3 Benefits of Technology for Compensation Alignment

An organization’s culture and its compensation system are complementary pieces in achieving the strategic goals of a company. Without the alignment of these pieces, the results can be unpredictable. Research published in Compensation & Benefits Review finds that compensation is a key contributor to culture, and vital to achieving corporate goals. The right technology can ensure that compensation is delivered effectively.

Professor Pankaj Madhani from the ICFAI Business School has studied the importance of aligning compensation management with organizational culture to generate strategic advantage. Madhani states that:

"The organization culture can be shaped by the type of compensation system used and the kinds of behaviors and outcomes the organization chooses to reward and punish. … Depending on how the compensation system is designed, developed, communicated and managed, it can positively or negatively influence an organization’s culture."¹

When companies are small, managing the compensation model of a few employees can be done manually. As companies grow, compensation management becomes a strategic element in accomplishing competitive objectives and attempts to manage compensation manually can be disastrous.

The need for technology

Employee compensation is a business activity with constantly moving parts. Trying to manage these moving parts manually wastes a great deal of time inside the Human Resources (HR) function. Compensation in large enterprises needs to be managed across different countries, different regions within the country and job roles. At the same time, employees are being hired and promoted, are questioning their pay, and serving their resignations.

To attract and retain the needed talent, companies should review compensation practices to ensure fair pay, appropriate promotional raises, and remedial adjustments for at-risk employees. Performing due diligence for each of these activities in a manual environment will quickly overwhelm HR. To serve the needs of both employees and the company for these compensation activities, the use of technology offers compelling benefits.

Benefit #1: Assess and address attrition risks

When an employee receives an offer of employment from another company, a manager’s first instinct may be to offer the employee a higher salary if they stay, especially if they are a top performer for the company. Unfortunately, this sometimes assigns a salary to the employee that is out of line with other employees within the same job role. In this regard, the manager may be averting a perceived issue today but could be creating future issues of unfair pay complaints.

Using technology for compensation management allows the employee’s manager and HR to avoid impulsive decisions that can be costly for the company. The information stored in a compensation management system can quickly compare an employee’s salary to the rest of his / her team and colleagues and industry norms. If the compensation system also stores each employee’s performance history, and market benchmarks, the manager and HR can quickly determine whether a counter-offer is justified and what the counteroffer amount should be. In addition, the use of a predictive analytics platform can identify employees whose compensation may leave them at risk for attrition, and provide an opportunity to retain and motivate those employees.

In today’s business world, equal pay for equal work has become such a huge issue for all companies that the use of technology to manage compensation can help keep companies out of the courts and out of negative media stories. Pay equity is a very visible issue with an average of 1,000 pay discrimination charges every year since 1997. Avoiding the fines associated with these charges can easily justify the purchase of such technology.

Benefit #2: Make better strategic compensation decisions

When, where, and how to adjust compensation is a strategic decision. Should you adjust all job roles equally to align with increases in inflationary rates? How should you adjust these values to reward top-performing employees? Will you need special adjustments to improve retention rates of specialized job roles? How will you align variable pay incentives to strategic goals?

Without the use of technology, aligning goals to compensation is incredibly challenging. In addition, HR will constantly be “correcting” employee compensation as employee pay bands become out of alignment with inflation and changes in worker demand. Resources in HR will be heavily consumed as compensation professionals spend their days “chasing market value” of employee pay and investigating an increasing number of employee pay complaints.

With the use of compensation management technology, HR can stay ahead of moving market values, which will reduce the number of internal pay complaints. A reduced number of complaints frees up HR’s time to spend on strategic goals.

Benefit #3: Increase efficiency of compensation management

Yearly pay planning with a manual process is time-intensive. It involves heavy use of spreadsheets, emailing of spreadsheets for review and constantly chasing “fair market value.” It’s very easy for this information to become out of date. Just as technology has increased the efficiency of business processes in many other business functions, the use of compensation management technology can free HR from many of the manual tasks it performs today. Compensation personnel, freed from non-value-added tasks can then spend time on strategic compensation management for improved cultural and goal alignment.

Contact beqom today to speak to one of our compensation experts about technology to help you effectively manage total compensation for your organization.

¹ Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886368714541913