Editor's Note: In today's post, Jim Brennan serves up his Classic tale of The Answer to our compensation design and practice challenges.
Imagine having the solution to every pay issue in one volume! The Compensation Cookbook will solve all your problems. It promises to provide the perfect recipe for virtually every Total Rewards challenge. Instant answers to any remuneration issue are made available at your fingertips! No compensation chef should be without this essential guide to serve up the ideal menu in your café, restaurant, or eatery ... and even in your private dining room. Spice up your initial cafeteria offerings with the perfect blend of base, incentive, extrinsic, variable, flex, step, intrinsic, static and untrinsic elements.
The long-awaited authoritative dictionary of decisions contains every remuneration formula and reward metric required for instant success in the compensation trade, says its editor, the noted Total Rewards guru H.R. Screwtape. This massive manual of metrics should be available on February 29, 2013, according to the distinguished publishing house of Ratchet, Gimme, Compound & Sons and Daughters and One Odd Nephew. Plans are being considered for conversion of the initial cuneiform script version into PDFs, then to electronic text and eventually even an interactive Cloud format. Libraries have already announced plans to place the weighty tome next to the Phlogiston topic section of their Research Reference stacks.
Sample: The Timely Turnaround Technique
- Take 3,985 employees and trim the outliers (see Chapter 19)
- Freeze the pay of the remaining lowest 5% of performers and place it in a Frozen Fund
- Toss the candidates into a cauldron and bring them to a boil
- Whip them into a froth with a basic mix of bland intrinsic motivators (see the Appendix for a list of Pink-approved incentives) leavened with a pinch of sweet gold dust
- Garnish the survivors with distributions from the Step 2 Frozen Fundaccording to The One and Only Magic Matrix (see Chapter 8)
- Serves exactly the right number (as specified in the Chapter 33Master Count Table)
David J. Thomsen, PhD, founder of the rival pay survey publishing house ERI Economic Research Institute, expressed admiration at the ambition of the researchers but scoffed at the prospect that any one book could encompass the entire realm of tradecraft knowledge, saying: “Really? No way.” The even more distinguished Keystone Award Winner PhD Jay Schuster retorted with an argumentative but articulate lengthy book review response: “Yes, way.” Readers are invited to decide for themselves.
Elements of The Compensation Cookbook include:
• The most popular sales incentive programs found at TARP firms in 2007
• Bilingual pay premium rates for left-handed English-speakers at Venezuelan oil export companies
• The one average pay increase rate uniformly suited for every job at every employer
• Staffing formulae that will assure the appropriate growth of the HR department
• Calculators to compute the perfect benefit package for each new hire
• A universal holiday schedule appropriate for application in any nation on Earth
• The correct pay compression emergency relief valve setting
• A Taxonomy of Pay Premiums, detailing all the ways to justify demanding extra money
• Advanced methods for forced performance distributions to guarantee strict limits on the proportion of workers permitted to excel
• Special applications for outside consultants hired to cook the books
FLASH Update: Unfortunately, it appears that publication may be delayed due to a special request by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. OPM asked that the release of the trade secrets be deferred until the revolutionary consensus Best Practice concepts of The Compensation Cookbook are ridiculed tested by the National Academy of Sciences and broken ruined applied in the Federal sector first.
April Fool!
E. James (Jim) Brennan is a total rewards advisor with extensive multi-industry corporate HR and consulting experience. Past Compensation Editor of the Personnel Journal and last Senior Associate of pay surveyor ERI, he recently returned to consulting. Author of the Performance Management Workbook, popular speaker and frequent expert witness in executive compensation trials, Jim also serves on the Advisory Board of the Compensation and Benefits Review.
Creative Commons Image "Happy April Fools Day" by Mykl Roventine
Comments