What have data and analytics got to do with compensation communications? Oddly enough, these numbers can help you give your communications a more personal tone, make them more user friendly and enable you to bridge the gap between HR-speak and employee-speak. In other words, they can help you get your message through and cut down on the frustration you feel when you work so hard on communications but still get a bad rap from employees.
We'll talk about how this works in a minute, but let's start by checking out this comparison. Imagine you had to tell the Compensation Committee that the company couldn't afford one of their proposals. You'd certainly explain it differently than if you were explaining to your family that you couldn't afford something. To dig a little deeper, notice that your explanations about affording an X-box would be different for a 16-year old than for a 11-year old. In each of these examples, you'd think about how you could influence your "audience" to agree with you before you spoke with them. Of course your explanations for the Comp Committee would have far more detail than the ones you used at home. In other words, you'd customize your communications to each audience.
Recently, the big consulting firms have talked about "personalizing" HR communications. That may be a good long-term target, but I'm talking bout much more basic practices. You can use employee data and analytics to learn how to talk in a more relevant and engaging way with your employees. You'll do a better job, and get better scores on the annual engagement survey.
Many clients are surprised to learn that you "take things apart to put them back together again" when you design compensation communications. Think back to the earlier example. Comp Committee or 16-year old, you need to analyze what it will take to persuade them before you talk. Back at the ranch, data and analytics show you how to convince your employees about the important points you need them to understand and support. Here are a few illustrations.
Take a look at the number of new hires that you have. If your numbers are over 10%, there are a lot of employees who 1) haven't yet heard how the compensation program works in any detail, 2) don't know what their role is in the pay for performance process and 3) don't have experience working with their manager. If you only communicate a synopsis of the program, you'll have a lot of people who don't really know what's going on, and who will be frustrated by the communications. Instead, plan how you are going to get them to the same level of knowledge as the rest of your employees. And when you are writing the materials, make sure there is information at the "expert" level as well as the "beginner" level so incumbents don't have to wade through the same amount of detail as the newbies.
Take a look at the percentage of employees in the first third of their range. This is a good example to show how to choose wording and messages to connect with your employees. If you've got 25% or more of your total employees in the first third of their range, it would be unwise to introduce your compensation philosophy as, "highly competitive with rewards that recognize contributions to the company's success." Many of your employees are not experiencing your practices that way, and are likely to respond with cynicism.
Take a look at the percentage of employees in the last third of their range. If you cap their increases at the maximum of the salary range, and you use the same description of your compensation practices, you'll be met with the same problem of cynicism, but for a different reason.
Percentage of departments who've received comparatively lower merit budgets? Odds are the root cause of this practice was their waning impact on business results. If you want to influence these employees to reengage, you'll need to talk about how merit practices are linked to business results. You'll also want to use a total compensation context for your communications, rather than salary focused, to remind employees of their broad rewards opportunities.
Of course, there are new compensation practices to take into account as well. If you decide you are going to institute a geographic differential for remote workers, the percentage of those affected will influence what you say and how you say it. And, of course, if there are any short term possibilities of layoffs or rightsizing, the size of the action--as well as the departments affected--should influence how you talk about compensation this year.
The metrics and analysis that you use should be far more detailed than the sample given, but they give you a good idea of how to start. What defines an audience? They have unique, ingrained attitudes and beliefs that will affect how open they are to your influence.
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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