Sir, – The whole idea of a national utility for provision of water is spurious and ill-conceived. I know this, for certain. I live on Clare Island. Electricity, TV and radio signals, telephone networks are all “sent to us” from afar.
Our water supply, on the other hand, comes from the sky, lands on the island, flows off the slopes of Croaghmore, is filtered through tanks, and flows through pipes to every household on the island. The source is local, the maintenance local (my good friend Michael Bob), possible problems are local, and all solutions, by definition, must be local.
Quite contrary to a national, even European sharing of electrical power, water will always be “local”. Or course there must be national policies, guidelines, sharing of costs for providing water, but there is absolutely nothing to be gained through the creation of a “national” utility to this end.
Only Dublin (the Pale) has a need of water provision “from afar”. Let there be county or provincial utilities providing water.
It is absolutely certain that provision of water on Clare Island has nothing to gain from Irish Water. The risk is that the vital local knowledge, needed for maintaining the service, will be sacrificed on the altar of a “national utility”. – Yours, etc,
PETER GILL,
Clare Island,
Co Mayo.
Sir, – Irish Water pays bonuses to their employees even if they have a “needs improvement” rating on their performance review. You might ask what is so unusual about paying bonuses in a company. Don’t all companies do this and isn’t this the way to stimulate performance in a company? And from what we have seen of Irish Water so far, does not its performance definitely merit improvement?
Paying bonuses to employees for their performance is counterproductive and doesn’t do anything to increase the performance of employees; the opposite is true.
Repeated research by highly regarded institutes over the last 30 years has proven without doubt that paying bonuses for performance doesn’t work and is counterproductive. Keep in mind the banking crisis; the collapse of a complete sector which paid itself the highest bonuses. If bonuses worked, the banking sector should be thriving!
Any self-respecting HR practitioner knows this and would be very careful regarding implementing a bonus culture in a new company. That is the surprising thing about Irish Water; as it is a new company it has all the opportunities to establish a new culture and implement policies which would help it perform, yet Irish Water immediately returned to the failed old bonus culture. It tells me that top management is not focussed on creating a new efficient organisation based on new proven scientific methods but are very focussed on keeping things as they are. This is not very convincing for the executive of a newly formed company assigned with such an important task.
Dan Pink in his book Drive, the Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us reviews the new motivational theories developed over the last 30 years. He concludes that when it comes to motivation there is a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system – which is built around external, carrot-and–stick motivators (performance bonuses) – doesn't work.
Science has shown us that the new motivational approach which works has three essential elements: autonomy, the desire to direct our own lives; mastery, the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and purpose, the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Up to the end of the last century motivation and bonuses were built around external rewards (performance bonuses) and punishments. That worked fine for routine 20th-century tasks.
But in the 21st-century this old system is proving to be incompatible with how we organise what we do, how we think about what we do, and how we do what we do. When the carrot-and-stick approach is used for more complicated management roles, strange things begin to happen. Traditional “if-then” rewards can give us less than what we want. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity and crowd out good behaviour. They can also give us more of what we don’t want; they encourage unethical behaviour, create addictions and foster short-term thinking. And that is exactly what is happening at Irish Water at the moment.
The carrot-and-stick approach isn’t all bad. It can be effective for rule-based routine tasks, because there is little intrinsic motivation to undermine and not much creativity to crush. However, this doesn’t apply when you are setting up a new organisation. Then creativity, ethical behaviour and performance are very much in demand.
Modern motivational theory centres on three important elements for employees of a company: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
This is what Irish Water should have been focusing on instead of a quick performance bonus culture that is counterproductive. – Yours, etc,
KENNETH BUCHHOLTZ,
Campbell International
Human Resource
Consultants,
Cloncoul House,
Ennistymon,
Co Clare.