When employees become bank shareholders
In the news is that a Digital banker, GoTyme, aims to make 90 percent of its employees shareholders of the bank. Definitely, a very encouraging, unusual and rarely heard of initiative on a workers’ productivity program among local companies.
The company’s chief executive officer was quoted as saying: “Ownership changes how people operate. When our team members think like owners, they move faster, go the extra mile for customers … will help accelerate our goal of building the largest and most loved bank in the Philippines.”
GoTyme is one of the few companies in this country that has reached the stage of their employees becoming significant shareholders and, therefore, will start having involvement with the company’s future direction.
A preparatory program on productivity where workers share in the increased revenues’ gross profit and are rewarded with higher take-home pay, exceeding the basic compliance with minimum wage law, is a good start toward having major ownership of the company they work for, like in the case of GoTyme.
Employers’ groups, like Employers Confederation of the Philippines and Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, could take a lesson from GoTyme because 99.5 percent of Securities and Exchange Commission-registered companies operating in the country are micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), which dominate the domestic market but have lackluster business operations.
It’s time for employers’ oversight groups to do the spadework of raising the productivity levels of MSMEs by tutoring them on conceptualizing the productivity levels of MSMEs by conceptualizing simple productivity reward programs for their workers. The team-based productivity reward programs should be adopted by MSMEs as the basis for increasing take-home pay and for the payment of the productivity bonuses on added company revenues. The minimum wage should be a thing of the past.
A research study “Creating a Culture of Collaboration and Performance Through Team-based Incentives” (Research Gate, January 2015, Dr. Luis R. Gomez-Mejia and Dr. Monica Franco-Santos) buttressed this strong argument for team-based productivity:
“A meta-analysis published in 2003 of 45 studies using team incentives found that overall, the use of incentives tied to the achievement of team goals resulted in a 22 percent increase in performance.”
We have high hopes for GoTyme with their employers as shareholders and their goal to dominate the market in the digital banking industry is not farfetched with a highly motivated workforce; we see similar growth possibilities for the many MSMEs operating in the country’s domestic market if the Team-based Productivity Rewards Program for workers can be widely adopted for a start.
MARVEL K. TAN, CPA,
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