---
title: "Distributors: Whose Employees Don't Complain About Low Pay? How to Respond?"
description: "The most common labor issue is compensation, with most employees dissatisfied with their current pay, feeling it's too low. Of course, employees feel pay is low not in absolute terms but relatively—compared to other employees, their own efforts, the value and performance they create, the boss's income, similar positions in other companies, and friends and family. These comparisons make them feel underpaid, even if the boss emphasizes difficult business conditions."
author: "潘文富"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2017-01-11"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jzApbzSoNzsdU1a3WwIwoA"
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---

# Distributors: Whose Employees Don't Complain About Low Pay? How to Respond?

> The most common labor issue is compensation, with most employees dissatisfied with their current pay, feeling it's too low. Of course, employees feel pay is low not in absolute terms but relatively—compared to other employees, their own efforts, the value and performance they create, the boss's income, similar positions in other companies, and friends and family. These comparisons make them feel underpaid, even if the boss emphasizes difficult business conditions.

The most common labor issue is compensation, with most employees dissatisfied with their current pay, feeling it's too low. Of course, employees feel pay is low not in absolute terms but relatively.
> **Relative to what?**
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> **1. Relative to other employees;**
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> **2. Relative to their own efforts;**
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> **3. Relative to the value and performance they create;**
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> **4. Relative to the boss's income;**
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> **5. Relative to similar positions in other comparable companies;**
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> **6. Relative to the employees' friends and family.**
After comparing these factors, employees inevitably feel their compensation is low, even if the boss emphasizes the current difficult business environment, rising costs, and thin margins. However, employees are likely not to listen, thinking the boss is just crying poor. Even if the boss improves compensation bit by bit, employees see it as stingy and ungenerous. Once resentment arises, work efficiency correspondingly declines.
In fact, employee compensation is a bottomless pit that can never be filled. After all, desire and greed are human nature; those who can exercise self-control in material matters are truly saints.
Of course, the problem still needs to be solved. Facing employees' various overt and covert complaints about compensation, the boss cannot just sit and wait to die; some measures must be taken. Basically, there are four main directions to address employees' compensation complaints:
> **1. Establish objective benchmarks for comparison, such as industry salary levels and job capability standards;**
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> **2. Two-way accounting: the boss should also calculate for employees their actual work costs and waste, actual performance value, and various accident risks caused to the company during work;**
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> **3. Income decline due to employees' own vocational skills and execution issues;**
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> **4. Disarm the employees.**
Here, we focus on disarming employees.
What is meant by employee armament? The reason employees harbor resentment and dare to vent it is that they must have some supporting factors in hand. With grain in hand, one is not panicked; with a gun in hand, one fears no wolves. So, what are these things?
> **1. Their own irreplaceability, meaning no one else in the company can currently replace them;**
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> **2. Technical closure: relevant vocational skills are held by the employee alone, unknown to others;**
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> **3. Work process closure: only they know the actual progress of various tasks;**
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> **4. External resources, including customer resources and social relationship resources, are also held in their hands;**
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> **5. Other companies are contacting them, or they already have entrepreneurial plans.**
Why are these things called armament? Because the gun in hand can be used against enemies or turned on one's own people. Normally, these things employees hold are used to do things for the company and help create value. But once employees turn the gun around, these things become weapons to attack the company.
The corresponding solution is not complicated: disarm the employees, as briefly described below:
> **1. Establish job descriptions to clarify the scope of each position;**
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> **2. Establish work instructions to clarify the specific execution processes and standards for various tasks, as well as prevention and handling of common problems;**
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> **3. Establish an internal information transparency mechanism, such as OA or posting work progress on a wall, making all current work progress fully visible;**
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> **4. With the above three in place, begin implementing job rotation, rotating positions irregularly so employees master vocational skills for multiple positions and tasks, breaking technical closure;**
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> **5. For external customer and social resources, the company should centrally control them, establishing a central customer relationship system;**
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> **6. Conduct reserve recruitment: after interviews, candidates do not join immediately (they remain in their normal positions at other companies) but enter the company's new employee reserve pool, start learning vocational skills in advance (provided with job descriptions and work instructions), and irregularly participate in temporary company activities to familiarize themselves with the company and work, serving as external reserve forces.**
As for employees wanting to change jobs or start their own businesses, the company cannot stop them. However, as long as they are still employed today, their armament must be removed—that is, break all employees' irreplaceability so that other employees can easily replace them, and the external new employee reserve pool can deploy new employees at any time to take over the work.
After disarming employees, they will more objectively consider their actual value. Combined with two-way accounting and analysis of their own problems, this can to some extent alleviate the endless complaints about compensation.
The author comes from a private business background, having operated a family distributor company for many years, during which he also served as a business manager and trainer in several manufacturing companies. His research focuses on internal management of small and medium-sized private enterprises, with main topics including personnel management, cost control, management backend setup, and the integration of retired military personnel into private enterprises. He continuously breaks down over 400 topics related to internal management of private enterprises and keeps updating material collection and solutions.
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