Employees say executive reward doesn’t represent value for money
Only 44 per cent of workers believe they are fairly paid, although 55 per cent said they were given a pay rise in the past year, research has revealed.
The research, detailed in the report ‘Britain at Work’, also revealed that 28 per cent of employees felt their senior leaders were overcompensated for their work.
Healthcare employees expressed this sentiment most strongly with 46 per cent of respondents from the sector reporting that their boss was unduly rewarded for their performance, the study conducted on behalf of business consultancy firm Lansons found.
Speaking to People Management, Scott McKenzie, director of Lansons’ Change and Employee Engagement practice, said: “People are saying: ‘Broadly, we’re paid fairly and we’re beginning to see pay going in the right direction but we don’t really understand why the chief executive is being paid the way that they’re paid. We barely see them, they’re not particular visible and we don’t get the value of why their pay is so high compared with our pay.’”
Lack of senior leader visibility is felt so widely that 22 per cent of the survey respondents said they could not name their chief executive.
Half of the survey respondents (51 per cent) would not recommend working for their organisation and more than a third (39 per cent) said they would leave tomorrow if they were offered another job.
McKenzie said: “We’re seeing people who are coming out of the economic downturn, they’ve perhaps stayed a long time in the same role because the job market has not been particularly buoyant. Pay has not been increasing broadly through that period. They’ve perhaps had to work longer and they’ve seen people being laid off so they feel they’ve had to do more with fewer resources. I think that’s all had a big impact on them and certainly there’s some big issues over health and well-being in terms of people working very long hours and that having an impact on their home lives.”
The report also discovered that 51 per cent of staff sometimes felt either pressurised or exhausted by work, which equates to 15 million people when extrapolated across the country’s workforce.
Time pressures were also found to be a significant problem, with 30 per cent of survey respondents reporting that they felt they did not have enough time to do their job effectively. In addition, the average overtime employees reported doing was one hour and 20 minutes per day.
Meanwhile, 31 per cent of workers said they did not take their full lunch break, 17 per cent said they regularly cancel social events to keep up with professional demands and 16 per cent had skipped a holiday because of work.
The survey questioned more than 2,000 UK employees across a range of industries and was carried out by insight agency Opinium Research.