Merrill Lynch Case

Merrill Lynch

I think that what Merrill Lynch did was completely wrong. I think that they should have lower salaries and have higher bonuses, because that means that the employee is going to have to work towards something. Having a smaller bonus allows the employee to slack off because the incentive is not better than what they are getting paid. It's not fair to the taxpayer for the government to bail out the company that is paying their employees billions when they are also losing billions. The only thing that I can think of is that Merrill Lynch knew they were going under and knew they were going to be bought out, so why not suck every last penny out of the government before going under. Until the government bailed them out they were at a loss in their net earnings.

I did the contrasting on my current employer, Best Western Butterfield Inn in Hays, Kansas. The key points of the map would be the hierarchy. There is three owners and it all files down underneath these three. The internal alignment is based on this and you have to go through the proper change of command if you need something accomplished. The next would that the employees' contribution is all based on the individual. We all need to have the right skills and attributes about themselves to make sure we sell rooms. The success of the group then relies on the individual performance. We get the benefit of if we sell out of rooms then 10% of the commission made off the room is given to us as a bonus. The other key point is the transparency of the management. Our managers' are very open about anything and this includes our pay.

I think that the major differences would be the flexible design in the internal alignment, line ownership, technology and choice in the management part. There is no flexible design of the company. Since the company is a part of a corporate company there is no flexibility whatsoever. We are command on how we are supposed to dress, act, and greet. Line ownership in the company would be very low because only HR mangers play in making pay decisions. Not only that, but the pay is set in each department that we have. The company also rates very low on the technology side because we have someone manually do our checks and we are given our checks bi-weekly by hand. Best Western has also not integrated to online depositing yet. Another downfall of this company is the choice of health care and retirement investment plans. As a full time worker we are not offered any benefits. Now I am not certain on the owners or the assistant managers if they get benefits or not, so I rated them lower because the benefits more than likely only benefit the upper level management.