Editor's Note: Pay communication in challenging times can be a little scary, but it is particularly important. In her Classic post, Margaret O'Hanlon urges us to do our best!
I was paying my American Express, AT+T, PG&E, Sprint, Comcast, Kaiser, and, and, and, bills last month, trying to be calm about the whole thing, given what’s going on out there. Deep in my angst, I started thinking about all the others out there doing the same sweating on the same night.
Some of them can’t actually pay the bills. Lots of them are shifting money from one account to another, or from one credit card to another, in the hope that more money will soon come in.
Most of them are somebody’s employees. And many work for companies who plan to communicate little or nothing about their upcoming increases but the amounts.
After all, it's just more bad news and most employees are just pleased to have jobs these days. At least, that’s what a number of my colleagues have been saying in the last few weeks. Why plan a communication strategy about pay when we have so little money to hand out? Employees are happy to sit tight right now.
Talk about the “head in the sand” strategy.
I won’t feel any better until I have a chat with a few of my compensation colleagues. We’ll break things down to see if we agree with the analysis. We’ll commiserate on the challenges we’re facing. If there are companies who aren’t struggling, we’ll be sure that we talk about them, too. I’ll feel better then, not because the facts have changed, but because I’ve found a way to have them make sense to me.
Why is it so hard to understand that employees need those kinds of insights, too? Yes,there isn’t a lot of money this year, but tell me again how that happened? Will it happen again next year? If we don’t know the answer, how will our company go about figuring it out? Why am I working this hard if you don’t know what will come of it?
We do so much talking about teamwork and collaboration in HR, why do we give ourselves permission to duck our commitment in circumstances like we have now? No wonder employees have a hard time trusting us and senior management. We clam up or are nowhere to be found at just the wrong times.
Bad news on pay this year? Start thinking now about the business topics that you will cover with employees in October and November. If you are taking employees into account, you shouldn’t just be saying the same old things about the increase budget. In fact, it’s going to be hard to figure out what to say and how. That’s why you should dig in and strategize.
Respect your employees. Yes, they are thrilled to have their jobs, but recognize the commitment they’ve made to your company’s success during this tough, tough period when there’s no clear end in sight. And then talk with them. Take things apart and put them back together again, so they are reminded (once again) that there is a logic to your company’s strategy. That their pay is an agreement between the company and them that is influenced by many different business issues.
You may not be able to reassure them, but you have a responsibility to try.
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.
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