One of the challenges of setting remuneration packages is making sure that the compensation you are offering is in line with the rest of the market.
Determining the appropriate salary for individuals in your company is essential to your business for a number of reasons. There is a battle for top talent in our current market and potential hires are more informed than ever about the market rate of their position’s salary. They weigh their decision based on a range of factors: opportunities for advancement, development programmes, commute time, and corporate values. The key factor is the total compensation package including benefits and perquisites.
Establishing market rates for core positions within an organisation is important for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it guides decision making for pay decisions including hiring, promotions, internal equity salary adjustments, and general compensation budget planning. Because labour costs are the largest cost to any organisation, a solid understanding of the external value of each position allows an organisation to develop an approach for setting an overall compensation philosophy or a guide for salary level.
The ability to balance the need to attract and retain talent with the fiscal responsibility of the organisation is a key priority for Executives. Compensation Benchmarking provides the information leaders require to define the costs associated with salaries and other compensation components such as profit-sharing or bonuses. Also, salary benchmarking ensures compliance with regulatory guidelines and requirements for equity.
For the purposes of comparability, salary surveys can be conducted to determine pay levels for specific jobs within other organisations. In other words, determine what other companies in your industry, geographic location, and size category are paying their employees for similar jobs. Combined with the knowledge you have about the internal worth of your organisation’s positions, external market data helps ensure your organisation is paying employees competitively. However, many organisations do not have the required resources to collect or analyse the data in the most useful way.
A key to successfully using the data contained in a salary survey is to understand the assumptions and criteria used to collect the information. Finding surveys that clearly report the basis for collection and dissemination of information will assist in ensuring that you are referencing a survey that is relevant for your organisation. Salary surveys need to be readily comparable and scientifically credible to be useful for benchmarking.
HRC Associates – Compensation Consulting Services
Compensation is a part science and mostly art. Knowing when to eliminate data points, how to age data, and when to adjust and weigh the data is critical. If the final analysis is incorrect, it could result in unintentionally leading or lagging the market thereby having difficulty in attracting key talent. The cost of losing competitiveness is something we cannot begin to put a price on for you.
- Survey Library and Compensation Tools:
HRC Associates has an extensive library of reliable, well established surveys covering a number of industries, geographic locations, and revenue sizes in addition to tools that help accurately analyse the data.
- Custom Surveys:
As third-party specialists, we can provide compensation benchmarking services to ensure that all positions are documented and benchmarked with the external market accurately. We can also customise these surveys to your specific company. Should you need assistance with your job descriptions, we can help with that too.
- Compensation Specialists:
Salary benchmarking compares the total compensation package, including basic salary, cash bonus, share bonus, long term incentive plans (LTIs) and pension, with those of executives in similar organisations. The data can be split by sector, revenue and/or business size to help you get an accurate picture of how your remuneration levels compare. Finally, once you have the market data, we can also give recommendations and guidance on next steps. For example, Employee Analysis – identifying which employees are below or above market and what it would cost to bring them to market, and how to effectively communicate changes to your employees.
Benefits include:
- Make setting salary ranges easy
- Eliminate compensation guesswork
- Make the correct job matches
- Stop overpaying employees
- Reduce the risk of losing your top performers
- Save time and money on compensation benchmarking
Compensation Report for Trinidad & Tobago
Contact us at consulting@hrc-associates.com or 868-285-4HRC to request a copy of our 2015-2016 Compensation Report: Executive, Managerial and Professional Positions.
Our latest Survey analyses national data by base pay, incentive pay, and total cash compensation (base salary, bonus, and direct cash perquisites) for over 3,800 incumbents in 270 Executive, Managerial and Professional positions, across 12 industry sectors in Trinidad and Tobago.
This year’s survey continues to analyse trends in executive reward programmes, including cost control, pay for performance and the incidence of short and long-term incentive compensation.
About HRC Associates
Founded in 1990, HRC Associates is a recruitment and management consulting firm specialising in human resources, compensation, executive recruitment, general management, and organisation strategy and change issues. HRC’s mission is to work with our clients to help them reach their full potential by integrating their people and organisational systems with their corporate vision and strategic intent.
