One of the challenges that the democratization of pay information has placed in our collective HR laps is the need to reconcile the differences in the kinds of compensation data relied on by employers (via purchases of professional published surveys) versus employees (typically accessed through free Internet sites).
From the employer point of view, one of the biggest weaknesses of much of the pay data available online without charge is the fact that it is self-reported. Part of the issue here is our assumption that people will succumb to the temptation to inflate their pay levels. But there is another, less talked about issue surrounding the whole service-service employee pay data business, in my experience, and that is the difficulty employees have in objectively and appropriately matching their jobs.
This, my friends, provides us with a potential teaching moment, one with two-way benefits. Getting employees involved in the matching of their jobs to pay surveys produces positive results in the following ways:
- Better and more accepted job matches for the employer. Not only do we benefit by getting the employee's point of view on their role and responsibilities, but we also gain their acceptance by giving them a voice in the process.
- Better understanding of the job matching process by the employee. The employee has an opportunity to see, understand and appreciate the job matching process through the employer's eyes, including the importance of focusing on the job that is being done, not the employee and their personal credentials (e.g., yes, you may have been working here for 18 years but the job you are performing is Technician 2; it is not a Technician 5 simply by virtue of your personal years of experience).
At this point, I know, beads of sweat are breaking out on some of your foreheads. I realize that not every organization may be ready for this level and kind of employee participation, but I am here urging you to consider it. I will confess that my initial stab at this (working directly with employees to match their jobs to survey benchmarks), a long time ago, came not at my own suggestion but rather as a result of a (somewhat visionary) client company promising to do it without running it past me first. After freaking out just a tiny bit, I sat down with the employees and got to work ... and became a believer.
Of course, like many avenues of employee participation, getting them involved in the job matching process takes extra preparation, extra attention to expectation setting and management, and - particularly - extra dedication to education and communication. In fact, we typically spend time in what we like to refer to as "Market Benchmarking 101" as a prelude to employee participation in the process. Some of the points we go through with employees during this effort include:
- What is a benchmark job? Benchmark jobs are not real jobs from this or any other company. Rather, they describe common roles that are found in many organizations. For this reason, benchmark job descriptions are purposefully brief and generic. It is important that these jobs be defined broadly enough that they allow comparisons across a range of companies, so that a critical mass of pay data can be collected.
- There won't be exact matches. There may not be many companies exactly like this one in the surveys, and there probably aren't exact counterparts to our company's jobs there. We try to find as many valid matches as possible, benchmark jobs that represent comparable skill requirements and levels of responsibility, so that we can be assured that we are building the salary program using valid competitive pay information.
- Your job, not you. What we need you to focus on (and we realize that this is a difficult thing to ask anyone to do) is the job you perform, its scope and its requirements. You, as an individual, may indeed have capabilities and experience beyond what is required for this job (in some cases, this may lead us to discussion of career development choices ...).
The plain fact is that, going forward, employees will have increasing access to pay data, and they will use it to assess the opportunities and practices of their employers and potential employers. To pretend that they are not up to the task of assessing their own job relative to the market is to ignore the fact that they are doing it already (whether or not they are doing a good job).
By taking the initiative to educate and involve them in your own market pricing efforts, you increase trust in the process and better the odds that - when they do feel compelled to do their own outside research - you and they will come to more consistent conclusions about the fair market value of their work.
And that's a good thing!
Ann - I have been thinking that there are a lot of similarities between pay marketplaces and job (recruiting) marketplaces. Both scare employers, offer a wealth of information to individuals ... and could be leveraged to build meaningful job profiles within companies. I think we will start to see a blending of these two marketplaces as well as a strong linkage to company job profiles.
You inspired me to write about it:
http://talentedapps.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/whats-recruiting-compensation-got-to-do-with-it/
Posted by: Amy Wilson | August 07, 2008 at 07:14 PM
Amy:
Interesting parallels! Great comment - and post!
Posted by: Ann Bares | August 07, 2008 at 08:25 PM