Morphing Your Bonus Into Malus

O-oh.  Not content with bringing the rest of us to our knees through their own tyrannical greed, are bankers about to spell the beginning of an unjust commission regime, or is it simply the heralding of a necessarily more altruistic, responsible approach to performance rewards?

I’m referring to the discovery yesterday of a shift in bonus scheme mentality at UBS.  The broadsheets choose either an emotional report, or a dry one.

Goodbye Bonus.  Hello Malus.  Extra bunce at this enormous bank will in the main now be held in a pot for three years.  Should the overall business performance dip, your slice will be reduced.

Surely this ludicrously addresses merely symptom, and not root cause, of any reckless or under-performance?

Imagine that you’ve made your numbers, you’re paid on invoice and all the goods you sold have been duly shipped.  Then they’re all slightly faulty.  Someone in production, somewhere along the line has dropped a brick.  Everything comes back for replacement.  In the meantime, all the POs you gathered are exchanged for credit notes.  Just before the year-end.

I could describe any number of different scenarios, each of which could have your commission recalled, inspite of you conducting your duties with aplomb.

If some rogue agent decimates profits with their sulphurous results, then they, along with each of their line managers, should face the plank.  Not the rest of us.  Malus?  Rebarbative nonsense.  The very rise of such an idea is another example of people being paid too much money to sit around and justify their own existence.