Blog Archive - October 2009

Sometimes it takes a little social media to get the message out. At Salary.com, we’re trying to make the esoteric world of payroll and taxes a little more approachable for small business owners. So instead of difficult-to-understand brochures and tacky-suited salespeople cold calling your business, we’re using YouTube, Twitter and a Payroll Concierge team.

It’s different, but then again so is our offering. We’re really trying to get beyond the white noise of traditional payroll markets, but that requires something that’s never been done before. So, we launched a free payroll offer that is for a year. Not a month or two. But for 365 days.

Now, let’s see if we can create a collection of celebrity paycheck images that we can post on Flikr…..

I don't know about the rest of you, but when Kenneth Feinberg was appointed to his position as Compensation Czar, my first thought was "What a great title!"

The second was "Wow, that's going to be a tough position to benchmark."

The third was "Better him than me."

Imagine being the executive compensation professional responsible for this mess. He faces the same challenges that we all do in ensuring that AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, Chrysler, Chrysler Financial, General Motors and GMAC attract and motivate the talent they need to survive and hopefully prosper. He is also being asked to set best practices for everyone else with little experience in executive compensation or Wall Street. I hope he has some good advisers.

“Fourth down, goal to go and the clock is moving.”

Competencies, job models and proficiencies continue to garner great interest around the globe as human capital managers develop programs to understand and match the needs of employers in bringing about growth and profitability. At the same time, there is intense competition within organizations for budgets and resources. So how does an HR professional make his or her case to those C-level executives who may not be familiar with the importance of competency initiatives?

Story telling is one of the oldest ways of educating people. So, when presenting the value of competencies and job models, rather than use a drab description of frameworks, profiles, and accelerators, why not use a metaphor that resonates with many people: sports?

We previously covered the importance of making time for performance reviews, and making performance reviews regular, comprehensive, and companywide. Just as crucial, however, is what is included in those reviews – and, perhaps equally vital, what is excluded. 

Quite often, a performance review can be different things to different entities:

• Manager – sees it as an opportunity to have a conversation with an employee on the latter’s strengths, developmental areas, and objectives going forward
• Human Resources – sees it as the culmination/roll-up of the ongoing one-on-one sessions that have occurred between manager and employee throughout the just-completed performance period, and an essential part of the Total Rewards paradigm
• Employee – sees it as the meeting in which I find out what raise I will be getting

We traveled around the world with our series of Salary.community meetings, presenting information, meeting our clients and, most importantly, listening to the challenges that people are facing. Not surprisingly, compensation professionals across all points of the world find they are faced with very similar challenges resulting from the global economy.  The norm is doing more with less – less staff, less merit dollars, less time. Many people within organizations – well, certain people (management, the CFO, etc.) – expect more from the compensation function to help with staff and the bottom line. I know in a down economy, many like me expect less from the compensation function of their job.

Talent management programs are designed to attract, motivate, reward, and retain the “best” employees.  You know, the ones who are smart, work hard, and produce value for your organization.  But as we all also know, great employees don’t all look the same. They come from different cultural backgrounds, were born in different generations, and they don’t all share the same values or have the same priorities. Talent management programs can do a good job of identifying the skills and competencies necessary for success in a job, and they can also help you determine if your candidates or incumbents are a good fit for a job which you may consider their candidacy. But do your talent management leaders recognize that the KSAOCs people possess does not really tell you much about what motivates them, or what rewards they seek?

Although the idea of competencies as a predictor of employee success has existed for more than 30 years, there is still a lot of confusion and uncertainty surrounding competencies and how they can be used.

A competency is the combination of knowledge, skill, and ability demonstrated by the observable behavior of an individual who is successful at a given task. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, there are actually subtle differences between them:

• Knowledge refers to factual information that is acquired by a person through study or experience
• Skill is the application of training or knowledge in the execution of a learned physical task
• Ability is the capacity to perform a given physical or mental task naturally or without training

Executive compensation has been and continues to be a hot topic in today’s news.  From the changes in the SEC proxy disclosure requirements in 2006 and potentially more on the way, to the appointment of Kenneth Feinberg as "Compensation Czar," public companies are now more than ever paying careful attention to the creation and execution of their executive pay programs.  As a result, I was asked to hold a refresher session with our sales team to review our executive compensation product, CompAnalyst Executive.  In the session, we were asked to test the knowledge of the team.  For fun, I included some current events relating to executive compensation pay and for a final question asked “What was the lowest base salary reported to the SEC for an executive in 2008?” There were very few who had the correct answer.

Many survey firms will argue that their method of calculation, presentation, and price are the best. Those are integral parts of a survey. Surveys have been around for a long time, and because of that, method, presentation and price have become somewhat standard. So what really sets a survey apart from others?

Participation is what makes a survey rise above. Not necessarily the number of participants, but the quality of each company’s submission.

WorldatWork recently released the results of its 2009/2010 U.S. Strategic Rewards Study, completed in partnership with Watson Wyatt. Results of the survey indicate that the economic recession hasn’t just had a financial impact on organizations; employee engagement and morale have dropped.

The survey reports that employee engagement for all levels of performers has dropped 9 percent since last year, and a staggering 23 percent for top performers. The cost-cutting measures organizations have had to put in place, including layoffs, wage freezes, reduced bonuses, and sometimes pay cuts, have weakened employee commitment.