You pay peanuts, you get monkeys article posted 8 dec 2015

Ali Mansouri Writer, Researcher, Consultant

You Pay Peanuts, You Get Monkeys: Recruitment of Teachers for Higher Education Institutions Dec 8, 2015 Google+ (Warning: This article is not about any specific university. It is about peanuts and monkeys! If you are allergic to peanuts and monkeys, do not read it. If you are a VC and you think the article is about your own university, you are strongly advised not to read it.

You may have a heart attack!!)

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Recruitment refers to the process of attracting, screening, selecting, and onboarding a qualified person for a job. At the strategic level it may involve the development of an employer brand which includes an "employee offering". The stages of the recruitment process include: job analysis and developing a person specification; the sourcing of candidates by networking, advertising, or other search methods; matching candidates to job requirements and screening individuals with organizational requirements by interviewing and other assessment techniques.

The recruitment process also includes the making and finalizing of job offers and the induction and onboarding of new employees.

Depending on the size and culture of the organization recruitment may be undertaken in-house by managers, human resource officers and recruitment specialists. Alternatively, parts of all of the process might be undertaken by either public sector employment agencies, or commercial recruitment agencies, or specialist search consultancies.

According to Dessler (2013:172), “It is hard to overemphasize the importance of effective recruiting. Even high employment doesn’t necessarily mean that it is easy to find a good candidate. For example, a survey during an earlier slowdown (2003-2004) found that about half of the respondents said they had difficulty finding qualified applicants. About 40% said it was hard to find good candidates.”

Recruitment is a very challenging operation in any business or organisation, especially for higher education (HE) institutions You cannot recruit good engineers if you know nothing about engineering; you cannot recruit good applied science teachers if you know nothing about applied science though you may know everything about money. You cannot recruit a good English Language teacher if you yourself cannot write one good sentence in English! You will end up recruiting “housewives” because you yourself is not qualified as a recruiter, hence there are real challenges in recruitment. But the success you may have in recruiting good candidates depends on non-recruitment issues and policies. For example, paying 10% more than most firms in your locale should, other things being equal, help you build the applicants pool faster.

The academic appointment process requires the use of a search committee. For classified searches, it is optional, but recommended. Supervisors may ask a committee to participate in the overall process including evaluating written materials and serving on an interview panel, or they may choose to evaluate written materials themselves and convene a panel to participate in interviews only. Panel members are valuable because they can provide different perspectives on the qualifications of candidates. The search committee/interview panel could be comprised of other staff members, managers in other departments on campus, or "customers" from campus departments. You may want to include an individual who holds a similar position to the one being filled. It is recommended that panel members include both men and women and, if possible, members of different racial or ethnic groups.

There are other important phases and issues in recruiting a qualified workforce for businesses and organizations. The most important one is the interview whether it is a personal interview or a phone interview if the applicant resides in a remote place or a different country. The purpose of an interview is to elicit information from an applicant to determine his or her ability to perform the job properly and efficiently. Successful interviewers learn how to ask the right kind of questions, how to keep the applicant talking about relevant information, and how to listen. The phone interview is the most commonly used technique in the Middle East, especially for higher education institutions. Interviewing candidates for higher education requires a high level of knowledge on the academic specialization related to the position the applicant has applied for, a high level of communication skills and a good mastery of English. You cannot really interview Page 2 of 6

an applicant to take an academic position in the College of Engineering or a College of Applied Science or a Foundation Program or any other college or department if you do not know anything about engineering, applied science or the Foundation Program. As most of the interviews for higher education positions are done in English, the interviewer needs to have a good command of English. It is really regrettable that all these essential requirements are mostly non-existent in most HR departments in the Middle East HE institutions. You find those who work in the HR departments know little or nothing about the academic specialization of the job, has very low communication skills and they can hardly speak or write English well. It’s a real disaster in recruitment. What are the results, why do we have this state of affairs and how can we rectify this course of action? The results, of course, are to staff the colleges and universities with unqualified workforce just to satisfy one and only one requirement in the whole process: the applicants are required to accept the “peanut” package of the job including the low salary! It is not really important here whether the applicants are qualified or not, whether their specializations fit the job descriptions or requirements or whether they are sane or insane! The most important thing is to accept the “peanut salary”! All the other actions or procedures are done and followed just to satisfy the formalities required of the organisation by the employment or higher education authorities. This is why I have met “teachers” with a degree in criminology or political history or even archaeology teaching English to students in the English language departments or Foundation programs. There is something basically wrong in the whole process with some disastrous outcomes for students’ English being very low even for college and university graduates. It is a great waste of time and money. The job can be done in a lot better way. The following lines are a quotation from James Goldsmith, the “owner of the great saying”: "My dear, It astounds me that businesses can continue to pay their best and most hardworking employees little to nothing and still expect genius-scale work from them day-after-day.

