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XCEL ENGERGY PAYS FOR EMPLOYEES WHO EXCEL

Xcel Energy Pays for Employees Who Excel

Dong Nguyen

Kaplan University

MT203: Human Resources Management

Dana Williams

July 2, 2013

Xcel Energy Pays for Employees Who Excel

Xcel Energy believes that rewarding has a big influence to job performance. Xcel Energy implemented a reward program that paid $427,000 for 6,133 employees (Noe, 2009). That much amount of money was given by suing merit-pay method which was fairly evenly across all employees in combination of individual, group, and cooperate performance. That was great for the average workers; however, with just 2% higher pay, those top performers did feel uncomfortable (Noe, 2009).

Recently, merit pay program should work out fine since the reward program was relatively new to the company. For long-term, continuous low pay out might result in dropping out of those top performers. Fairness is easy to say, but it’s hard to apply. The company should give more incentive programs that contain specific criteria so that the high performers would have chances to receive more bonus that worth their efforts.

The company already planned to give out big raises, bonuses to the best employees, and even long-term stock shares to nonmanagement employees. Employees understand company is going to pay more and responding well as seeing company’s consistent actions (Noe, 2009). As being addressed, the company is on the right way of giving more for the better performers and maintaining fairness to all employees. Giving out stocks as a form of bonuses is to maintain long term attachment and loyalty to the company. The better the company overall performance, the higher stock price is.

Xcel Energy should have variety incentive program that can apply to different ways. The original merit pay program has to be improved to have more accurate pay out to all employees. The employee recognition program is an additional measuring method for company to eventually giving out more...