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Tales From the Corporate Frontlines:The Importance of a Competitive Wage and Benefit Package

This article relates to the Compensation and Benefits competency, commonly evaluated in employee satisfaction surveys. It tells the story of a company that needed to attract new employees and discovered how a competitive wage and benefits package was integral to this process. The Compensation and Benefits competency focuses in detail on how your employees feel regarding their compensation and benefits packages. The questions included in this competency will help your organization determine wheth

This article relates to the Compensation and Benefits competency, commonly evaluated in employee satisfaction surveys. It tells the story of a company that needed to attract new employees and discovered how a competitive wage and benefits package was integral to this process. The Compensation and Benefits competency focuses in detail on how your employees feel regarding their compensation and benefits packages. The questions included in this competency will help your organization determine whether your employees feel they are fairly paid for the work they perform when compared to a similar job at a different company. This competency also queries their feelings regarding the adequacy and quality of their benefits package. A fair and attractive compensation package is critical for hiring and retaining quality employees. A high satisfaction level in this competency requires that your compensation structure and benefits package be fair, balanced, and understood by your present employees.

This short story, The Importance of a Competitive Wage and Benefit Package, is part of AlphaMeasure's compilation, Tales From the Corporate Frontlines. It illustrates how one company discovered the importance of evaluating its wage and benefits package and adjusting it to stay competitive and attract new employees.

Anonymous Submission

The Importance of a Competitive Wage and Benefit Package

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business partner and I recently took control of a small company that provides products and services to a very specific and narrow market segment. One of our first tasks was to fill a number of open positions in various departments. Most of the employees were long term, but we learned that the open positions had been filled and vacated several times over the past year.

We wondered why it was so difficult to attract and retain qualified people with the specialized skills we needed. In a discussion with some friends, an executive for a manufacturing firm asked if the compensation and benefits package had been evaluated lately. He told us that if it's been a long time, low salaries and/or benefits might be the obstacle we needed to remove.

In fact, it was. In our first weeks at the company, we launched an employee satisfaction survey that showed us how many employees felt that they were not being paid competitive wages when compared to people doing similar jobs at other companies. Further analysis of the results convinced us that we needed to reevaluate and adjust the salary and benefits structure in order to attract and retain the caliber of skilled employee needed to operate the company profitably.

First, we gathered detailed

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The etymology of "business" refers to the state of being busy, in the context of the individual as well as the community or society. In other words, to be busy is to be doing commercially viable and profitable work.
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information from a number of

Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation.

Many people speak about the Information Age as the advent of the Knowledge Age [citation needed] or knowledge society, the information society, and information technologies, and even though information science and computer
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Internet

The Internet (also known simply as the Net) can be briefly understood as "a network of networks". Specifically, it is the worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and governmental networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.
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databases on salary structures. Then we compared our structure and saw that we were on the lowest fringe of the salary range.

Unable to manage large-scale increases all at once, we developed a plan to phase in the increases over a period of time, and broke each position down into ranges according to expertise and experience.

We offered a hiring bonus, and developed a competitive bonus plan based on performance, staggering the payments over several quarters to encourage employee retention.

Then we examined the fringe benefits portion of the package. We also added an optional long-term disability

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insurance plan, with employees paying a portion of the premium.

Our company achieved the desired results by making these changes. As it turned out, the timing was perfect - long time employees would have moved on if we had taken no action. Next time, we'll be sure to make it a priority to reevaluate and adjust our compensation and benefits package on a regular basis.

This article may be reprinted, provided it is published in its entirety, includes the author bio information, and all links remain active.

Measure. Report. Improve your organization with AlphaMeasure employee surveys.

Josh Greenberg is President of AlphaMeasure, Inc.

AlphaMeasure provides organizations of all sizes a powerful web based method for measuring employee satisfaction, determining employee engagement, and increasing employee retention.

Launch your employee satisfaction survey with AlphaMeasure.

Insurance, in law and economics, is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of potential financial loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a potential loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium and duty of care.
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