IT Employers Turn to Bonus Pay to Boost Performance

Waves of IT employers are moving to the use of short-term incentive and bonus pay to improve IT workers job performance, according to a new study.

People3, a Bridgewater, N.J., company belonging to Gartner Inc., found that such quick fixes are now popular with 39.1 percent of those surveyed, compared with 30.9 percent in 2002. The survey, “2003 IT Market Compensation study,” surveyed 151 organizations in March and reflects compensation data for 43,990 IT employees in the United States.

“With an increased emphasis on cost cutting, evaluating IT total reward practices becomes more important than ever on an organizations agenda,” said Diane M. Berry, managing vice president at people3, in a statement. “It is critical for IT leaders to directly tie their employees monetary rewards to the achievement of their respective business unit objectives. Not only does this drive short-term performance to meet the increasing expectations of the business, but it also motivates and retains IT employees who are increasingly looking for a rewarding and satisfactory work experience.”

The study also found that average base IT salary increased 2.9 percent from year-ago figures. There was a 4.2 percent increase in median base salary of all IT jobs for the same timeframe.

The skill that organizations are having the toughest time finding turns out to be Oracle Administration. PeopleSoft and Unix were tied for second. According to the report, this represents increasing demand for ERP (enterprise resource planning)-related skills.

The toughest positions to fill, in descending order, included database administrator, Internet/Web architect, network architect, network engineer and security analyst.