SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 160,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each Tuesday in our e-newsletter.
Last week, we asked: How much of your total compensation are you comfortable having tied directly to your performance as variable compensation?
- 20% to 50% — I like predictability, but having some performance upside is attractive: 57%
- Zero to 20% — I prefer completely predictable compensation: 21%
- 50% to 80% — I want a base salary but prefer that the majority of my compensation be tied to my performance: 17%
- 80% to 100% — I want almost everything tied directly to my performance: 5%
Clearly, people want something they can count on from month to month. Almost 80% of you want the majority of your compensation to be predictable and also desire some performance-based upside. The small minority of respondents who want to take bigger bets on themselves are clearly more comfortable sacrificing predictability for upside. It will be interesting to ask this question again when the economy recovers because there’s probably bias toward predictability these days, when simply having a job is all most of us could wish for.
Mike Figliuolo is managing director of ThoughtLeaders and author of “One Piece of Paper.”