Compensation and Work

The relationship between employer and worker is at its root a commercial one. This does not mean that it cannot also be other things, but it is primarily an economic one - an exchange of various compensations for a certain period and amount of labor. Because of this economic core to the relationship, money should be a central concern when negotiating the terms of one's employment.

However, money - at least directly, in terms of one's salary, is certainly not the only form of compensation that an employer can provide and as one's experience grows in the work force one is more and more likely to appreciate these other forms of compensation, which can include 401k plans, health benefits, support for continuing education, on-site child-care, flextime and company time permitted for volunteer work.

This paper examines the full range of benefits - in addition to direct compensation - that employers provide today and determines which benefits are the most valued. Of course, different people want different kinds of benefits, not o

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e three most common alternatives to cash are advancement opportunities (76%, up from 60% in 1999), flexible work schedules (73%, up from 64%) and opportunities to learn new skills (68%, up from 62%), according to the fifth annual Watson Wyatt Strategic Rewards« survey. This emphasis on relatively intangible benefits such as the chance to increase one's own skills and knowledge is part of a larger trend in which the most important benefits that many employees want is the chance to create a healthier and more rewarding balance in their lives between the spheres of work and family. According to an MIT Sloan School of Management paper titled "What Do We Really Want?" (Ancona etal), companies remain highly conservative in defining what it is that employees want - using a model that is essentially tied to mid-20th-century family structures in which men derived nearly their entire sense from their jobs and were the sole financial supporters of their families and women stayed at home with families - and so had enough time to do all of the things for their families that men did not do. This is, of course, no longer the case, but many employers still structure their benefits packages as if each employee were the sole breadwinner of t
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Approximate Word count = 1335
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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