The new system of labor remuneration for teachers: does the incentive mechanism work?

One of the most complex problems in any organization is the construction of the system for stimulating its personnel in close connection with the contribution of workers to the collective result of the work. This issue is especially relevant for the social sphere, because the results of its activities have a significant public value; at the same time, the possibilities of developing adequate criteria for assessing the effectiveness are very limited. The paper points out key problems of evaluating the performance of employees and distributing incentive payments. These problems include the problem of identifying the employee’s contribution to the collective activity, the complexity of formalization of intellectual work and evaluation of the effectiveness of a wide range of activities, which include activities in the field of general education. The authors consider the issues concerning the assessment of performance of employees and formation of stimulating labor remuneration funds on examples taken from the practice of Russian education and materials of sociological research of opinions of teachers of the Vologda and Moscow oblasts on the outcome of the reforms. The article provides examples that show that in addition to the difficulties in assessing the effectiveness of the staff there are other related issues associated with the conditions of its application. The authors consider a case when the system of incentives for teachers collapsed not because of the imperfection of the system of remuneration and flaws in the assessing methods, but because of the decline in education funding. Therefore, an important issue in providing incentives for the workers of the social sphere, in particular, in education, is to separate the practice of incentives and the means for its replenishing, which is not typical for the commercial sector, where there is a rigid connection between the profits of organizations and the capacity to implement money incentives.