Here are three tips you can use any time during the year, but most of all during merit increase and incentive award periods.
Get yourself a champion (or champions). A champion is someone who will guide and influence the progress of your communications, especially with senior management and department heads. Typically a member of senior management, a champion believes in the importance and impact of effective communications and will help build recognition for its importance.
You know the best candidate for this role. Someone who will speak up when the commitment of time and resources to communications are being questioned. And who expects their managers to be role models when it comes to communications.
You're in a great place if the name of a champion just pops to mind! But if there is no one who stands out for the role, then recognize that your expectations should reach all (or most) of the senior management team. How do you treat them as automatic champions? Make individual appointments with champion candidates, brief them on the communications and ask for their help with challenges. Make it clear that all suggestions are welcome. Give them examples of support they can verbalize with their management team.
Collaborate with managers in real time. The compensation communication cycle takes many weeks -- too long to be disconnected from your audiences. Give yourself the assignment of listening to your managers during the cycle so you can adjust your communications.
How can you do this easily? After the announcement communications, check to see if your plans include everything managers need either by asking around informally or better yet, sending out a short questionnaire. Include a specific list of topics and tools that managers could use, asking for priorities and specific questions needing answers. You may not get the volume of responses you hoped for, but you will get insights into how to be more responsive to specific needs.
In the meantime, consider opening a hotline for managers during budgeting and merit meetings, to provide personal support when they run into tough spots.
Treat compensation as part of the business cycle. Just about any large-scale employee research of the last three years indicates that employees place a high priority on knowing how their work connects with the business. Compensation Cafe founder, Ann Bares, recently wrote a fabulous guide to developing a compensation philosophy that can help you obtain key insights by asking crucial questions. Using that strategy briefing, the items that should be covered in your communications include:
- The business environment you are in -- challenging, volatile, growth oriented, technically reengineered and so on.
- What this means for your organization's priorities, customers and competitive positioning.
- The organization's most important business and operating objectives, given the business environment.
- How well the objectives were achieved in the past year and why.
- How your company is going to pivot from those objectives in the coming year.
- The unique values and cultural norms that, as a result of your organization's business direction, influence how employees are rewarded.
- The purpose of each element of your compensation program.
Be strategic about your communication steps. In most organizations today, HR emails are short administrative reminders or maybe directions. Explanatory information, like that described in the list above, are tagged in the emails but linked to explanations found on your intranet. That way managers and employees can "pull" the deeper content when they are most interested. Optimally, the compensation program has a dedicated space on your intranet.
If the email/intranet mix described is not available at your location, then turn to Q and A communications. In my experience, they are a powerful tool in most organizations, and allow you to talk about a mix of strategic topics like those above -- as well as administrative details -- in a way that will be well-received.
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.
Comments