Introduction
Compensations and benefits are integral aspects and mandates of an organization’s HRM with a direct and indirect impact on the success and growth of organizations. Compensations include the salaries, while the benefits may involve monetary and nonmonetary advantages and benefits. The packages include fixed and variable payments; equity pays, among other benefits such as medical insurances. Organizations must offer their workforce competitive compensations and benefits packages to increase and maintain their motivation, morale, participation, and engagement for maximum job satisfaction, increased productivity, and overall sales and increased profits for the organization (Biswas, 2014). A significant challenge among many organizations is to develop competitive packages that would place their market-pay systems competitive and attract the right and most qualified employees. Hence, the assignment focuses on the ultimate activities that lead to competitive market pay systems, including the most effective job analysis process, activities to engage in for more competitive pay systems, and understanding the difference between pay level and pay mix policies. With this discussion, the assignment describes the main activity of constructing a productive and competitive pay structure among companies.
Job Analysis Process
The development of effective and competitive compensation, benefits, and pay systems in an organization requires understanding the jobs in the organization, including their duties and requirements. This process of identifying and determining the jobs, duties, and requirements forms the job analysis process. Processes involve the utilization of a series of actions and steps taken to achieve a particular objective, which in this case; the job analysis process involves five main steps. They include determining the most appropriate job analysis program, selecting and training the task force or analysts, creating directive or orienting the analysts on the process, conducting the actual study, and finally summarizing the findings, results, and use them to write job descriptions for the organization. In determining the job analysis program, organizations can utilize already established systems or can decide to develop another system and program that would produce the specific requirements and job duties as required by the organization (Daly, 2015). Using the already established programs is easy as the process follows the already established steps, however, developing a new system would require job analysis information that can be acquired from various stakeholders internally and externally by the use of questionnaires, conducting interviews observation, and instigating employee participation to collect their views and opinions.
Conducting the analysis requires a team that includes analysts who are mostly representatives of various departments. They are required to learn the program and procedures to follow for effective outcomes, which involves the orientation and assessment of the collected information. Reviewing the information helps the analysts best understand the job criteria and influencing factors, which translates in the next step of conducting the study. Finally, summarizing the results helps in identifying the aspects that meet the job criteria (Daly, 2015). The most effective and competitive outcome should describe the responsibilities, experiences, and expectations associated with the job.
Compensation Profession activities
Creating market-competitive pay systems is a great challenge for many organizations due to inadequate and asymmetries of information that hinder the creation of market competitive pay systems. Addressing this challenge requires addressing the issue strategically and comprehensively to attract qualified applicants and maintain the existing premier talent. It can involve using four main activities, including conducting a strategic analysis of the organization’s internal and external factors such as financial health and performance, competitor information, and core competencies, among others (Biswas, 2014). It helps them identify the company’s competencies and capacities in offering competitive pay systems.
Secondly, conducting surveys on the competitor compensation systems supplements the strategic analysis to eliminate biases and develop realistic, consistent, and competitive pay systems depending on the capacities. Companies should also consider integrating the internal job structures with the pay rates in the industry and markets to help them identify the organization’s internal and external valuation of the job. The integration can easily be established through the regression analysis that estimates the relationships of variables of interest (Biswas, 2014). The analysis will help the companies understand how the external market pay rates influence internal job structures and valuations, hence better and informed decisions. Finally, it is essential to determine effective compensation policies that align and are compatible with the organization’s competitive strategies.
Pay Policies and Pay Mix Policies
Creating market competitive compensation and pay systems requires adequate knowledge on compensation policies such as pay level policies and pay mix policies. The pay levels and pay mix are essential design features of a productive and effective compensation program. Pay levels describe the ‘how much’ and reflect the industry practices while pay mix policies focus on the proportion acquired from the incentive pay and the base pay and are designed to meet an organization’s marketing strategy (Daly, 2015). Pay level policies vary depending on the job description; hence, the differences in the abilities, knowledge, and skills result in different salaries. Pay level policies include three policies organizations can choose from, including market watch, lag, and lead policies. Pay levels in market watch fall along the market pay line hence compensations similar to those of competitors, in market lag, they are paid below the market line and less compared to competitors, and finally, in-market lead, the exact opposite of the market lag, above the market pay line and higher than the competitors are (Daly, 2015). On the other hand, the combination of salaries and employee benefits and the proportion expressed as a percentage shape the pay mix policies; they determine not only the organization’s marketing strategy but also its profitability objectives.
Constructing a Pay Structure
Creating a competitive pay, compensation system, and the program involves constructing the pay structure itself. This activity is more of a process and not an event as it involves five main steps, namely determining pay structures to incorporate, which could be one or more depending on factors such as the rates, core competencies, findings, job analysis process, and the job structure. Companies can compare and decide on whether to offer exempt and nonexempt pay structures, pay structures based on geography, and job families. Secondly, companies must determine the most appropriate market pay line in conformity with the pay level policies (Biswas, 2014). The information on the competitor’s compensation systems offers high guidance on the market pay line to settle and that, which offers competitive market rates. The next steps involve defining the pay grades depending on the job groups and calculating pay ranges for each grade these two steps helps determine the wider and limited pays, hence more natural hierarchy development. Finally, the professionals must evaluate the results on the job values both from the internal and external factors. This helps eliminate any inconsistencies and biases that may deprive the company of creating and attaining a competitive market advantage.
Conclusion
Compensation systems act as one of the most powerful tools for organizations to shape their employees’ behavior and utterly influence the productivity and performance rates of the organization. In that case, effective and competitive compensations and benefits systems create a willingness for the most qualified potential employees to join an organization and perform job tasks with high levels of expertise, engagement, performance, and quality. Hence, organizations need to invest in effective job analysis processes that result in the most productive job descriptions hence effective and compatible pay systems.
References
Biswas, B. D. (2014). Employee Benefits Design and Compensation (Collection). Press Delivers Collection.
Daly, J. (2015). Human Resource Management in the Public Sector: Policies and Practices. New York: Routledge.
