Emiratisation and Compensation & Benefits – part I

With the government’s recent push on emiratisation, and similar decisions in the other GCC countries, Compensation & Benefits professionals have a role to play in supporting the attraction, retention and growth of UAE Nationals in both the private and the government sectors. In Emiratisation : the way forward ?, Jane Williams from INSEAD explains in…

Percentiles – an easy way to “figure it out”

This Sunday Skills is about percentiles. It is a very useful concept in Compensation & Benefits, yet I have struggled to find an easy-to-understand definition of it and how to easily “calculate” it. This article in Connexions explains that today there is not an agreed definition of percentile, in the sense that it can be…

No, no one becomes a Compensation Manager in 2 days !

Today’s Career Corner is a rant about the so-called “certifications” that are offered in the region on the topic of Compensation & Benefits and Performance Management. I had already planned to write about certifications, but what I received in my LinkedIn inbox 2 days ago made me jump and I decided to post my reaction…

Analyse my SIP!

My friend took this job at a frozen food company in the Middle East. About one month on the job, he called me and said : “Sandrine can you help me analyse the Sales Incentive Plan which has been in place for a few years ? The GM wants me to give him some feedback…

How to decide how many promotions to grant each year

In a post last week, I described the best order in which to apply salary increases. Basically you start from the most general ones, and progressively you apply those that are more individual in nature. Promotional increases are among the second category, as only a minority of employees receive them each year. I got a…

Goodbye Steve Jobs

About 10 years ago I joined Apple to lead their EMEA Compensation & Benefits efforts. At the time, Apple was far from being the influential organisation it is today. Yes, Steve Jobs was back and had launched a number of new products, but the positioning of the company was still pretty much niche, with mostly…

New hires vs employees : 3 salary situations and how to handle them

Imagine the scene : you are sitting at your desk, happily going along your normal HR activities, when an employee (let’s call him John) enters your office and expresses some concern over his compensation. More specifically, he says, he knows that some of his former colleagues at his previous employer, “who were earning the exact…