Editor's Note: Time to step up your pay communication game? Margaret O'Hanlon has some Classic advice on creating a new and improved communication menu!
Remember back to high school or college, when you and your friends were always seriously short on money? Sometimes, you'd all want a pizza or two or three, but the amount of money you could pool would determine what you could order. Then, when you ate the much anticipated slices, hungry and anxious for your share, you'd eye the others -- secretly judging who took more slices -- bigger slices, the biggest share of the toppings and so on. And if you were short on money frequently and had this experience often, feelings would grow and opinions would form -- unspoken or loudly offended -- about who always got more.
That dynamic is part of your employees' experience right now. After many years of making do, people have been watching carefully and developing strong feelings. As your managers would tell you (if you asked them), it won't take much to scratch the surface and get a piece of what's on employees' minds. In some cases, I bet it can get pretty volatile and distracting from the work at hand.
This is one of the reasons that I've been urging you in recent posts to prepare managers to talk with employees about their current pay.To point out that pay is front of mind in this country and emotions play a bigger part in how people think about their pay right now than they have in the past.
Of course, everyone's always had strong feelings about their pay, but it's a different situation when employees have data to back their feelings up, especially their own experiences over those very small pizzas you've been able to order over the last couple of years.
Where do you start? Not with the skeptics who are saying, "This is just reality. We all just need to deal with it as adults."
Nope. As Ann Bares advised in her recent blog article, " . . . it's a smart move to start . . . by taking a look at what's really going on. What is the reality of you compensation plans and practices? And what is their reality as perceived by managers and employees?"
And don't kid yourself, it will take courage to find out.
The ROI? Remember those pizzas? Do you want your managers dealing with people who keep their eyes on the past, counting slices and listing all the ways you've been shorting them? Or do you want employees' eyes on the present? Right now some of them are balancing their hard-won wisdom about what their work can bring them with a smoldering sense of disillusionment about what their work won't bring them.
Better yet, let's have them looking to the future. Isn't that the engagement we all strive for? Where employees devote themselves to making the future appear with the openness of hope, believing in your business and how their contributions will achieve hard-won accomplishments? These feelings are nurtured through regular candid conversations, encouragement and openness about what's really happening.
This is a goal that managers cannot pull off on their own. Not only does it involve a strategy and moral support, it success is based on truth and trust. Your managers rely on you for the truth in this confusing business climate. The question is, are you going to have the courage to help them?
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.
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