Our Compensation responsibilities don't stop at numbers. They include performance management, reward strategy, career development, compensation communications, among many other key influencers of employee engagement.
The sudden reimagining of jobs from on-site to at-home has affected what jobs "mean," let alone the employee's role in the organization. Plus, remote workers are not motivated in quite the same way as they were when they sat in an office down the hall. As I quoted in a recent Compensation Cafe article, our new organizational models are rocking our work relationships because we are changing:
. . . the organizational norms that underpin culture and performance -- [not only] ways of working [but also] standards of behavior and interaction -- that help create a common culture, generate social cohesion, and build shared trust."
This should be reflected in the work we are doing. There's nothing more important in Compensation's role than building shared trust and thus engagement. It's not in our typical job description, yet it is a role that we are quite proud of.
With that in mind, I thought I'd touch on some of the programs that will probably need adjustments to reflect the new "standards of behavior and interaction" that have emerged for employees who work from home in your organization.
- Career architecture -- How employees get assignments and how they move up through their careers are both changing because of the adjustments to how we work. You may find that you need these processes to be more flexible, more manager driven, and thus more transparent. Because of this, you may have to change your approach to leveling your jobs.
Not an overhaul, but an adjustment, so job dimensions can play multiple roles. You'll want them to be used for easy employee assessments by managers to facilitate project assignments, as well as to check readiness for new responsibilities. (Some of you may already have salary survey services that provide this type of career architecture, making it easy to adapt to career development purposes.) - Performance expectations -- Most organizations should consider reassessing performance priorities based on the new ways that remote employees work. For one thing, the competencies that are prioritized in an onsite organization are not identical to the ones that are important to an organization of remote workers, or to an organization of remote and onsite workers.
Communication and teamwork, as well as organizational literacy, are competencies that may have inched their way up in importance because they impact employees' MBO performance in this new environment. Of course, if your organization has announced a strategic shift post Covid, MBOs should be refined accordingly, emphasizing the collaborative dimensions of our new work styles. - Employee listening -- There are many reasons why Compensation professionals should feel overwhelmed these days. Count on employees feeling that way, too. Instead of using the disarray as a reason to avoid surveys and focus groups, try to look long-term. You're probably guessing that employees feel the same way you do. But now that we rely on Zoom to pull us together, there are fewer occasions to take the organization's temperature.
You could use some good data if you want to make sound decisions. Remember that surveys tell you WHAT people are thinking. Focus groups tell you WHY they are thinking that way. So if you want to understand WHY stuff is going on, be sure to include focus groups in your strategy. - Manager tools -- I have written about how you can help managers give performance feedback and pay information on video calls. That's just one example of the type of help managers need right now. After all, their own jobs have changed, they need to guide employees through jobs that are changing, and they are tired. The stress everyone is feeling can easily leak into their important employee meetings. You'll build a safety net by providing tools like the ones described in my article.
- Pay Transparency -- If you don't hear the creaks and thwaps coming from your compensation communication strategy, you're probably not paying attention. The era of remote workers will accelerate the need for open book management, if only to equip people with what they need to get their job done. If you haven't started thinking about how you might develop pay transparency in your organization, don't wait much longer.
- Change management -- If there is one thing that we've learned recently, it's how effective our company is at change management. Change is going to be the way of life for a long while. Make sure you help employees build that acceptance into their mindset, and plan some self-assessments for Compensation and Human Resources to polish your own change management effectiveness.
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 everythingiscommunication.com.
Comments