Determining the appropriate salary level is never as simple as we would like. The reason is that despite all the diligent work that goes into salary surveys, the resulting pay data for a given job is always a broad range. So deciding what precisely to pay an individual takes good judgment that comes with experience.
The challenge in the interpretation of salary survey data is that it requires a combination of good analytics and common sense. The reality is that often a lot of work is required in order to analyze market pay and determine your pay point and pay range. This often involves analyzing several surveys and/or survey reports and considering other factors such as company strategy, payroll budget, and internal equity before landing on an appropriate salary. As Compensation and HR professionals we have to be able to say, here is the data, here is how it is analyzed, and here are the judgments we made as experienced professionals.
The WageWatch PeerMark ™ report allows our survey participants to build their own competitive sets, select from a list of 300+ job titles, and quickly generate a market variance report for the participant’s local market. For the more demanding and complex data needs, a WageWatch Consultant can build your custom reports for you that will meet your specific needs. We will work with you to define your report specifications, target market areas, competitive set and any other specifications.
WageWatch compensation consultants are your data partners on whom you can rely on to get the most comparable data from your market, with the expertise to know how and what data to extract from each market or sub-market in order to provide you with survey report(s) containing the best competitive results. Custom reports solve many compensation problems. For example you may run into a market area that is heavy with one or two competitors not allowing you to report any data or perhaps the survey market does not contain enough competitors of a similar size and scope that fits your organizational needs. This is where our compensation consultants can assist having the experience needed to work around some of these challenges and capture your specific needs such as peer groups, industry focus or geographic cut. This additional data analysis can enhance the overall story that you will have to present back to your executive team. We can build multi-market competitive sets across multiple locations. These many be niche markets in highly competitive hyper segments or broad multi-city or state benchmarks for management companies entering new markets. Custom reports can also be powerful resources for developing union defense strategies, management and executive job pricing, pricing jobs in rural markets with few competitors, segmenting markets into micro markets, and blending markets into macro markets.
WageWatch compensation consultants can also help you with your analysis of the market data compared to your current salary ranges and incumbent salaries to update your current structure or in creating a whole new structure. Perhaps you are looking at moving more toward performance-based pay. We are prepared and experienced to be able to help you with a variety of compensation needs, for example, analyzing the compensation impact of organizational changes with an internal equity and external competitiveness analysis. Our analysis is full service. In addition to the compensation review, our consultants can help with FLSA classifications, hybrid jobs, writing job descriptions, mapping new organization charts, and crafting employee communications.
As the economy continues to improve, we expect to see more pressure put on salary budgets and merit increases in order to meet rising demand for talent. Our consultants can work with you to get the balance right on budgeted wage increases and their relationship with structure adjustments. When wage increases and adjustments are made, often other potential concerns are uncovered such as wage compression and paying out of range. WageWatch consultants are here to offer comprehensive guidance on your structure maintenance and adjustment requirements.
WageWatch salary surveys provide data tools and report statistics for analysts of all experience levels. Please contact WageWatch if you need assistance with interpretation the statistics reported, help building custom reports, or have a need for our wide range of consulting services. For more information on our services and surveys please call WageWatch at 888-330-9243 or contact us online.