How does Team Engineer™ work?
Your confidential membership is both your vote for the TE™ compensation and employment policy reform we are advocating, and your access to employment opportunities from companies who join us in this movement to revitalize the engineering profession in North America.
In your commitment to join our paid, Team Engineer™ membership website you’re taking this most important step: You will be counted among the engineers in North America who are concerned for the future of our profession and want positive change! As TE™ membership grows exponentially, engineering employers will take note. The good ones will join TE™ as member companies and inform engineers seeking employment of their best-in-class hiring policy on this website.
It’s a message you can use in wage and bonus discussions with your manager. It’s a question you can ask a hiring manager in an interview. Are you a Team Engineer™ company? If not, why not?
If you think this is the “tail wagging the dog” and it will never work, check out the safety story in Formula One racing. NBCSN views an excellent documentary entitled 1. And Ron Howard’s recent movie Rush tells a piece of that story in an equally compelling way. The rivalry between Niki Lauda and James Hunt is a gripping, true story of a technology spinning out of control, literally, on unsafe race tracks and inadequate regulations. Lauda took a stand for safety and forfeited a probable F1 World Championship. Sir Jackie Stewart was a key figure in unifying the drivers into a small but cohesive race driver's association, too many of whom had paid with their lives, and they pushed back at the race organizers and team owners. Joining the cause, Bernie Ecclestone and F1 physician “Prof” Sid Watkins and others worked diligently to close deadly safety gaps. Together, a handful of courageous players affected profound changes to tracks, procedures, cars, racing regulations, and emergency medical responses.
The tail wagged the dog and not a single F1 driver has been killed racing since the disastrous Italian Grand Prix race week in 1994 at Imola which claimed the lives of Ayrton Senna, Roland Ratzenberger…and almost took Rubens Barichello.
Why join Team Engineer™ as an Individual Member?
- Because you’re ready to play a part in making a change in industry!
- You believe that undermining the engineering profession leads to further technical demise.
- You meet the technical needs of your company but are not able to meet your own financial needs.
- You don’t (or can’t) belong to a union and you have no real voice in the workplace.
- You believe good ideas and excellent engineering should yield fair rewards.
- You want to enjoy your career choice, and have the chance to grow professionally.
If engineers are in such great demand, doesn’t that mean our compensation is commensurately high?
That’s the way it’s supposed to work, according to the laws of supply and demand. But that’s not how it translates in engineering employment. There’s been a lot of corporate messaging about the difficulty hiring qualified engineers. What these corporations do NOT say is they don’t want to compensate engineers adequately!
We’re all aware of the push among politicians and business leaders to get kids interested in math and science because our standard of living depends upon engineers. And that’s great, but to what end? Veteran engineers (with ten plus years experience) have to change jobs or professions if they want to earn enough to support even a modest lifestyle. Or a family. Or put a kid through college.
As things currently stand in America, engineering is practically a dead-end career path. Unfortunately, the high starting salary is an engineering perk that does not increase proportionally over time. That's the wage stagnation problem that leads to income disparity. And it's intrinsic to most engineering employers in North America.
Now that corporations are people, we want to encourage them to be good citizens in a role that's uniquely profound and important in our society. Providing productive and worthwhile employment, excellent products, and worthy competition in the marketplace today and for many years to come.
Where will the extra dollars come from, to compensate engineers fairly?
Here’s the great news: In many companies there is plenty to go around—it’s just not being fairly distributed to engineers.
Addressing that problem in our sector is exactly what we’re focusing on at Team Engineer™. We're advocating for change in the following important areas in all companies that employ engineers:
- Excessive “C level” compensation packages are an ideal source of funds for companies to begin the reform, as are stock dividend distributions.
- Bonuses and commissions that are allocated only to sales people comprise an antiquated business model that denies the livelihood of the technical people that design and manufacture the very products that sell.
- Paying managers more highly than purely technical people forces technical experts to walk away from their engineering expertise in order to earn more by managing people. Not only may the wrong person become a manager, but there usually aren't many manager positions to aspire to for better pay.
- Taking possession of engineers’ intellectual property without fair compensation on the basis of “shop rights” is little more than legalized theft.
Why would we join Team Engineer™ as a company?
- Because you embrace stakeholder value above shareholder value (to borrow a phrase from an economist).
- Your business is more about your product and your people than overpaying a CEO.
- You know you need to attract top engineering talent - and then retain them!.
- You embrace the concept of reasonable profit rather than maximimum profit so you can channel resources back into upgrading your infrastructure, aggressive R&D, and inspiring your workforce.
- You realize you can't be competitive "on the cheap" and your long term plan carries more weight than any quarterly report.
- If you underpay a supplier, eventually they will be gone: Your engineers are your IP suppliers.
- Business as usual is no longer yielding the returns you seek. It's time to lead the way with a 21st century business model.
- It's the analogy of fair-market trade and civil rights for all; our principles make good business sense exactly because they are right and sustainable.
So how does TE™ impact the engineering profession?
Companies can become TE™ member companies by subscribing to Team Engineer™ principles for hiring engineers well and compensating them fairly and submitting their Engineering Fairness Policy addressing some or all of the above points for their particular business unit to Team Engineer™ along with their annual dues payment. Upon approval, their fairness policy, logo, and link to their hiring URL will be posted on a dedicated page here on the Team Engineer™ website, and they will be allowed to post the Team Engineer™ logo and our URL on their own website.
TE™ Individual members will have access to search the Team Engineer™ website for member companies when seeking good employment.
When excellent companies hire talented engineers fairly, both the company and the engineers are transformed. Our goal is to foster such mutually beneficial, long term relationships that rarely happen in North America's business climate today. There is no limit to the potential for good business, innovation, and economic growth through such a fair and empowering arrangement.
Because treating people fairly cuts both ways, too.
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