You are required to write a report that analyses the business/management decisions in one of the summary examples presented. YOU MUST START YOUR ANALYSIS WITH A CYNEFIN EVALUATION OF THE DECISION MAKING ENVIRONMENT.

Decision Making Themes you could consider IN ADDITION TO CYNEFIN:

Situational complexity of decision making (CYNEFIN)

Balancing priorities in ethical decision making]

Ethical decision making frameworks

Leadership and structuring decisions

Making hard decisions within complex situations

VJY Decision Making

Rationality

Non-linear thinking

Cognitive dissonance Decision Making

Humanism Decision Making

Risk Averse / Happy (Conservative / Optimistic Decision maker)

Soft Systems Analysis

Factors shaping operational and strategic decisions

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Making HR pay choices post pandemic? (2021- Current) (This summary outlines an increasingly considered HR choice for many organisations post pandemic. You can evaluate this choice).

Summary -Google is the most recent tech employer to plan to potentially cut the pay of employees choosing to work 100% remotely post Covid-19. Their compensation would be based on where they live, not the office they were once attached to. Others in tech such as Facebook or Twitter and some law companies have now announced similar plans. Some companies however have decided to go the other way and have said salaries could also be adjusted up.

Are greedy companies taking away from workers who've given their all during and post the pandemic and putting families and marginalized employees living in cheaper areas at a disadvantage? Why would some of the worlds most famous companies decide that reducing remote workers' pay was their best option? Even those experienced with Google, feel this could be a very poor decision.

To decide whether Google's move is fair consider the impact of globalised capitalism. Two google employees one is on a higher salary than another, supported in their use of remote working and relocation which because of this secures more family support. The other worker on a similar salary but different role in Google and at the top of their scale asks and is refused a pay rise. Local resentment grows at the apparent benefits of one worker from working at home with that of another worker. This situation is surfaced every time there is a Zoom meeting with workers dispersed across geography but on similar pay salaries but potentially different salary bandings.

For centuries work was conditioned on showing up to a particular field, factory, or office, so pay ranges vary by location. They're designed to attract the right candidates where the company needs them to be. It's not the cost of living employers consider; it's the cost of talent. The two are only partially related.

Companies will pay what it takes to attract and retain people in a particular market. It's the cost of a software engineer that matters, not the cost of a one-bedroom flat. Put differently, an employer cares what you and people like you will accept, not what you need to live on.

Cost of living is not the real focus it is the value of the context of the worker. Salary is based not on worker needs or created value but on what it would cost to replace the worker. Internationally mobile employees have experienced this for years. Expatriate contracts are a thing of the past. A worker moving countries is usually asked to give up their existing deal and sign again under local law - and local pay rates.

If a worker wants to move bad enough, they accept the pay cut. A smart organisation may absorb the difference into a promotion, moving the employee to a new pay band so they don't feel the pain so instead of getting a pay cut they didn't deserve, they don't see a pay rise they did earn. It makes sense psychologically, if not financially. The colonial undertones of an overpaid expat class are falling out of fashion, and some think rightly so. It's no fairer than asking an immigrant to undercut the local minimum wage.

Fundamentally, is the problem that capitalism has a location-based compensation system for increasingly location-independent work? This is requiring some companies like Zillow to decide to pay everyone the same. Such blanket policies where pay rates are applied regardless of employee context do not seem to solve any of the employer concerns about remote working which tend to cluster around perceived productivity differences. Aligning pay globally for a large multinational company though, would be a legal and logistical nightmare. For Google with 135,000 full-time employees, such levelling up across the board would cost hundreds of millions.

In the longer term, as knowledge work becomes disconnected from location, so, too, could professional pay scales. If workers insist they can work anywhere, corporations could insist it can be done by anyone. This can create significant ethical and decision difficulties as such choices made by workers and employers often revolving around the unique situation of the worker, the nature of the power relationship between the skills and value of the worker in a labour market and assumptions about those skills and their availability but which could then lead to situations of illegal discrimination.