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Article | Beyond Data

Make your HR and salary data work better

By Jasbir Singh and Kerem Tuzlaci | July 13, 2022

You can enhance the efficiency of your human resources function while ensuring your HR policies and practices are competitive and compliant.
Pay Equity and Pay Transparency
Beyond Data

As a human resources professional working in today’s volatile and intensely competitive global market, you need to ensure you’re delivering on a robust, competitive and fit-for-purpose Total Rewards strategy. To do so, it’s critical to have a deep understanding of your organization’s business objectives and talent value proposition as well as how those interplay with the needs of an increasingly diverse workforce.

Delivering on Total Rewards requires targeted insights tailored to your business and talent priorities. When done effectively and collaboratively, a customized approach to rewards design and organization structure will deliver solutions that meet your organization’s specific needs and situations.

Enhance the HR team’s efficiency

HR professionals have never had a heavier burden of responsibility to design thoughtful employee value propositions that attract, engage and retain talent. Nowadays, this means more than just having the right compensation and benefit programs. It’s also ensuring wellbeing and working guidelines connect with your employees to secure a more engaged and productive workforce. It’s setting yourself apart as the current war for talent continues.

How can HR address such a spectrum of human capital matters and stay one step ahead as these matters continue evolving?

Empower your HR team to focus on strategy and guide leaders toward the right business and talent decisions and actions. Ask the right questions, then partner with experienced WTW HR data professionals and consultants to conduct analytics that inform and drive a custom, comprehensive roadmap for a Total Rewards strategy that resonates with your workforce. Following are just a few examples of how companies are managing through change.

Focus on rewards for hot jobs

As the world of work continues changing – particularly influenced by digital transformation – compensation and HR professionals are hard pressed to respond to market competition that has built around certain jobs. But identifying and subsequently paying for hot jobs can be a tricky process.

Talent demand outpacing supply, rapid growth in the number of jobs or incumbents and high turnover rates may all be indicative of a “hot job,” but finding a reliable, skills-based view of traditional reward and talent management applications is a challenge. Additionally, job descriptions seem to be constantly updated as digitalization continues shifting how, where and when we do work. This is creating both challenges and opportunities for skills taxonomies, identifying peers and determining proper benchmark matches.

A more bespoke analysis of job descriptions aligns market data with a view toward your organization’s growth objectives and associated work and talent needs. This may involve blending benchmark survey data from traditional and non-traditional peers as well as selecting matches based on title, scope of responsibility and reporting level.

Getting these details right provides critical advantages for securing talent in hot jobs like data science, supply chain, engineering and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Ensure pay equity and pay transparency

Regulators are increasingly introducing pay transparency requirements in an effort to reduce the gender pay gap. Additionally, employees, customers, investors and other key stakeholders are increasing their pressure on organizations to ensure pay is fair and effectively communicated. This has made pay equity and pay transparency a key agenda item for compensation and HR professionals.

Publishing your salary ranges could open questions of inequity, but a robust pay equity analysis will reveal whether pay is administered fairly within your compensation framework. It also is important to know if salaries for a particular demographic group are below or low in the range you intend to use for external job postings.

To get your compensation structures into shape, you need to understand:

  • Job level: How the work gets done
  • Job discipline: The type of work that gets done
  • Competitive market data: How much the external market is willing to offer

By organizing jobs via a job leveling framework and job architecture, you will get insights into the job groupings needed to create market-relevant and internally equitable pay levels. Diving deeply into your pay data helps ensure compliance with regulatory practices, pay-for-performance alignments and proper disclosures.

And remember: All of this must be accomplished while managing the competitiveness of salary programs that drive organizational and business goals. Ensuring market-competitive pay programs is key for ensuring good governance – and required to support fairer pay equity outcomes and a better overall employee experience.

Evaluate organization alignment and effectiveness

Thinking about your organization’s alignment helps shape discussions around spans of control, how works gets done and overall governance around leadership and management structures. And taking a nuanced approach to understand key factors reveals more sides to the story.

A customized analysis may confirm that your organization is top heavy – and lighter at the professional and support levels. If so, this understanding lends itself to a more holistic review of overall workforce strategy and effectiveness, including the proper spans of control and targeted rewards that encourage, enable and empower individuals and drive organizational performance.

A tailored approach sets your organization apart

Keeping a pulse on a constantly evolving market and understanding how trends are affecting your organization’s ability to remain an employer of choice is no easy feat in our current environment. But robust and customized data analytics delivers market-specific insights to inform and empower your decisions.

A bespoke combination of comprehensive data, technology and human intelligence from experienced professionals will provide you with a critical differentiator as you define the best way to maximize the return on your Total Rewards investment and get the best out of your workforce.

Figure 1. WTW solutions that help you get the most from your salary data
Authors

Managing Director, Rewards Data Intelligence

Rewards Data Intelligence Leader, Saudi Arabia

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