What Pay Grades Can Do For Your Organization

By Stacey Carroll, PayScale.com

We talk about pay grades all the time here at PayScale, but not everyone understands why they are so important. So, without further ado, here are our top three reasons to adopt pay grades.

3.      Easier to Administer Than Individual Ranges

While this is not the primary reason for developing pay ranges, it is important. In job-based ranges, each job has a different pay range.  In some cases, the difference in one range and another may be quite small, even insignificant. 

Compensation Today's News Round-up

Welcome to our news round for late May. As you catch up after the long weekend, we wanted to give you the HR and business news you may have missed.

Maternity Leave Poll Results Are Here!

The results of Compensation Today's first poll are in. A few weeks ago, in "Poll: What is Your Company's Maternity Leave Policy," we asked readers to tell about their company's maternity leave policies. A little over 250 of you let us know. The results can be found below. Most provide the statutory requirement of 12 weeks of unpaid leave, but a fifth are now providing paid leave.

It's Easier Than You Might Think

A movement has started to inform employers that the dangers and frequency of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are often overstated. According to researcher Dr. Harry Croft, medical director at the San Antonio Psychiatric Research Center, whose views on hiring veterans were covered in an earlier post “The Right Reason to Hire Veterans,” "Not only are the rates and severity of PTSD  lower than many assume but, when understood, the impact of PTSD in the workplace can be managed."

MarketMatch Goes Farther

By Tim Low, VP of Marketing, PayScale.com

Today, PayScale releases an update to our MarketMatch algorithm. We do these regularly to provide our customers access to the latest and greatest information on the market and the state of compensation at any given moment. We don't believe in 15 month old surveys 'aged' and massaged into categories and slices that might not be relevant to your business today. We believe in real data from the recent past, like the past few days. So, while we don't always talk about changes to MarketMatch in great detail, today I thought it would be good to share with you some of the things that are new and fresh.

Retention Requires Communication

Some stories make you cringe. For those of us who think about human resources every day, this post by Paul Spiegelman may be one of them. In the article, he talks about losing one of his top performers and the lessons he learned from the experience. Like many employers before him, he relearns the painful truth that retention matters as much as recruitment.

Paid Leave Makes A Difference

Do you want to make sure your pregnant employees remain loyal employees and stay at work long after they give birth? If so, you might be wise to focus on whether or not any leave you provide is paid, according to a new research study. Researchers from Bryn Mawr College and Rutgers University found that women who take paid maternity leave are more likely to still be working a year after they give birth than those who take no leave at all.

Do Them and Your Business A Favor

A former Army psychiatrist thinks companies often hire veterans for the wrong reasons, leading to bad results for both the businesses and the veterans. Dr. Harry Croft, co-author of Always Sit With My Back to The Wall and a former Army psychiatrist who has been working with veterans since 1973, argues that the best reason to hire veterans is for their skills.

Just Rewards For Your Employees

Here at PayScale, we often talk about compensation philosophies answering 3 main questions:

• How do you define your market?
• How competitive do you want to be relative to the market?
• What do you want to reward?

In working with clients, I find they know the answers to the first two questions within a heartbeat. The third question, however, often leads them to stumble and to look to me for guidance. What are the options? What should we reward? At that point, I have to dig in deeper to their organization.