Compensation Trends for Comp Professionals

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Salary Bands/Pay Bands and Variable Compensation: A Manager’s Guide to Attracting Talent

<p> <a class="asset-img-link" href="http://featherfiles.aviary.com/2012-11-14/f77694d11/5d51acd1080b44f38196e15011b2aeed_hires.png"><img alt="Pay bands" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341bf85853ef017c337d1d5e970b image-full" src="http://www.payscale.com/content/blog/images/a6a00d8341bf85853ef017c337d1d5e970b-800wi.png" title="Pay bands" /></a><br />Jessica Miller-Merrell, <a href="http://www.blogging4jobs.com" target="_self" rel="noopener">Blogging4Jobs</a></p> <p>If you’re in the business of giving or receiving (or hoping to receive) an annual merit increase, it’s a good time to get familiar with pay bands. Pay bands — a term that is sometimes used to lump broader terms such as pay levels, ranges or grades — is a component of an organized salary compensation structure. For example, an administrative position at a software company might include receptionists, office assistants and executive assistants. Those jobs are categorized together and given a predetermined minimum and maximum (Pay Band 1 = $12-$18 per hour). </p>

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Do I mean percentage or percentile?

<p> <a class="asset-img-link" href="https://www.payscale.com/content/blog/images/a6a00d8341bf85853ef017d3e7f3f47970c-pi.png" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Header_percentile_percentage_1" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341bf85853ef017d3e7f3f47970c image-full" src="http://www.payscale.com/content/blog/images/a6a00d8341bf85853ef017d3e7f3f47970c-800wi.png" title="Header_percentile_percentage_1" /></a><br /><em style="font-size: 10pt;">Mykkah Herner, MA, CCP</em></p> <p><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><em>Compensation Consultant at PayScale</em></span></p> <p>When benchmarking positions, it’s easy to get tongue-tied over the terms percentage and percentile. Percentiles are admittedly confusing. People generally understand that market pay breaks out at the 10<sup>th</sup> through 90<sup>th</sup> percentiles, but what does that even mean? And how can I use that information to manage <a href="https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/comp-planning-ecourse/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">employee pay</a>? When are percentages valid when talking about employee pay? I often get these questions from my clients.  The answer is that we use both percentiles and percentages when developing and managing compensation plans.</p>

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Calculating Employee Turnover

<p> <a class="asset-img-link" href="https://www.payscale.com/content/blog/images/a6a00d8341bf85853ef017744d20c53970d-pi.png"><img alt="Header_InOut" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341bf85853ef017744d20c53970d image-full" src="http://www.payscale.com/content/blog/images/a6a00d8341bf85853ef017744d20c53970d-800wi.png" title="Header_InOut" /></a><br /><strong>Employee Turnover Rates</strong></p> <p>Employee turnover is driven by many factors including inadequate compensation, lack of employee engagement, poor job fit, etc. Whatever the cause, you can easily calculate your company's rate of turnover. This is a critical benchmark that can help you understand your relationship with your competition and with your employees. You should continually monitor this rate so you can make informed choices in the future. </p>

The Top Three Reasons to Create Pay Grades

<h1>What Pay Grades Can Do For Your Organization</h1> <p>By Stacey Carroll, <a href="https://www.payscale.com" target="_self" title="PayScale" rel="noopener">PayScale.com</a></p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>3.      Easier to Administer Than Individual Ranges</strong></p> <p>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. </p>

Performance vs. proficiency: Understanding key differences

<h1 class="subhead">Just Rewards For Your Employees</h1> <p>Here at PayScale, we often talk about compensation philosophies answering 3 main questions:</p> <ul> <li>How do you define your market?</li> <li>How competitive do you want to be relative to the market?</li> <li>What do you want to reward?</li> </ul> <p>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.</p>

Building a Better Incentive Plan

<h1 class="subhead">Blending the World at Work and Brad Hams Approaches</h1> <p>By Mykkah Herner, <a href="https://www.payscale.com/pro" target="_self" title="PayScale.com" rel="noopener">PayScale.com </a></p> <p>Last month, I <a href="http://blogs.payscale.com/compensation/2012/02/ownership-thinking.html" target="_self" rel="noopener">read and reviewed</a> Brad Hams’ <em>Ownership Thinking</em>, and promised to write more on his sense of having the right incentives. While I thought he has some useful suggestions, I found his incentive plan to be both too prescriptive and too detailed.</p> <p>Ultimately, I find that World at Work, the experts in the compensation field, explain incentives best. So, rather than spend a lot of time on a plan that can use a little more cohesion and a little more variability, I’ll focus on World at Work’s explanation of incentive plans, and weave in some gems from Hams. World at Work focuses on three stages: pre-design, design, and implementation.</p>

Salaried Employees Work Hours: Laws from FLSA

<h1 class="subhead">Exempt Employees and Rules Requiring Specified Hours</h1> <p>You probably are aware that exempt employees generally should be paid the same salary regardless of the number of hours they work or the quantity of work they produce. But, can you require them to work a certain schedule and track their hours?</p>

How to Determine New Employees' Annual Bonuses

<h1 class="subhead">When to Give an Annual Bonus to a New Employee</h1> <p>Chances are, you have recently been tasked with the job of determining (or at least helping to determine) what your employees’ end-of-year bonuses should be. With your long-term employees, you've have had some historical practices, as well as a, hopefully, comprehensive performance review to rely on to help you. But what do you do with employees who haven’t been with the company for a full year, including those who may have joined very recently? While there are no hard and fast rules, here are some approaches for you to ponder.</p>

Rules on Notice & Pay After a Resignation

<h1 class="subhead">Do Voluntary Resignations Require Advance Notice?</h1> <p>When you’re watching your labor costs, it is important to know how to handle an employee resignation, compensation-wise. If you require employees to provide two weeks’ notice of their resignation, you may have to pay them for that full period even if you release them earlier. But, even if you only request the advance notice, it still may be better employee relations to pay for that full two-week period.</p>

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Holiday Pay for Employees

<h1 class="subhead">Answers to 7 Holiday Pay Questions</h1> <p><a style="float: left;" href="https://www.payscale.com/content/blog/images/a6a00d8341bf85853ef015393820c47970b-pi.png"><img class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8341bf85853ef015393820c47970b" style="width: 100px; margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" title="6394869841_b9d954ef90_b" src="http://www.payscale.com/content/blog/images/a6a00d8341bf85853ef015393820c47970b-100wi.png" alt="6394869841_b9d954ef90_b" /></a>Do you have to provide paid holidays? What about for new employees? And do you have to pay overtime to employees who have to work a holiday? We’re officially heading into the holiday season with Thanksgiving coming up next week and Christmas and the New Year just around the corner. If you are like most employers, you may be dealing with holiday pay issues. To help you out, here are the answers to seven common holiday pay questions.</p> <p>

Comp Basic: Mean vs. Median

<h1 class="subhead">The Difference Between Mean and Median</h1> <p>Midpoint, market ratio, mean, median, merit bonus - I don’t know what it is with “m” words in compensation, but there are a lot of them and it can get confusing. Let’s try to simplify things by breaking down the difference between two commonly confused words: mean and median.</p>

How to Avoid Pay Compression

<h1 class="subhead">Pay Compression: Our Nightmare in the World of Compensation</h1> <p>Compression is the ugliest issue compensation professionals face. It tends to be a no-win, lose-lose situation, and the ways to deal with it are limited.</p>

Compensation trends: Modern perspectives on pay

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