Observing the work environment in Egypt and the US has been a very enriching experience for my humble self. I cannot help it but note that there are fundamental issues damaging the work force productivity in the Egyptian market. And by market here, I am only referring to the private sector. As the issues I am addressing here have completely different shapes and consequences in the public sectors in Egypt.
Bottom line is that pay bands for managers and employees are too disparate in Egypt. This creates a must-cross barrier for every person in the work force just to be able to get a decent income. So, every employee’s target is to become a manager as soon as humanly possible. Along the way, a lot of targets and milestones are overlooked and/or used just to get to the ultimate destination without exerting the due effort to excel for the sake of these milestones success in itself.
Now, come to think about it, how is it possible that everyone in an organization can become a manager? What type of frustrations the work force goes through because of this unrealistic goal? What is the value (for the organization and the individual) of lost opportunities because of this frustration, and lack of focus on mastering day to day employee tasks? These are questions to be considered by the architects and decision makers of our work force.
On the other hand, my experience in the US has been very different from this. The manager has duties and responsibilities that are directly related to orchestrating and developing his work team. It is a “role” that does not make him/her significantly any more pay worthy than the rest of the team. As a matter of fact, in some cases the pay of the manager can be less than that of one on his team, if that team member had the experience and qualifications that would make them eligible for such a compensation scheme.
This balanced environment allows people to work more in their comfort zone. So an employee is not compelled to go over the top and try to become a manager unless he/she has the skills of, and passion for, leading people. They are fairly compensated regardless of their “managerial” status or rank; based on their experience and qualifications for the job at hand.
That being said, and back to our questions for our work force architects, the answer to them is to relate the pay to the qualification, reduce the gap between pay bands, and treat managerial “positions” more as roles and less as status. Our work force would have much more motivation to excel at what they do and focus on their day to day achievements, and we end up with more leaders and less “status managers” and “wannabes”.
