implementing such a policy for a cohort subset might have negative consequences?

As an aside, there is evidence to suggest that unlimited holidays cause huge amount of stress and strain on an organisation.  As CharlieHR has noted: “…what we perhaps didn’t appreciate at the outset was that holidays aren’t singularly about the individuals taking time off. It also affects everyone else in their team and everyone across the company as a whole.”

Many people in organisations that offer unlimited holiday, simply don’t take enough of it, not knowing what the limits are can cause anxiety and, finally, unlimited holiday…it can’t really mean that, can it?  Work still needs to be done.

For me, the lessons here are to think about all staff when implementing such a policy, is it fair?  What are the consequences, seen or unforeseen and will it have the overall desired effect you are looking for?

On the face of it, I would wager that junior staff (what a horrible term by the way) are going to feel disenfranchised, upset, annoyed and demotivated and not treated fairly and consistently.  Which I am sure was not the intended outcome.