Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 20:58:18 -0500 (EST)
From: Sunee Grima <SuneeGrima@AOL.COM>
Subject: Re: Merit pay for Serial Librarians (Karen Chobot)

Karen,

What your institution is trying to do is an old wine in a new bottle. Yes,  we
do set porfessional goals every year. Some years we do more and some years we
do less. At the public library I worked before, they set the areas where
people need for their jobs into 7 areas: collection development, reference
service, fiscal management, public service,  time manangement, infomation and
technology and property management. Under each category, there are some
suggested activities. Imagine,  folks who work in Technical services doing
just labels, stripings and entering barcodes into the system, trying to find
activities that will fit to all those categories. I was a supervisor at that
time, my suggestions to people who worked for me were to think about what they
do in their jobs that would fit those categories. In another word, I did not
want them to run around looking for broken chairs and tables and fix them, so
they could fulfill the goals for  "property mangement"  I did suggest to them
to lay out their goals as to process xx numbers of items for each month. This
fits the goal for taking care of library property. They would do the same
things with other categories. The key word is to process materials and do
their jobs.

I do not know of any better way for a merit pay. In Thailand, at my time when
I worked fo the government agency, everybody got a one-step merit increase at
the end of the year. Some people manage to get two-step increase by being
close to the authority who has the power to grant the merit increase.

Some orgnization let employees do special projects. Of course, the project
will be headed by the project owner and helped out by other employees. In my
opinion, it might pitch one person against another. It is a competition game.

With the merit pay, think about the documentation that you will need to work
on versus the amount of  money you will receive. Does this worth your time,
enregy and efforts for just a few dollars for evary paycheck you earn?

Good luck

Sunee Grima
Acquisitions/Serials Coordinator
Weber State University
Ogden UT 84408

sgrima@weber.edu.

This is my own opinion.