What are you going to invest in compensation communications? This is not the typical place to start when you plan, but from a practical standpoint it is the best. A candid answer will make the difference between feelings of success and dissatisfaction. Time and resources are the real determinants of what you can achieve.
For example, if you are really constrained on budget and time commitment, the best you can achieve is a solid schedule for communications on the announcements, forms, and deadlines involved at the end of the year. Accepting that approach ahead of time will help you organize yourself better. Otherwise, you'll find yourself ducking the elaborate communication items on your plan. If they ever get done, your heart won't be in it and you'll rush them. Better you should face the reality and do a nice, tight end-of-year rollout with crisp communications including some meaty FAQs.
If you are constrained on budget and time commitment but not painfully, add some content on the components of your compensation plan along with the end-of-year transactions. It takes more time to get these communications accurate and understandable for employees, but it should not be overwhelming. Note that this type of information belongs on your intranet, where people can refer it as needed, so you may need to get some tech support -- another investment in money and time.
Talking about how the plan works is different from talking about how the plan works for ME. That's the next level of commitment and this time it is linked to pay transparency.
Talking about WHY the plan works the way it does involves at least six months including preparation. Or, you could have a year-long communication schedule, with updates and ongoing effort to provide content about the compensation plan. Another item that will consume time and resources at these levels of communication--you can't skip covering how the employee can move up in her/his career, so you'll need to have this framework in place.
These elaborate communication plans are quite an investment. Hardly something a small department could handle in a single year. But if you use the first two steps (transactions + plan components) as communication building blocks that you can rely on, you could keep building out the communications with more and more content over the years.
Compensation communications often get a bad rap because we find ourselves disappointed in it's impact on the employee culture. More often, we've been unrealistic about what we can possibly achieve. If you try to be clear-eyed and frank with yourself and your leadership, you're more likely to build satisfaction. And who knows? All this practical truth-telling might get you a bigger budget and more resources.
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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