Do your employees believe what you say about your pay program? How do you know?
I've had the chance to work with many organizations that have decent, even quite good, compensation programs and practices in place, but where employees are simply not buying it. They resist "corporate" messages about the pay plans and they invent and spread all manner of rumors about them.
In circumstances where trust issues are focused primarily on compensation (rather than being part and parcel of a larger issue of faith in leadership) and after taking the necessary steps to ensure that the pay program itself isn't necessarily at fault, I find that information - clear, detailed, credible and truthful - can be the compensation or HR professional's best weapon.
There is often a common thread running through situations like this. In my experience, communication about the compensation program in these organizations tends to be broad and relatively flavorless. Buzzwords and platitudes abound; descriptive specifics not so much. Compensation communication comes off like a sales pitch, and that is the way employees perceive it. Messages are completely lacking in any of the descriptive detail that might make them believable.
And by descriptive detail, I am not suggesting things like "Jack Brown just got a 10% salary increase, raising his base to $95,000, despite the fact that he was only 'meets' at his last appraisal."
What I am suggesting is that:
Instead of just saying the program is "competitive", tell employees about the market strategy you use in benchmarking, show them the list of surveys you use and explain why each is a good fit, then walk them through how market data is gathered for a sample job. (This is also a good opportunity to explain to them why you don't use free stuff from the internet.)
Instead of just saying jobs are assigned to salary ranges based on "market and internal equity considerations", walk them through an example of how the market pricing and/or job evaluation process works for a particular job. Perhaps use this as an opportunity to explain the purpose and use of salary ranges (and hopefully your practice matches the intent here.)
Instead of just saying that every job has a "bonus opportunity", remind them of the objectives of the bonus plan, how it was designed and why, and the purpose of the different mechanics. Make sure the calculations are clear by going through a couple of "what if" scenarios.
You get the picture. Specifics. Truth. Clarity.
Death by detail? Perhaps. Not every employee group wants, needs or will even sit still for this level of detail -- I'll grant you that. But I have found that spending an hour, or even more, doing this kind of information sharing and straight talking in front of employees who have lost their faith in the program can make a real impact.
That's my experience. What has yours taught you?
Ann Bares is the Founder and Editor of Compensation Café, Author of Compensation Force and Partner at Altura Consulting Group LLC, where she provides compensation consulting and survey administration services to a wide range of client organizations. She earned her M.B.A. at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School and enjoys hiking, reading and hanging out with family in any spare time.
Creative Commons Image "Trust" by Nguyễn Phát
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