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If you participate in salary surveys, chances are you’re buried in outdated manual processes. Data loading takes weeks, you’re cobbling together information from spreadsheets, and tracking different submission deadlines.
Only to hear from providers: “We noticed errors in your submissions.” Add more time going back and forth with publishers.
It’s time to rethink how you participate in surveys and the cost of the status quo.
What’s the cost of manual survey management?
HR teams spend weeks or months just to participate in salary surveys.
For decades, HR has participated in surveys in the same painstaking way. The problem is, it’s costing practitioners their time and sanity. It’s also costing your organization money.
- Tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity
- Work sitting on the backburner while you enter data
- Bad data means bad benchmarks
- Low-quality submissions create compliance headaches
- Paying for surveys that don’t deliver value
The endless hours spent on survey participation aren’t just a hassle — they’re financially damaging. According to the consulting firm EY, the average cost of manual data entry by a HR professional reached $4.86 per entry in 2025.
If you’re combining data from your HRIS, Performance Management system, and possibly separate Benefits into survey templates, you might be making hundreds of manual entries per survey.
The expense of manual participation racks up quickly.
The price tag your CFO doesn’t see
Finance doesn’t spend time in the trenches participating in surveys. If spreadsheets are “working” that’s less program spend for your compensation function.
They fail to appreciate the real costs of manual survey participation.
It’s up to you to quantify them.
- Hours spent on participation
- Cost of a junior analyst doing the work (if you’re lucky)
- Back and forth with providers
- Bad data quality
Third-party salary surveys remain the gold standard for accurate benchmarking. Payscale’s Compensation Best Practices Report found 52% of organizations use them.
This percentage rises steadily with organizational size. Once companies reach 750 employees, 66% rely on third-party surveys. At 10,000 employees, 82% use them.
While HR-reported data in compensation management software (49%) and closed-network HR-reported data (27%), like Payscale Peer, offer valuable alternatives, traditional surveys remain the most popular option.
Two problems. First, Finance and other Executive stakeholders often don’t understand the value of salary surveys.
Second, the manual processes they think “save money” actually drive-up costs — in HR practitioners’ time, delayed decisions, and poor data quality.
Automating survey management doesn’t just reclaim your lost hours. It ensures you’re getting the most out of your investment with the best data for attracting and retaining talent.
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The shift from manual entry to automated participation workflows: what HR needs to know
Today’s HR professionals are ditching costly manual processes. They’re turning to compensation management systems for time-intensive and routine work.
The old model of survey management has been modernized. This means:
- Smarter survey spend based on match quantity and quality
- Survey templates automatically populated with pricing matches and HRIS data
- Submission report generation that catches duplicate matches and errors
- Process improvements that create real savings
This change isn’t just tactical — it’s philosophical. Moving away from busy work so HR can take on a more strategic role.
How Payscale is transforming survey participation
Payscale replaces tedious manual participation with a new approach.
Automated data assembly
- Pre-loaded templates: All survey templates come ready to use in one centralized location
- Easy data management: Links to essential HRIS and other data (job structures, pay elements, population data, company information) on your platform
- Real savings: Cuts weeks or months of prep time, saving your company tens of thousands in productivity losses
Submission deadline management
- Complete visibility: Dashboard view of all outstanding tasks and submission due dates across multiple surveys
- Multiple submission tracking: Managing all domestic and international survey submissions from different publishers in one system
- Early access: Some provider templates are available before they are released to competitors
Price match memory
- One-click retrieval: Instantly pull last year’s pricing matches instead of manual re-entry
- Historical lookups: Essential for aging data forward and analyzing year-over-year trends
Built-in error detection
- Automatic validation: Identify all errors and duplicate matches before submission
- Catch provider inconsistencies: Identifies provider errors and issues prior to submission
- Cost protection: Avoid paying 2x to 3x the cost due to submission errors
- Time savings: Eliminates the back-and-forth with providers questioning submission accuracy
Survey analytics
- Utilization metrics: Detailed analysis of how many quality matches each survey generates
- Comprehensive survey library: View ALL your available surveys, not just your current slate for more options and choice
- Consolidation of survey results: Pull data from every survey without jumping from different spreadsheets and systems
White-glove survey participation services
Some organizations don’t want to touch survey participation at all. We understand. From interpreting unique provider requirements to loading disconnected data, it’s often simpler to outsource.
That’s where Payscale Services comes in.
Our compensation experts can handle your participation with ease: defining participation requirements, managing submission timelines, populating templates, generating reports, and validating data.
Over the past 23 years, we’ve forged exclusive partnerships with brand-name survey providers such as Mercer, Culpepper, and Aon Radford/McLagan. That kind of access doesn’t come easy — it’s built on relationships and proven expertise.
In fact, we have more seasoned survey participation professionals than some of our competitors have employees.
Less grunt work, more strategy
Automating survey participation and management frees up HR practitioners' time. But for what?
Strategic work that actually moves the needle.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: many departments including Finance and IT don’t see HR as a strategic function.
You’re administrative overhead. When you’re spending a month on survey participation, who can blame them?
The irony is brutal. You need accurate market data to make strategic compensation decisions. But the manual processes of gathering that data reinforce the perception that your work is tactical.
Strategic HR doesn’t happen by accident. It requires intentionally eliminating mundane work.
Survey participation is the perfect place to start. Much of it is time-intensive, repetitive, and doesn’t require strategic thinking.
It does demand accuracy and disciplined processes, which is precisely the type of work you should automate.
When you automate survey participation, you’re not just saving time. You’re making a statement about what HR should be doing.
It’s part of the transformational shift other business functions need to see. And, more importantly, it’s the role your organization desperately needs you to play.
