CAN YOU NAME 6 REASONS FOR PARTICIPATING IN SURVEYS?
Some have tax season, others have allergy season and Red Sox Nation has baseball season. But HR professionals have Salary Survey Season and it is going on right now.
But, why put in any effort to participate in salary surveys? Aren’t they just a tedious, antiquated, time wasting task? I don’t think so, and at the end of February we conducted training for 60 of our members who wanted to learn how to participate in TSG’s Benchmark Compensation Survey. The training was long and intense as we went through every phase of survey participation.
Why would 60 people put themselves through this training? Because they, or the managers who sent them, realize the benefits of survey participation, of course.
This month I explain why you should participate in surveys.
David Weaver
President, The Survey Group
Pay Employees Competitively Measuring the marketplace and being competitive is critical to an organization’s success. The key to any compensation program is having the fundamentals in place to be externally competitive. The only way I know to achieve competitive pay is to participate in credible salary surveys and to analyze the results by comparing the average pay for each internal job to the external market pay. Knowing where your organization pays employees relative to the market helps you to manage labor costs and to attract and retain a qualified workforce.
Adjust Pay Based On Market Conditions Adjusting pay is twofold: salary survey analysis can assist you in determining how much you should be spending for overall salary increases and it helps you identify incumbents who are paid significantly behind the external market. Then a plan can be developed to bring those salaries up to the competitive pay rate over a period of time.
Establish Salary Ranges There is no way to design new salary ranges, or update existing pay structures, without consulting compensation surveys. Whether you use salary structure trend data to move ranges accordingly or you perform a comprehensive market analysis to determine more accurately how to adjust ranges, you need compensation data.
Estimate Labor Costs Of Competitors Short of calling each one of your competitors, the best way to understand pay trends in your industry or geographic area is to participate in surveys providing those breakouts. For example, The Survey Group’s Benchmark Survey reports on revenue, industry and geographic cuts of data.
Provide Data For Pay-Related HR Projects Salary surveys can be a great source of data when you are working on other HR-related projects. If you are designing a bonus plan, you can analyze data for each job to determine the actual bonus paid, the target bonus percent, the actual total cash delivered or the target total cash. This type of data provides key information in developing your bonus plan. TSG surveys also report a host of other pay related programs such as hiring, retention and referral bonuses, stock options, on-call compensation, and student pay programs.
Be A “Good Citizen” In The HR Community To receive valid, high quality compensation data, everyone must be willing to share. TSG has been fortunate to have a high level of repeat participation for its compensation surveys. This type of stability with participants gives the data a consistent trend upon which to base your annual market analysis.
Many thanks to those members who have already participated in TSG's 2012 Benchmark Compensation Survey. For those who haven't, you have until Thursday, April 26 to help us reach our goal of 100% participation!
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If you have any questions regarding your survey input, please feel free to email me at davidw@thesurveygroup.com or call me at 781-345-7514.