Hiring a large quantity of cheap labor is far less effective than properly hiring and paying for the best. 1,000 monkeys get far less done than three people. And if you barely pay people and they leave, just to find someone else who’s willing to work for such a cheap cost, realize you’re not getting the better deal. What you just did is replace a hardworking person with a monkey – you’re expecting them to think on the same intellectual capacity is absurd.

Pay people right. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Falsely yours, James Goldsmith" This is only one side of the coin. The other side is that many studies have found out that employees who accept low salaries are not only unqualified for the jobs but they have psychological problems or they will develop these problems as the time passes to the extent that they will eventually have some sort of mental disorder. What else should we expect?! In a study titled: “The Impact of a Wage Increase on Mental Health: Evidence from the UK Minimum Wage” by Christoph Kronenberg, Rowena Jacobs & Eugenio Zucchelli (August 2015), the researchers have found that mental health problems cost the UK economy around £ 105 billion every year, arising from treatment costs, human costs and lost productivity (Centre for Mental Health, 2010). Examining the relationship between income and the mental health of low wage earners is important as the lowest income earners have twice the probability of facing mental health problems compared to average income learners (Meltzer et al., 2002).

There are a number of potential mechanisms through which income could affect mental health.

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Following Benzeval et al. (2014) the literature connecting income and mental health is categorized into three pathways; these are broadly defined as: material, psychosocial and behavioural.

First, the material pathway can work directly through an income shock by enabling the purchase of physical goods and services which can improve an individual’s mental health. It has been shown , for instance, that mental illness is associated with poor diet, which is often caused by low income (Prince et al., 2007). An income increase, therefore, might facilitate the attainment of a healthier lifestyle or better accommodation. The material pathway can also work through routes which enable an individual to cope with mental health problems, such as receiving mental health care. In countries with healthcare systems with no social insurance or not free at the point of use, higher income enables individuals to purchase better mental health care services.

Second, the psychosocial pathway (or stress pathway) concerns those psychosocial changes that may increase an individual’s level of stress and lead to depression or other mental illness. For example, individuals tend to compare their income with that of their peers and this might have an impact on their mental health or psychological well-being (Marmot, 2004; Marmot and Wilkinson, 2001; O'Donnell et al., 2013).

Third, looking at the behaviour pathway, there are a number of behaviours that positively or negatively affect mental health such as unhealthy eating (Scott et al., 2007), physical exercise (Penedo and Dahn, 2005), smoking (Mykletun et al., 2008) or alcohol and substance misuse (Jane-Llopis and Matytsina, 2006). A theory explaining why there might be changes in healthbehaviours as income increases is the Grossman model, an economic model explaining the demand for overall health and healthcare (Grossman, 1972; Grossman, 2000). In this model, a wage increase affects both costs and benefits. The benefits increase since an individual has more “healthy days” which can be transformed into income via labour.

In his article, “Is Your Low-wage Job Bad for Your Heart?” published on HealthNews on January 7, 2013, Brian Krans emphasises that low wages are a risk factor for high blood pressure.

According to a research at the University of California at Davis. J. Paul Leigh, a professor of Health Economics, studies the role economics plays in human health. His previous work demonstrated that low wages increase a person’s likelihood of being obese, among other subjects. In this recent round of research, Leigh and his team took a look at how wages affect high blood pressure, or hypertension. Published in the latest issue of the European Journal of Public Health, the study not only shows a link between low wages and hypertension, but also notes that the highest risk is for women and people ages 25 to 44, two groups not typically at risk for hypertension. “I think wages are important over the psychological portions of the job,” Leigh said, adding that wages are a better indicator of job stress than other factors.

Another study titled, “Adverse Health Effects of High-effort/Low-reward Conditions” by Siegrist Johannes published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol 1(1), Jan 1996, 27-41 discusses many issues concerning the link between psychosocial occupational stress and health.

