Tough question. Best is rarely the most popular at any given moment. Don't know of anyone doing any comprehensive survey of all compensation practices, which is necessary for such a ranking; nor am I even aware of any comprehensive list of what practices need to be surveyed or how to ask those questions for swift/painless answers, analysis and reporting. Keystone Award Winners Jay Schuster & Pat Zingheim write regularly on best practices, with their paper on Fast-Growth Company Practices being their latest work (available in the ERI White Papers at bottom left of www.erieri.com) on what has measurably been most successful. However, the reader should be aware that these particular "most successful" enterprises have refused to permit their specific identification because they found their improvements so effective and profitable that they are unwilling to yield that competitive advantage by publicizing their discoveries to their rivals.
Professional associations and other groups do sponsor a few surveys that cover practices. In fact, one of the longest strings on the WorldAtWork Online Community (community registration required for access) is "Best Survey Source for Pay Practices" where participants have listed every question they would love to see surveyed comprehensively. That association's recent report on Compensation Programs and Practices (direct access available to premium members only), ambitious as it was, did not encompass all those questions and only covered fewer than 1,400 employers, for example. Nonprofit associations like WorldatWork or government agencies are the only impartial surveyors who could collect enough information to make a “best” determination. Only they could persuade companies to share all this inside proprietary info without having the participants risk annoying their consultants by cooperating with other consultants or opening themselves to sales pitches by new consultants involved with the survey. Most (but not every) survey firm is a consultancy using survey questionnaires as sales tools, door-openers and contact identifiers. Only one or two of the firms left in the compensation survey business do nothing but publish surveys without doing any consulting at all. (Please let me know if I'm wrong on that!)
One final question might be a best-survey-killer, too: who decides what is "best"? And what authority do they have for such an arrogant posture? Who is competent to rule on what is the optimum practice for every situation?
The power to award recognition is prized because it acknowledges authority to confer the title of “best.” There is typically acrimonious competition and rivalry between those who would declare themselves the arbiters of quality, because acceptance brings power to the winner. Ranking is a demonstration of authority. Whether it is accepted, objective or reliable is a different question. Some quality raters assure their objectivity by refusing to accept advertising and some do not, for example, so various ranking lists come with variable reliability levels.
"Best" lists are always popular, but they rarely contain data on more than a very limited sample of (usually) self-selected enterprises who are big on self-promotion regardless of the reality. There is a Focus on Ethics question on that exact issue (asked Aug. 24) that was published in the October 2010 issue of WorldatWork's Workspan magazine, about a CEO burbling to reporters about his best of breed highly popular work-life total rewards culture which is surprising news to the internal HR people expected to answer questions about it from the press. People who use subjective adjectives like "best" tend to work in marketing. Those researchers who actually analyze data and know most about the subject will always qualify their conclusions and provide relative standard error statistics, because one size does not fit all and there are always exceptions (statistical outliers) in any observation population.
Now that’s settled, we will next address the proper definition of “fair.” Not.
E. James (Jim) Brennan is Senior Associate of ERI Economic Research Institute, the premier publisher of interactive pay and living-cost surveys. Semi-retired after over 40 years in HR corporate and consulting roles throughout the U.S. and Canada, he’s pretty much been there done that (articles, books, speeches, seminars, radio/TV, advisory posts, in-trial expert witness stuff, etc.) and will express his opinion on almost anything.
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