✍🏽 What are some of the best ways to determine salaries based on location, industry, experience, etc.? What are your favorite tools or resources to do so?
📣 Rachel Ackerman, Director of People Ops at Barstool Sports:
I’ve used a bunch of different comp benchmarking tools in my career. Finding the best tool for your org varies so doing some due diligence research or RFP’s could be really helpful.
Radford is a big name in the comp benchmarking space and offers a lot of good data that you can slice and dice for your needs (revenue, headcount, geo location, etc.). But keep in mind that you have to pay to play with the data. Not only is it more expensive than other offerings, you also have to submit your orgs data to them annually, which is time consuming depending on your org size and the size of your team. Also keep in mind that the data may be aged when you’re using it since they update periodically and you may return zero results if there isn’t enough data for the role you are researching.
CompAnalyst is another tool I’ve used which was really helpful at some smaller orgs that also allows you to narrow your search down to meet your specific needs. You don’t have to submit data, so that’s a timesaver. They also made it simpler to create hybrid roles and weight the roles to help provide a more accurate band.
I’m currently in the process of researching benchmarking data for my own org and have also been looking at a few other options:
– Pave: offers benchmarking as well as a full suite of compensation tools for managing employee data and compensation cycles
– Pequity: I’ve been following Pequity for a few years now and have been watching them continuously improve and iterate on their tools and offerings. They now offer benchmark data along with a place to house your internal data and plan comp cycles.
These are just a handful of what’s available on the market today.
📣 Heba Root, Chief People Officer at LandDesign:
I’ve used Payfactors and CompAnalyst. Both have a lot of similarities. Both helpful tools that don’t require you to submit information. My experience with Payfactors was that the compensation information they provided was on the low end.
I recently signed up with ERI Compensation erieri.com/salary and they provide more capabilities, data is updated more frequently, along with a compensation management system for a lower cost than Comp Analyst. I’m happy to report my experience in a few months. They were also able to show me which companies from our industry that uses their benchmarking services.
✍🏽 What are some suggestions you can give to an agency wanting to introduce a floating holiday into their benefits package? Also, would you recommend leaving it open for use or creating a ‘menu’ of options where it can be applied?
Context: small, diverse, non-profit org
📣 Rachel Ackerman, Director of People Ops at Barstool Sports:
Love this question! At my last org, we offered two floating holidays to full time employees (and one floating holiday to part timers) in lieu of some of the traditional holidays that some orgs offered (like Indigenous Peoples Day or Veterans Day).
We originally offered them for use for any recognized religious or government holiday on the calendar, but then opened it up to allow employees to use those two days for whatever they wanted to celebrate. So now it could include birthdays, anniversaries, or any other day that the person wanted to use their time for. We felt it made it more inclusive and removed the bureaucracy from the benefit.
The employees needed to use the floating holidays in the calendar year they were offered as they did not roll over to the next year and they were not payable upon termination.
📣 Bethany Reed, Senior HR Business Partner at ARETUM:
Currently, and at a previous organization, our floating holidays were administered the same as how Rachel describes. Leaving it open allows for more flexibility and inclusiveness, so I recommend going that route.
📣 Heba Root, Chief People Officer at LandDesign:
Our floating holiday is open and can use any time during the year to celebrate something that is meaningful to the individual. Can also be used for a mental health day. Does not roll over into the new year.
📣 Alex Clermont, Director of People & Operations at TDC:
Agree with Rachel and Bethany, but in lieu of a menu you can offer examples of how it may be used. I’ve found that employees are sometimes confused by different designations of PTO. I like Rachel’s language of (paraphrasing) “Anything you want to celebrate such as birthdays, anniversaries, or anything else significant to you [insert rollover and expiration language]”
