2013 Compensation best practices [infographic]

It’s my birthday today, and I want to share with you a “gift” in the form of quick infographic from Payscale.com. It covers best practices in Compensation & Benefits for 2013 and is interesting for companies in all countries even though the study is based on US organisations. I strongly suggest you get the full…

Out-of-the-box thinking for designing merit matrices

Are you using a merit matrix for deciding salary increases for the employees in your company ? Then you are already familiar with the traditional “bands” or “ranges” of comparatio (basic pay compared to midpoint of the salary range associated with the grade of the employee – the position of the employee in the pay…

Are you using comparatios without thinking ?

In the compensation world, comparatio is defined as an employee’s base pay divided by the midpoint of the salary range linked to the employee’s job grade. Comparatios can be expressed as a percentage (110%) or a number (0.9). Uses of comparatios We use them mostly at the time of salary reviews, in companies that use…

How to make management look into real inflation for salary budgets

Ayesha joined my readership recently and asked : “I would love to hear some suggestions on what to do when market inflation rates are far higher than what the official sources as well the generally accepted sources like the The Economic Intelligence Unit magazine report… and we have to convince the organization to allocate higher…

All you need to know : from compensation surveys to salary ranges and salary review

Frances, one of my readers, recently commented to me as follows : I have to create salary ranges and compare the current salary to market data. This will allow me to make the determination if the person’s pay is within the acceptable range. Year-end is approaching and I am starting to get more questions around…

Updating salary ranges… or not ?

When the time of salary review approaches, most Compensation managers will start preparing by reviewing the salary ranges in their organisation. Using data from compensation providers, we look at the midpoint, minimum and maximum of our salary ranges. Do they still reflect the market ? The first consideration should be “how do we define market”…

3 factors influencing the promotion rate for your organisation

As we got into salary review time or mid-year reviews, colleagues have asked me, almost every year, the same question about the promotion rate : “What is a reasonable benchmark for the number of employees to be promoted each year ?” Now, bear with me please because my answer is one that usually is not…