The need to identify critical health-related components within the global psychosocial occupational environment is discussed, and 2 theoretical models, the person-environment fit and the demand–control models, are reviewed to help analytically define those components. The findings of the study point to adverse cardiovascular and other health effects of chronically stressful experience in terms of high effort and low reward.

Teaching is a very stressful job but, regrettably, teachers all over the world are very low paid whereas the administrative staff, especially senior managers, receive far higher salaries but they Page 4 of 6

spend most of their time in stupid meetings and useless things like reading newspapers! The general conclusion is that any scale of salaries for university teachers need to be determined not only on the basis of monetary criteria, as some inefficient VCs may think, but also on a number of criteria including those related to mental health. It is a commonsense approach to believe that the healthier the workforce in any organization, the more productive it is. Paying peanut packages to the teachers in HE institutions has disastrous outcomes not only in economic terms and lost productivity but also on efficient job performance and high rate of absences and turnover, which in turn leads to a very low quality of teaching and worthless degrees and certificates. I have done many classroom observations of teachers in many colleges and universities and I can easily conclude that low-paid teachers teach very badly and behave like “real monkeys”: they jump in the clssrooms and even on the corridors; maybe they think they need to behave like that! The boss wants them to do so; in fact, he treats them like monkeys and does not expect them to behave differently. “Monkey teachers”, teachers with low salaries, especially in Foundation Programs in colleges and universities all over the world, are not expected to behave differently from monkeys with mental disorder Notes 1. Benzeval, M., L. Bond, M. Campbell, M. Egan, T. Lorenc, M. Petticrew and F. Popham (2014). 'How Does Money Influence Health?', Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report.

2. Dessler, Gary (2013) Human Resource Management. (13th ed.) Harlow: Pearson.

3. Grossman, M. (1972). 'On the Concept of Health Capital and the Demand for Health', The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 80 (2), pp. 223.

4. Grossman, M. (2000). 'The Human Capital Model', in (Culyer, A. J. and J. P. Newhouse Eds.), Handbook of Health Economics: Elsevier.

5. Jane-Llopis, E. V. A. and I. Matytsina (2006). 'Mental Health and Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco: a Review of the Comorbidity between Mental Disorders and the Use of Alcohol, Tobacco and Illicit Drugs', Drug and Alcohol Review, vol. 25 (6), pp. 515-536.

6. Marmot, M. (2004). 'Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health and Life Expectancy', Bloomsbury: London.

7. Marmot, M. and R. G. Wilkinson (2001). 'Psychosocial and Material Pathways in the Relation between Income and Health: a Response to Lynch et al', British Medical Journal, vol. 322 (7296), pp. 1233.

8. Meltzer, H., N. Singleton, A. Lee, P. Bebbington, T. Brugha and R. Jenkins (2002). The Social and Economic Circumstances of Adults with Mental Disorders: Stationery Office.

9. Mykletun, A., S. Overland, L. E. Aarø, H.-M. Liabø and R. Stewart (2008). 'Smoking in Relation to Anxiety and Depression: Evidence from a Large Population Survey: The HUNT Study', European Psychiatry, vol. 23(2), pp. 77-84.

10. O'Donnell, O., E. van Doorslaer and T. van Ourti (2013). 'Health and Inequality', in (Atkinson, A. B. and F. J. Bourguignon Eds.), Handbook of Income Distribution, Amsterdam: Elsevier.

11. Penedo, F. J. and J. R. Dahn (2005). 'Exercise and Well-being: A Review of Mental and Physical Health Benefits Associated with Physical Activity', Current Opinion in Psychiatry, vol.

18 (2), pp. 189-193.

12. Prince, M., V. Patel, S. Saxena, M. Maj, J. Maselko, M. R. Phillips and A. Rahman (2007).

'No Health without Mental Health', The Lancet, vol. 370 (9590), pp. 859-877.

13. Scott, K. M., R. Bruffaerts, G. E. Simon, J. Alonso, M. Angermeyer, G. de Girolamo, K. Page 5 of 6

Demyttenaere, I. Gasquet, J. M. Haro, E. Karam, R. C. Kessler, D. Levinson, M. E. Medina Mora, M. A. Oakley Browne, J. Ormel, J. P. Villa, H. Uda and M. von Korff (2007). 'Obesity and Mental Disorders in the General Population: Results from the World Mental Health Surveys', International Journal of Obesity, vol. 32 (1), pp. 192-200. 

mental health care

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human resources

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recruitment tools

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