Generally, I like that idea, but I can also see some ways it would fail.

People vote based on what they know, and there’s a limit to what people can know. In a small company, you can easily know everyone, but in a massive corporation, you simply run into some human limitations in this regard.

Some people have a highly visible job, like someone in IT tech support. If you have problems with your computer, and tech support is able to help you out, you’ll happily vote for that guy to get a raise.

However, the IT boss made the arrangements for a server upgrade, so your storage space didn’t come close to running out. Do you even know what goes on in the background? No. Would you vote for the IT boss to get a raise, since you have no idea how they’ve contributed to your wellbeing? Probably not.

Also, some people will find ways to make their minuscule efforts look much grander than they deserve to be seen as. If that works out, they’ll get lots of votes and pay rises even though their contributions are hardly worth mentioning, which actually sounds a lot like the situation we’re currently in.

The thing is, when everything is running smoothly, you don’t even know who fixed what. If things break, you may have some idea whose fault it is, but that’s not guaranteed either. We can’t just wait for things to break so that the guy who fixes it could become famous and popular. Ideally, people would fix stuff before anything breaks, and that would a be a far more efficient way to run a company. This sort of voting system could result in horrible inefficiency and pressure to be seen and loved.

People could also cooperate. What if a manager promises a coffee machine that gives free coffee if he gets a raise? Maybe the workers could vote for that, but should they really? What if the workers pool their votes to give one of their own a raise? They could rotate who gets the raise, so that each of them gets a raise when it’s their turn. Oh, and that sort of cooperative voting system could be used as a bullying instrument. You could discriminate one of the workers just because they have the wrong skin color, wrong accent, wrong family name or whatever. I’m sure people would come up with all sorts of messed up ways to abuse this system.

But the big questions is: Would this be better than the current system? Maybe, but we would need to set up some rules first. Doing it wild-wild-west style would be a complete disaster. Then again, the current system has some serious problems too, so…