A Little Goes a Long Way

If you're a regular on Compensation Cafe, you know that you can often hear us singing, "Everything you do in compensation is communication." With that ringing in my ears, I thought we'd take a quick look at some of the everyday compensation things we do in job analysis and documentation. Where do the communications come in? What messages are we sending? And how can we up our our game?

A little understanding of how your daily compensation work qualifies as communications goes a long way towards building trust and contributing to employee engagement.

Here we go.

Job analysis and documentation are tedious tasks that we are trying our hardest to automate. The thing is, our insights come from going deep into the data, which is hard to do when the computer organizes things for us. Sometimes automation gets in the way of really understanding what differentiates an Engineer I from and Engineer II. How do we supplement? With meetings and/or interviews with the people actually doing the job.

Here's the common belief about what inteviews accomplish in the world of employee communication. By interviewing employees, they obtain insights into how the base pay structure is built. Employees get to see what's going on and have input into information-gathering about their job. In other words, employees (should) become more satisfied because they have learned a bit and had input.

But our definition of communications should not be limited to information exchange. Communications affects minds and hearts -- and hearts are where you have the deepest and most lasting influence on people. Employees' feelings shift towards trust when they have input into decisions that determine their worklife, as long as their input is listened to. Employees' feelings shift to the positive when you get personal and interview them.

Feelings? Aren't they the "soft stuff" that doesn't belong at work. Nope, nope, nope. It's just plain obvious that feelings influence engagement -- and building engagement is a big part of why we earn our salaries. By showing employees respect (through interviews), they're likely to become more open-minded and receptive to Human Resources and our methods. And more sympathetic to our claims of pay competitiveness. 

Asking everyone to submit job profiles, questionnaires or job descriptions? I've been through a number of companywide projects of this sort, and I know how much of a hassle it is to get everyone to submit their information. But it's generally true that the worst offenders are the biggest skeptics. It may seem counterintuitive, but if you're in a company where trust is an issue, imagine what you would communicate by going out and interviewing the people who don't fill out and submit their forms? It would make it that much more difficult for the unbelievers to have any credibility. (There's that feelings stuff again.)

I know we are all short on time and broadbased interviewing usually has a consultant or three lending a hand, so here's another approach. Think about minds and hearts. Identify a list of jobs each quarter that qualify for personal attention, either because of their complexity, visibility, contribution to innovation -- or because the job incumbents are the most ornery in your organization!

Margaret O'Hanlon is founder and Principal of re:Think Consulting. She'll join Ann Bares and Dan Walter of the Compensation Cafe to speak  the unspoken -- Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communication --  in an upcoming book. Margaret brings deep expertise in compensation, career development and communications to the dialog at the Café. Before  founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal with Towers Watson. Margaret earned her M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology at  Indiana University, Bloomington. Creative writing is one of her outside  passions, along with Masters Swimming.

Comments

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Great suggestion Margaret! Who says Compensation can't be "high touch"!

[Dan Walter]

Great article Margaret. Actually talking to people, face-to-face, like evolution intended is an amazingly powerful tool. One caution.... Don;t interview people if you intend, or expect, to ignore everything they say once they're gone.

Once you engage someone who may have otherwise been just floating around, you need to continue this engagement after the interview. If not it's like waking someone up to tell them it's time to go do something cool, then leaving them behind as they excitedly prepare to go with you.

[Margaret O'Hanlon]

Thanks for backing me up guys. Our compensation communications should build relationships, so worthwhile, but so often ignored or even avoided!

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I've been thinking about this some more Margaret. Your idea is very creative and can set a good example. HR could use the same process for talking to employees about various policies. Better understanding is what we need.

I'm not high on company-wide surveys or formalized approaches ---- I think much more can be accomplished in having small group meetings with employees. Maybe you don't reach everyone --- but the ones you do reach can really be impacted. And they can be the messengers to others in their work group.