Compensation aspects of HR trends for 2012

Future Insights is a recently published report looking into “the top trends for 2012 according to SHRM’s HR subject matter expert panels”. Even though SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, is an HR trade association based mostly in the USA, I found some of the trends to be interesting also at an international level.…

Of average salaries in Europe

A while ago, a Sales Director asked for “an average salary for a sales/account manager in IT company selling specialty software within Europe”. I wish it were that simple but there is no such thing as a “salary in Europe”. For the same job, each country will pay different salaries. Salaries are normally always expressed…

GCC Nationals pay: a lesson from the Y2K bug

Remember the big scare of the so-called “Y2K bug” ? Back at the end of the Nineties, the world started to realise that a lot of computer programs had been written with dates expressed “55” or “87” instead of “1955” and “1987”. As year 2000 was approaching fast and therefore dates would become “00” ie…

Remuneration, engagement and the GCC employee

Recent reports have drawn attention to the fact that remuneration is not the main motivator for GCC-based employees. The Qudrat TM Research results were recently released by Aon Hewitt  and highlight that National Qataris are the most highly engaged local Nationals in the GCC, irrespective of their gender. Regarding issues often mentioned by companies regarding…

Merit increase or bonus, how do you reward performance ?

Welcome back to Compensation Insider ! I wish you an excellent year and hope you will be visiting my site regularly 🙂 Given we are at the beginning of the year and most HR and Compensation experts are about to go through salary reviews and bonus payments, I thought it would be relevant to share…

The safeguards in salary benchmarking

Here is a paraphrase of a LinkedIn question asked recently : “How do you make sure each role benchmarked for salary purposes has the same responsibility ? Is there legislation on this ?” This is a question a Compensation specialist often gets from managers. Here is what you can reply when you get that question…

A follow-up on Zynga

So Zynga, the company behind hugely successful Farmville and other games on Facebook, eventually proceeded to its IPO last week. Despite raising 1 billion dollars (the largest tech IPO since Google), the stock value fizzled very rapidly, even on the first day : it was priced at 10 $ and closed at 9.45 $. This…