jamesz

Performance pay for the public sector?

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In December last year The Work Foundation released a comprehensive review of performance-related pay in the public sector:

PRP schemes can be effective in improving outcomes across the three public services for which evidence is available (health, education and the civil service), although the central conclusion is that the outcomes from PRP are mixed, which much dependent upon organisational and occupational context and scheme design and implementation. Where positive effects have been found, effect sizes are sometimes small and may also be short-lived. As well as evidence gaps across much of the public services, the weight of evidence also varies, with the more robust evidence coming from education and health rather than the civil service. Cost-effectiveness data to assess the value for money of PRP interventions is also rare.

The implication is that performance-related pay isn’t a quick fix: it requires careful development to fit it to the context, and organisations might take a while to adapt to it and see benefits. Without more examples in the public sector it isn’t possible to say whether it will prove cost-effective.

Matt Nolan

Quick note: Earnings inequality and aging

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Note:  I know I’m not replying to comments right now, I’m very sorry.  It isn’t you, it is me – this time of year is always pretty full on for me!  Keep an eye out – in the next couple of weeks I will find time to turn around and comment back.  Post will be a touch lighter as well – but I will try to have at least three things up a week!

Via Twitter came this cool graph from Wiki New Zealand.

I’m going to quickly note something from that graph.   Read more

Matt Nolan

A Top 10 on the labour market

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I recently did a Top 10 over at interest.co.nz, focused on the labour market.

With labour market conditions improving in New Zealand, and overseas, while technology changes and we recover from a long slow down, there are a lot of interesting points to consider – I suggest going over and having a look 😉

Matt Nolan

Labour day: Jobs as a cost?

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Today is Labour Day in New Zealand – and given I’ve written about “co-ordination” so recently I can’t do one of those posts where I talk about public holidays as a co-ordination device.  Instead I intend to discuss the costs and benefits of “jobs” – or the costs of benefits of supplying your labour 😉

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Matt Nolan

NZ isn’t the US: Employment rates

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So often we hear that, even though the unemployment rate is falling in the US, employment is low.  It is the low level of employment, and the lack of integration in the community that entails, that is causing so much anger over there.  The lack of opportunity illustrated through the low employment rate is one of the key pieces of information pulled out to suggest something must be done.

Often people in New Zealand talk as if whatever is happening in the US is happening here, therefore something must be done.  However, lets be a bit more careful – especially as in the case of the employment rate that is untrue.

 

remprSource:  Stats NZ.  Quandl.

Yes, the story is more complicated (Working for families increased the number of second earners in the labour market, a factor that will in of itself have pushed up the participation and employment rates).  But if anything that suggests we need to be a lot more careful applying “lessons” from the US situation to New Zealand.  We are not the United States – a point we’ve noted when looking at median income comparisons in the past 😉

 

 

jamesz

Billing by the hour

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There’s an interesting article on the NYT about an accountant who has stopped billing by the hour:

A few years ago, he said, he realized that the billable hour was undercutting his value—it was his profession’s commodity, suggesting to clients that he and his colleagues were interchangeable containers of finite, measurable units that could be traded for money. Perhaps the biggest problem, though, was that billing by the hour incentivized long, boring projects rather than those that required specialized, valuable insight that couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be measured in time. Paradoxically, the billable hour encouraged Blumer and his colleagues to spend more time than necessary on routine work rather than on the more nuanced jobs.

I look at this from two perspectives: billing within the firm and billing to clients. Read more