Last week, I sat in on a meeting involving some of our wonderful client managers here at PayScale. As they’re the folks working so closely with our clients on a regular basis, I was thrilled to be invited to listen in. My goal as a content writer here is to produce helpful, relevant pieces that HR leaders and comp pros find valuable — and I can only do that if I have insights into what you folks care about!
I took away a lot, but there were two things that came up over and over again that have really stuck with me. I have a feeling they’ll ring true for you.
Comp Pros Are Short on Resources
I heard story after story about ever-shrinking comp teams. I heard that over the years, comp pros have been asked to take on more work and shoulder more responsibility while they say goodbye to colleagues — and that it’s frustrating. Well of course it is! Comp has such a big impact on the organization and is anything but simple; it’s no wonder our comp friends are stressed out by having to do more with dwindling support.
Comp Pros Are Short on Time
An inevitable byproduct of scarce resources, comp pros, I learned, are also incredibly pressed for time. When there are fewer people to do the work, plates are obviously going to be overloaded. The thing that stood out to me most among these comments was the insight that comp pros are exceptionally good at sussing out the potential value (or lack thereof) of meetings, reports, etc. and wisely declining or deleting when appropriate to protect their limited bandwidth. Comp pros want to know they’re going to learn something if they take time to attend/listen/watch/read, and they want that something to be specifically about comp.
What Am I Gonna Do About It, You Ask?
Well, unfortunately I can’t expand your time or team. But! My team and I can create resources that give you strategies and tactics for tackling these problems. We can shed light on how your colleagues in other companies and industries are handling these challenges, we can research the newest tools and techniques for managing comp (and time), we can report on important comp developments so that you’re always informed — and we can ensure everything we produce is always worth your while.
To that end, let us know if there are any other specifics you want us to address. I look forward to learning more!
Tell Us What You Think
What are your biggest challenges right now? Share your story in the comments.
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Love to leave a comment, but I don’t have time… or resources. 😉 Kidding. Great write-up Cassie. I tend to agree. The “resources” challenge seems to go up exponentially with bad tech. PayScale Insight gets me pretty far, but I definitely spend more time than I should doing things that I know a computer could do for me.
I totally agree, Cassie. As a new PayScale client, I am slowly but surely finding ways that PayScale can assist in all of this.
I have a great comp department at my fingertips in PayScale, but I would find challenges in the inability to not give comp increases to an ever demanding staff that see their workload increases, their benefit dollars don’t stretch as far and they have fewer resources to complete their work. All is a recipe for disaster. At this time, I don’t believe it is only a comp professional that feels the pinch.
Our biggest challenge here is managers do not understand compensation and we do not have the time and resources to help them.
Time is always a thing for comp folks – this is why building key relationships in your organizations is so important. Those relationships can be leveraged to help with getting data and other resources together on a project. Typically (in my case) if Ops is driving a request for a comp plan, they are willing to help put some resources together to get the work done.
One challenge we are currently facing is trying to document our organization’s incentive plans that are above-and-beyond base pay. Documentation and memories about such plans are not always very good.
PayScale can really free up a comp pro’s time by automating employee uploads and through its reporting functionality.
PayScale technology has been great at giving me time back with the added technology. There’s still so much as it relates to other factors that are manual i.e. variable pay, commissions, etc. I enjoy reading best practices and successful programs with other companies.
Our biggest challenge here is our field HR does not understand compensation and we have the time and resources to help them, but it seems they are not getting it.
I work for a national low retail eye care provider and our challenges have been how deal with all the minimum wage increases that are occuring all over the country! We want to go into these markets but it’s hard with minimum wages starting at $15. How are other national retailers dealing with comp in this high minimum wage areas?