For compensation professionals, market pricing sits at the core of many responsibilities and outcomes
Establishing and managing the salary structure, designing short-term incentive plans, conducting internal equity analyses, and distributing merit increases during the performance management process all rely, to some extent, on accurate market pricing, otherwise known as salary benchmarking. Compensation management is important because it affects so many other functions. Your market pricing activities must be thoughtful, organized, repeatable, accurate, and, above all, aligned with and reflective of your labour market (i.e., who you compete with for talent, not necessarily revenue).
What is the best way to ensure this happens? Start by developing a salary benchmarking methodology.
Why is salary benchmarking important?
Salary benchmarking involves analyzing salary surveys to find positions that align with the skills, responsibilities, and qualifications of jobs within your organization. This process helps determine the market value of those roles. The resulting data indicates the external worth of the job, which you can then modify to account for its internal value.
The result is usually a market reference point that enables you to group similar positions into a broader framework, such as a conventional salary structure or pay ranges.
Creating a structured approach for carrying out market pricing activities within your organization ensures that anyone involved in market pricing a position follows established methods for gathering, weighing, and integrating data consistently. An essential component of establishing a salary benchmarking methodology is gaining a comprehensive understanding of pertinent labor market data, which informs the selection and inclusion of appropriate compensation surveys.
The elements of a salary benchmark methodology
Although the level of detail in a salary benchmark methodology may vary, the following elements, at a minimum, will ensure market pricing consistency.
Compensation philosophy
A compensation philosophy is your starting point. If you don't have one — STOP! Do not attempt to create a salary benchmark methodology without understanding your organization's goals for positioning pay among your labour market competitors.
A compensation philosophy statement can be something as simple as "ABC, Inc. targets pay at the median." Or, very often today, the philosophy will include
- pay structure details, such as how base pay is positioned versus variable pay
- a statement regarding the labour market competitors
- the role that pay-for-performance plays
In any case, you must understand your company's target pay positioning in the labour market to develop a benchmark methodology. If that's not in place, that's your first task — get to work!
Surveys
With the considerable budget you have at your disposal, it's easy to purchase loads of salary surveys, right? If that’s your situation, cheers to you!
However, most of us have a limited budget and need to be strategic when selecting which salary surveys to purchase. Be sure to choose reputable surveys that reflect your labour market competitors and contain jobs that match a significant number of the positions within your organization. Typically, you should plan to use and analyze data from multiple compensation data sources.
Scope cuts and data elements
Developing a salary benchmarking methodology includes understanding how your company recruits talent and how that recruitment strategy may differ by employee segment.
In most organizations, there is a segment of jobs where the talent/candidates may come from various background industries, meaning it's not essential that candidates have experience in your industry. For example, a Human Resource job or an Administrative Support role can typically be filled by a professional who demonstrates the skills you are looking for regardless of prior industry experience. They can learn the nuances of your industry; what’s important is their knowledge of HR.
However, other roles require specific industry experience or even experience working in organizations of a particular revenue size or type, such as a not-for-profit organization. The survey scope cuts that you choose to use should align with the kind of experience you require for each role.
Beyond the data scope cuts, you'll want to document the data elements you will use from each survey. There's nothing more frustrating than collecting data from a survey and realizing as you are beginning to load it into your market pricing tool — whether that's a market pricing tool or a spreadsheet — that you're missing data elements you need.
Use your compensation philosophy as a starting point to identify the data elements you will need to analyze your salary range competitiveness each year. Most organizations will collect some variety of base pay, short-term incentives, long-term incentives, total cash compensation, and total direct compensation at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, although the names of these elements in each survey may vary. You may need to use additional details to complete your salary benchmarking. In each survey, use your salary benchmark methodology to document which data elements to pull for each data cut. By doing so, you will have a clear salary survey element checklist to follow when you are collecting data to update your market pricing, which will improve efficiency, consistency, and accuracy.
Alignment to employee segments
Once you have identified the scope cuts, you now need to determine and document how to align the data to the various employee segments. Typically, it's appropriate to take broad employee groups or departments (e.g., Finance), consider the experience desired, and translate that into the appropriate data scope. However, in some cases, it may be necessary to think in terms of jobs. A sample table outlining the data cuts for jobs in a healthcare organization is provided below.
Developing composites
Typical guidance has always been to collect three survey data points for every job you are market pricing. (Yes, that means you will need to purchase three separate salary surveys, at least to benchmark your jobs.) As you probably know, that can be difficult to achieve. With multiple data points for every benchmark job, you are faced with the challenge of combining those data points. Again, you can achieve consistency and efficiency by establishing a set of market pricing guidelines for blending data in your salary benchmark methodology.
Lead, lag, lead/lag:
Lead: age your data a full year ahead, which means that as other companies are adjusting employees' pay, you have already accounted for that adjustment in your market data.
Lag: only age the salary data to the start of your upcoming performance year.
Lead/lag: age the salary data to the mid-point of your coming performance year.
Aging factors
All surveys have different effective dates. To use the survey data accurately, you need to apply an aging factor, which is a multiplier consisting of some portion of the coming year's predicted pay increase budget, such as those found in Mercer's Canada and US Compensation Planning Surveys.
Which aging factor you use will depend on whether you wish to lead, lag, or lead/lag versus the external market.
Weighting, premiums, and discounts
You can apply different weights to the individual data elements to make each element important in the resulting survey data composite. For example, data from a particular survey may be discounted due to the perceived lower relevance of the participants to the role being market priced. Conversely, a premium may be applied to data to reflect the additional roles and responsibilities of a job family in your organization. Weights can be applied to data for a variety of reasons, and it can become confusing to try to keep the reasoning straight. Documenting your methods for market pricing and capturing the weighting in your market pricing tool makes analysis and auditing repeatable and efficient.
Combining data
The simplest method for developing composites is to average the adjusted market data1 for each pay element. Even in those cases, you will need to determine how to address data anomalies, such as zeros.
Get the input you need
To make sure your salary benchmarking methodology supports your company’s critical talent objectives, the key to success is understanding your various labour market competitors and talent strategy thoroughly.
You can engage either the HR professionals that represent the multiple employee segments within your organization or the department/business leaders themselves.
Gather these resources and begin by educating them on what it is you are developing — give them a little “Compensation 101.” This leads to a discussion of how critical their input is to salary benchmark methodology. Engaging the department/business leaders in the development process produces a more accurate methodology, leading to more precise market pricing, and, therefore, more competitive employee compensation. It also increases awareness among members of the organization, which can be critical in communicating compensation decisions to the broader workforce.
Looking for an expert?
In some cases, developing a salary benchmark methodology for your organization may be a job that benefits from some third-party advice or review. In that case, don't hesitate to engage a consultant, such as Mercer or another reputable consulting firm. Developing a comprehensive salary benchmark methodology is an important step that will provide significant improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and consistency. Trust us, the time spent is minimal compared to the gains you will realize.
Looking to talk to an expert? Give us a call at 855-286-5302 or email surveys@mercer.com.
For more information on developing a benchmark methodology or similar topics, look for other articles in our Compensation 101 series.
1 By "adjusted market data," we mean the data after any premiums/discount weightings are applied.