A while back I heard a comment that some people were worried that moving to scrum would have a direct affect on their ability to gain financial rewards as scrum was based on the team and not the individual.

I’ve thought about this over time and realised that this is an ingrained cultural issue that is maybe prevalent across the whole industry.

Now of course different members of a team may well be on different salaries for different reasons.  Market forces for example will dictate levels of pay for certain roles, its likely that it will cost you more in salary for someone recruited to a company than maybe it would for someone grown organically within the organisation.

Often however following someone’s initially salary, financial reward or pay rises have been given based on people’s personal performance or perceived performance, it could be there is a hierarchical structure that you move up based on certain criteria.  This has been on going for many years so when people hear that we succeed as a team, we work as a single team and we win or lose as a team then I can understand how they may be concerned with how it affects their yearly financial rewards in terms of pay rise etc.  I don’t see however that just by moving to scrum an organisations method of determining pay rewards would change and in fact I am very confident that it doesn’t and the methods of reward remain unchanged.

If we examine the topic further and take the current approaches to pay rewards what issues may this cause in relation to working with a scrum team?  If financial reward is based solely on individual performance perceived or otherwise then this could lead to a hero mind set.  People may take on over bearing workloads, work excessive hours, with hold information from other team members, not help other team members and let the team fail as long as on an individual level they succeed and ultimately ensure they make themselves look good so that come financial reward time they will get the lions share.  This I’m sure we would all agree is not the best place to be when we need to work as a team to deliver successful projects or products.  In addition of course if everyone took this approach there would be a high probability of project failure and this may reduce the desire to offer any financial rewards from the company.

So how can we change this?  Well if we work as a team, deliver as a team and win or lose as a team then surely we should be rewarded as a team.  If the team is successful then the team is rewarded, if they are not successful then the reward is reduced.  If we took this approach then what mindset would this promote?  If people are measured as being part of a successful team then this will encourage a mindset of one of a team player, ensuring it is the team that wins and not individuals at the expense of everyone else.  Workload would be shared out, information cannot be withheld and people will willingly support and help each other.  They will do this as they will know from a financial aspect it is to their benefit.   We should focus our rewards on successful teams delivering working software and individuals displaying the characteristics that move the team as a whole forward. This method rewards teamwork and successful teams and not successful individuals at the expense of the team.  If all the team work together towards common goals and objectives and not as a set of individuals then there is less likelihood of project failure and therefore the organisation may have more money to offer in terms of financial reward.

Some people may say that this would allow weaker team members to hide away but would this really be the case, this in fact may draw them out more quickly, people will need to be on the top of their game and be adding value to the team in the best way that they can for the team to succeed and in fact may breed higher performing teams.

Over and above this what about the case where we do have outstanding individuals, they may work well in a team and tick all of those boxes and we may want to reward them highly to retain their services and avoid them being tempted to go elsewhere, how do we reconcile this and cater for this scenario?

Now I have been extreme in how I have painted the picture and somewhat simplistic, people and teams are not really at such opposite ends of the scale and of course there are many other factors at play in how teams function and work together other than financial reward but the question remains how do you align individual rewards against the team ethos which in essence was the comment that I heard.

I don’t think these are questions that a scrum team can answer,  this is far deeper and far more in grained and cultural, we would need to change the entire organisation to think in this way and indeed would need to change the way financial rewards are seen and dealt with.  This would be a big ask of any company or industry.

Will we ever get to rewarding by team as opposed to individual? I don’t know, maybe there is some aspect of this already with team bonuses and maybe they need to co-exist along with individual reward as opposed to individual rewards being replaced.   Maybe we need to find a happy medium that recognises and rewards the team, with team work being paramount but can also recognise and reward individual excellence as long as it is not to the detriment of the team or encourages hero behaviour.   

Do I think we should get to the position whereby scrum teams are rewarded as a team based on team success?  Yes I do, will it be something that I will see as common practice in the medium or maybe even longer term?  Probably not, that is within the hands of individual organisations and down to industry trends. 

Indeed maybe these questions throw up many more questions in themselves and this whole topic is one of extreme complexity with many factors at play whether this is at an industry level, organisational level, team level, individual level and even down to the culture within the country that you operate.