How We Serve Clients with Base Pay and Market Benchmarking Services

By Cassandra Faurote

At Total Reward Solutions, we find ways to help clients rise to employee compensation challenges in good times and bad. That’s one reason so many clients consider us their trusted partner for compensation solutions, year after year. Another reason is that we offer a broad range of services, including employee Base Pay projects, Market Benchmarking, Executive Benchmarking, and Incentive Compensation program design. How do we tailor these services for our clients? Read on to learn more about our Base Pay and Market Benchmarking services, and how we deliver tailored solutions to help clients overcome their employee compensation challenges:

Base Pay Projects

A base pay program provides structure and organizes your jobs so you can attract and retain talent. It can also help provide career pathing, help ensure internal and external equity, and help eliminate discrimination in compensation.

Well-crafted base pay programs have many benefits. They can:

• Provide appropriate pay ranges for recruitment
• Promote accurate job descriptions
• Provide a basis for determining the external value of jobs to market
• Provide baselines for reviewing employee performance and rewarding desired behaviors
• Ensure costs are maintained and managed appropriately
• Help reduce turnover through improved employee morale and engagement when pay is not a dissatisfier

Naturally, because your market and your organization are one-of-a-kind, we offer many options and variables. Ultimately, we tailor our Base Pay Project services to match your unique needs.

Recent TRS Base Pay projects, for example, have included the following:

• Helping an organization that has combined several separate entities into one to develop a single overall pay structure
• Helping an 8-year client in the pharma industry completely update their benchmarking and base pay structure
• Helping a client in the medical industry update three job families and their associated pay structures for over 150 jobs

Market Benchmarking

Regardless of your type of pay program, market benchmarking is crucial. Just what is market benchmarking? It’s the process of identifying competitive pay levels for jobs in the external market (external equity). It helps companies establish their job worth hierarchy. Also, market benchmarking typically supplements the job evaluation process, although some organizations use pay systems based solely on market benchmarking.

To be done well, market benchmarking requires good survey data. Therefore, it’s important to verify the reputation and integrity of the data source as well as the data screening methodology. The best kind of market data is third-party published data that is employer-reported and “scrubbed”.

Recent TRS Market Benchmarking projects have included the following:

• Helping an entity that is small in terms of the number of staff members (but larger in the sense that it serves four separate company entities) by determining the compensation value of their complex roles.
• Helping a technology company by benchmarking new values for all positions during a major restructuring and developing a new pay structure to support the new organizational structure.
• Helping a non-profit update their current market values. We also looked at what the market values would be if we blended in all industry data vs. just non-profit data to determine their competitiveness to the overall market.

The Bottom Line:

We’ll share more information soon about how we are serving clients with Executive Benchmarking and Incentive Compensation plans. For now, whether your organization is in “operations as usual” mode, undergoing a major restructuring, combining entities, or you just want to be certain your company is market competitive with employee compensation, we can help. Over the past 15+ years, we have worked with clients in over 30 different industries whose staff levels ranged from 6 to 4,000 employees. Simply put, our track record is as strong as our commitment to client service. We have the depth of experience as both internal and external consultants you want in your trusted compensation partner. Let us help you strengthen your position as an employer of choice who can attract, retain, and motivate staff with market competitive compensation programs.

Ready to learn more and discuss your organization’s specific needs, contact us today at 317.589.8529.

About Total Reward Solutions:

Total Reward Solutions is your trusted partner for compensation services. Led by Cassandra Faurote, professionally certified Compensation and Human Resources expert and author of the book Compensation Sense 101, Total Reward Solutions offers a broad range of compensation and total rewards consulting services to help your organization attract top talent, motivate employees and retain top performers. We can partner with you on a project basis, on retainer, or as your total outsourced solutions provider for compensation services.