Building a Compensation Plan: An Exercise in Collaboration

Building a compensation plan from scratch can be intimidating if you don’t know where to start. In fact,  even if you do know where to start, the process can be pretty daunting.

At PayScale, we’ve been talking with companies for years, helping them develop their compensation strategies, build their pay ranges, and train their managers to better communicate compensation across the organization. We have a pretty good idea of what it can take for companies to do that.

At the 2017 Total Rewards Conference, one company’s total rewards leader was talking about the process they undertook to develop and roll out their compensation plan across their enterprise organization. She shared that their total rewards team socialized their plan internally for a full year before finalizing the plan and rolling it out. A year! Not every organization will take that long; it will absolutely depend on the size of the organization, the established communication tracks within the organization, and how much “say so” people have across the levels and functions of the organization.

The story was a good reminder of the value of socializing ideas, of sharing them with peers and friends to gauge reaction, course correct, and then share again. I have long been a believer that the best ideas are greater than the sum of the individual parts, and that collaborative creative efforts make more meaningful results than ideas generated in a vacuum.

The Definitive Guide to Creating a Comp Plan

So when it came time to identify, clarify, and share the process for building a compensation plan, we turned to our friends at BambooHR to build ideas that were greater than the sum of our individual knowledge. Together we collaborated on the eBook, The Definitive Guide to Creating a Comp Plan. It blends BambooHR’s deep knowledge on how to become a high-performing organization, rooted in culture and values, with PayScale’s deep knowledge on linking compensation with culture and business results.

We’re both passionate about helping organizations and individuals thrive by enabling better relationships between the two. This eBook will help you create up-to-date compensation plans that support your business objectives and ensure your long-term success. It will help you retain, motivate, engage, and attract top talent by aligning compensation to your organization culture and business results. We invite you to see the product of our collective ideas.

Tell Us What You Think

What’s your biggest compensation planning challenge? We want to hear from you. Tell us your story in the comments.