Salary.com HRVoice

At one point during the Salary.community London User Meeting, I was seated between two global compensation managers. One represented an organization of less than 200 employees, the other, more than 40,000. You wouldn’t perceive this magnitude of difference from their conversations, because they shared precisely the same challenges.

Their top concern was the same: how can their organizations do more with less while trying to retain their best employees. And their engaging conversations revealed that they were tackling the same issues, just on different scales:

The news has been full of stories that have undoubtedly left compensation pros scratching their heads. Some headlines have included:

In the face of record-breaking profits, and the payment of commensurate bonuses, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has “warned his employees to avoid making big-ticket, high-profile purchases.”

Chafing under new pay restrictions proposed by Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg, Citibank recently sold Phibro, one of its few profitable businesses, simply to avoid paying a $100 million bonus to star trader Andrew Hall.

AIG allowed Joseph Cassano, the head of AIG Financial Products, whose business unit lost hundreds of millions of dollars in credit default swaps, to keep living in the company's luxurious London house, and gave him a nine-month consulting contract for $1 million a month for much of 2008.

Our last Salary.community meeting was hosted in London last week. I’ll admit, I’m a bit sad. I'm tired and relieved too, kind of like how it feels after your last party guest leaves for the night. The preparation beforehand can be lots of work, but seeing the party go just as you had planned makes it worth all that went into it.

In the end, no matter how much you plan every moment, it is the unplanned events that make your day special. Though we arrange for a full agenda of presentations and roundtable discussions, we understand the importance of unstructured networking time. User groups, professional associations and other organizational  meetings are a great opportunity for HR professionals to leave the office and talk to other professionals about the problems that they are facing in their organization.

Just back from sunny London (yes, you heard me right, sunny!), where we held our annual user meeting for Salary.com’s UK and European customers. It was a great chance to reconnect with our customers and hear the unique challenges they face as they address and manage  global compensation in a volatile economy.

We opened the day with a keynote presentation from Robert Ward, director of global forecasting for the Economist Intelligence Unit, who managed to make us laugh when he encouraged us to have more babies as a means to a stable future economy, even as delivering the prediction that the recovery will be a slow one – noting that living standards aren’t likely to reach pre-crisis levels for many until beyond 2013, even in developed nations. The remainder of the day was devoted to a number of other topics that are critical to global comp practitioners – the financial reality of expat assignments, perspectives on outsourcing to India, China and Vietnam, and a discussion of how compensation teams will respond to the upturn in the economy.

What discussions have we been having within our organizations regarding the tide turning on the recession? Are we ready?

I recently heard an analyst declare that when the recession ends, we will be looking at turnover in organizations of upward of 40 to 50 percent of staff. Again, are we ready?

During the economic turndown, we have been hearing about all of the cost savings initiatives being put in place. Strategies such as pay cuts or wage freezes, benefit reductions, and reductions in staff.  What plans do we have in place to address these initiatives? Remember employees don’t forget these “temporary initiatives." Are we ready?

For all the extremely useful, high-quality salary surveys that are out there in the marketplace, there are quite a few poor-quality sources being used by HR or compensation professionals every day. In a previous post, Walter  talked about how the quality of participants is what ultimately makes a good survey, but there are a number of other factors for practitioners to consider when purchasing and using salary surveys. The following is a list of criteria that should be met by each and every compensation survey that you use.

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