Be a Champion for Market Pricing Automation

I do a lot of public speaking, which gives me the pleasure of getting to meet all levels and experience of compensation professionals. What never ceases to amaze me is the amount of companies that use antiquated methods for market pricing – hundreds of spreadsheets, printouts, binders, even rudimentary homegrown databases. Sometimes we get so stuck in the process that we forget to take a step back and notice that we are all doing the same thing, at the same time, with the same data every year.

There has to be a better way.

And there is. There are many software options for compensation professionals to take advantage of to help revolutionize the way they do market pricing so they can stop wasting time recreating the wheel every year. That isn’t news.

I realize that budget has a huge impact on what comp departments can choose to adopt, but I find that budget isn’t always the issue. Fear of change or of new technology and our own inability to champion the needs of HR often get in the way.

Market pricing seems to be the final frontier for HR technology. This may be because we as comp professionals are the ones who see the real value in what automation can provide, because we wouldn’t accept such manual work in other parts of our department.

Do you have someone sitting and writing out each individual paycheck? No, you go to ADP. So why are we so willing to accept having a spreadsheet for each job or a database that no one knows how to run a query against?