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Pay Transparency: Culture is Key

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Chris Kelley Posted in Compensation Consulting, KnowledgePay

There’s still a lot of talk lately about the idea of pay transparency, but many organizations still not willing to take the plunge. Why the hesitancy? One argument I hear is that pay information is personal and it’s a private matter between the organization and employee. Others respond with view that employees just don’t have a need to know what coworkers earn. Or, my favorite, employees can’t be trusted with this kind of information. Therefore, when social media management company Buffer recently announced it was posting salaries online, you can imagine the uproar.

However, as Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne emphasized in a December blog post, “Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation for great teamwork.”

Buffer isn’t the only company choosing to share ‘confidential’ information. Thirty-employee SumAll chose to make performance reviews as well as salaries public. They say the program is a success. This may be due to how well they implemented the program. Specifically, they built the right culture as well as developed complementary policies and programs that are transparent as well as defensible.

Twenty Percent of States to Invoke Minimum Wage Changes on January 1, 2013

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Chris Kelley Posted in KnowledgePay

That’s right, at least ten of the States have already announced increases to their minimum wage hourly pay rates going into the new 2013 calendar year. If you have workers in any of these locations: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont & Washington, be ready. Come January 1st of 2013, you’ll be dolling out more coin for employees that have been paid at, or near, the current minimum wage rates. Compensation costs already account for the single largest operating expense for most companies…and those costs are going higher.

The average increase going in to effect is 2.1%, with Rhode Island going up by over 2x that amount (up 4.9%).
Nine of the ten States that will be increasing their minimum wage rates, already have rates that are set above the federal rate of $7.25. With Missouri increasing their minimum wage rate up to $7.36/hour, we will have twenty States requiring wage rates higher than the federal mandate.

Funny Market Pricing Stories

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Chris Kelley Posted in KnowledgePay

Funny how? Ha-ha funny, or funny like a clown. Well neither really. These are just a few of the quirky, humorous situations I’ve stumbled across. Would love to hear your stories.

Towers’ Data Always Runs High – I’ve actually heard this one on several occasions. My response is always, “Really? Do they have bigger calculators or something?” I think not. It’s better to look at the participant lists and see if there’s a driving force behind why there may be data differences between survey vendors for the same benchmark job. Towers Watson does have a very high percentage of large companies and better representation amongst a few of the higher paying industry groups which offers a better rationalization for why their data might be higher. But what if, just maybe, that is the relevant labor market where you compete for talent. Conversely, what if you’re a smaller firm in a notoriously low paying labor market? You would likely be looking to compare to a different set of participating companies. The real story here is make sure you select the survey vendors that are the best reflection of the labor pool where you swim and don’t just knee-jerk react to some off-handed comment that one vendor “runs high”.

Market Pricing Social Media Jobs (Really, Any Emerging Job Family)

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Chris Kelley Posted in KnowledgePay, Market Pricing, Salary Surveys

Ann Bares recently posted a blog on market pricing social media jobs. She really hit the nail on the head by using a very timely and relevant example many of us in the compensation profession are wrestling with right now. Today it is social media jobs, a few years ago it was web development, and tomorrow it will be some other emerging field. We need practical guidance for market pricing emerging job families

I don’t disagree with Ann’s advice at all, but rather wanted to add some additional perspective.

Understand the Labor Market: Know where people come from and/or go to when trying to fill those emerging job families. The social media job family that Ann has queued up is a fantastic example because five years ago, these jobs didn’t even exist. Think about it…no kid was playing in the sandbox twenty years ago saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a Community Moderator.” Yet today, there are thousands of people making a living by doing just that.

So, where did they come from?

Clearly, there’s no single answer, but when I look at the survey job summaries, the Monster job postings or the LinkedIn profiles of people doing this type of work, I see threads of both journalism and marketing. This prompts me to study the market data for those job families as well. Granted, this is not your typical “70% of job duties” type of job match for the social media jobs, but it does provide some insight on the wages paid to people in a nearby talent pool. If the tasks and qualifications are reasonably similar, the market data for these adjacent, but more established, job families will tend to track with the emerging field.

Jacqueline Kuhn Recognized by IHRIM

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Chris Kelley Posted in KnowledgePay

Jacqueline Kuhn was awarded the 2011 Summit Award by the International Association for Human Resource Information Management at their annual conference. This award is given out to individuals who have made significant, long-term contributions to the advancement of the IHRIM goals.

Jacqueline is one of the hardest working people in the field of human resource information systems. She serves us here at KnowledgePay as our head of Professional Services. Her incredible knowledge of the HR software landscape is tremendously valuable.

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