Every day, PayScale products and services help compensation and HR pros ideate, create, roll out and manage forward-thinking comp plans. We are always on a mission to help companies execute their comp goals with as little effort and as much innovation as possible.
With that in mind, we recently launched a new Support Center to help PayScale product users with key activities like benchmarking, running reports and utilizing structure and analytics tools.
In conjunction with our products and services web pages, Modern Compensation Hub and Comptopia customer community, we are excited to continue offering resources that help people with comp!
We know your comp activities can run the gamut. From analyzing and benchmarking jobs to formulating a comp strategy to executing a comp plan or communicating compensation policies, you can feel like you are in over your head and going it alone.
Here are four places you can ask for help:
1. Ideating a Comp Philosophy and Strategy
Talk to the dreamers and ideators in your company — this is their time to shine! Utilizing the talents of the strategists around you is going to do a number of helpful things: confirm the validity of ideas you already have, open up new ideas that may not have been on your radar and get early buy-in on your comp plans from the big thinkers and decision-makers.
PayScale also offers comp strategy planning as part of our professional services if you need some help getting all these ideas on to one page.
2. Benchmarking Jobs to Market
Talk to your managers early and often when it comes to anything related to analyzing jobs, building job descriptions and comparing your internal jobs to benchmark jobs in the market. Your managers often know the jobs better than anyone else, so a quick survey to them about the core components of the jobs in their department is going to save you a lot of work.
Pro tip: Full legal job descriptions are NOT needed for market pricing! Whether you are using salary surveys and managing them in a place like PayScale MarketPay or benchmarking with a tool like PayScale Insight, you only need the most basic details of a job to compare it to market. A job summary or list of key tasks and requirements will absolutely do the trick.
3. Turning Market Data Into Pay Ranges
Building pay ranges is both an art and a science, and anyone taking this task on for this first time might unintentionally lean heavily into one or the other. If there is one component of comp planning where you must ask for help, it’s this one. Whether you are looking at software or a service to help with this, make the investment. Building pay ranges is a key place to partner with a compensation professional and ensure you’re building a pay structure that aligns with your comp strategy and market data and is set up to grow with your organization.
Don’t have the resources you need internally? PayScale can help with this too.
4. Communicating Comp
If building pay ranges is the place where you are most likely to need some outside expertise, communicating the compensation structure is the area where its most crucial to ask for internal help. Odds are you’ve been part of (or witness to) a company-wide initiative that flopped because no one knew about it, no one understood it or no one bought into it. New comp plans or programs are at risk of this too — get the leaders in your company to start communicating alongside you rather than hoping the right messaging trickles down.
Ask not what you can do for your comp plan, but what your comp plan can do for you!
Tell Us What You Think
What’s your biggest compensation planning question right now? Ask away in the comments.
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