Compensation consulting can help your organization take an approach to compensation that keeps your employees satisfied, increases retention rates, and promotes sustainable organizational growth. At Astron Solutions, we believe taking a total rewards approach to compensation is the most viable method of achieving these goals. Here’s a quick overview of total rewards and the compensation consulting services our firm offers.
- Our Approach to Compensation Consulting: Total Rewards
- What are the Benefits and Challenges of a Total Rewards Model?
- Total Rewards Compensation Consulting Services by Astron Solutions
Our Approach to Compensation Consulting: Total Rewards
Total rewards compensation is the guiding philosophy that Astron Solutions and other top firms use in their compensation consulting services. Let’s dig into what the total rewards compensation model is.
Total Rewards Compensation: An Overview
Total rewards compensation involves taking a comprehensive and holistic approach to employee compensation. In other words, a total rewards approach encourages you to think beyond the numbers on an employee’s paycheck!
There are two types of compensation in a total rewards system:
1. Direct Forms of Compensation
This includes the financial ways you compensate employees, like salary, incentive pay, base pay, commissions, allowances, bonuses, overtime pay, and equity benefits.
2. Indirect Forms of Compensation
Indirect compensation essentially refers to all the other non-financial ways (tangible and intangible) your organization gives back to its employees. There are a number of compensation methods that can be characterized as indirect compensation, including:
- Benefits. Benefits like health insurance, retirement plans, and PTO fall under this category. Benefits are a method of indirect compensation that is easy to quantify.
- Flexibility. This includes a healthy work-life balance and the level of flexibility you offer around scheduling, PTO usage, and the format of your workplace (in-person, hybrid, or remote).
- Performance Recognition. Recognition includes all the ways you award exemplary employee behavior, including peer and team recognition. Ample performance recognition increases both employee morale and long-term peak performance.
- Career Development Opportunities. Career development opportunities matter to employees. Providing these opportunities empowers your employees to not only grow within their roles but also within your organization as a whole. When you display a clear and actionable path that employees can take to advance their careers, it shows them that you value their involvement in your business.
- Internal Culture. Believe it or not, your internal culture is also considered a form of indirect compensation. Employees want to work within a positive, uplifting, diverse, and engaging community of employees. Fine-tuning your performance management process and overall management style, encouraging employees to get to know their coworkers, and even providing surprise catered lunches every now and then can all help create an internal culture that is attractive to job candidates and current employees.
- Other. There are other forms of indirect compensation as well, including perks (like personal parking spaces or company phones), employee health and wellness programs, and more.
The main purpose of a total rewards compensation strategy is to help organizations strike the perfect balance between these categories in regards to their budget, culture, mission, and goals. By thinking about direct and indirect forms of compensation strategically, your organization can develop more effective compensation plans that support your long-term engagement goals while also making the most of your available resources.
What Are the Benefits and Challenges of a Total Rewards Model?
If your organization is interested in moving toward a total rewards model for your employee compensation strategy, it’s important to weigh the benefits and challenges of doing so. After all, shifting toward a total rewards compensation model will require time and likely some outside advice. Let’s explore the benefits and challenges.
Benefits of a Total Rewards Model
A generous salary isn’t always enough for employees to stick with an organization in the long run. Company culture and benefits received are increasingly important for making your employees happy and motivated. With a total rewards approach to compensation, your organization can:
- Stand out amongst competitors when attracting new employees
- Increase employee engagement and retention
- Use your compensation plan as a persuasive recruitment tool
- Display tangible benefits to current and prospective employees
- Improve employee performance and productivity
A compensation consulting firm that specializes in the total rewards approach (like Astron Solutions) can help you develop a strategy perfectly tailored to your unique organization.
Challenges of a Total Rewards Model
Creating a comprehensive compensation strategy that truly meets the unique needs of your employees is rarely simple or straightforward. The two main challenges that can crop up are:
- Figuring out the right compensation salary
- Aligning indirect components with employee needs
Many organizations turn to compensation (or salary) surveys to help guide their salary decisions. Astron Solutions can help your own organization with our custom Total Compensation Surveys.
Designing the indirect components of your total rewards plan requires anticipating your employees’ wants and needs and balancing those wants and needs with your organization’s interests. Working with compensation consultants with total rewards expertise will be your best bet for navigating this tricky balance.
Total Rewards Compensation Consulting Services by Astron Solutions
Compensation consultants can be invaluable partners, especially when it comes to complex undertakings like updating (or creating) your approach to total rewards. Understanding your own needs and goals will be key when searching for the right type of compensation consulting your organization needs. At Astron Solutions, we offer these total rewards compensation consulting services:
Base Compensation
Employee Communication
Questions are inevitable when you roll out or modify an HR program. We design communication tools customized for your various audiences, using the formats and channels they prefer.
Policy Development
We develop the policies and procedures necessary to keep your compensation programs running effectively and equitably. We can create a compensation policy document that outlines the program basics and details the roles and responsibilities of both HR and line management.
Exempt or Non-Exempt?
Avoid misclassifying employees as exempt or non-exempt. Contact us for our non-legal opinion when you’re not sure about how to classify particular employees. We can also assist with determining an employee’s regular rate of pay for overtime purposes.
External Market Pricing – Individual Positions
Are you losing out on high-quality talent for specific roles because your compensation program isn’t competitive enough? Are your costs excessive because your compensation program is too competitive?
We’ll help you update your compensation so you can attract and retain the right people for the right roles.
External Market Pricing – Large-Scale Projects
If your organization’s base pay system is out of touch with the market, you could be hemorrhaging money, talent, or both. If you have no formal pay structure, there may be internal inequities. Whatever your situation, we’ll help you get the most value from a limited compensation budget.
Internal Pay Design
We work with you to develop a job evaluation plan that addresses the relative value of jobs within your organization.
We also develop a job description system that 1) saves you and your managers time, and 2) reduces the expense of providing new job documentation.
Custom Surveys
Our salary and benefits surveys will give valuable information about total rewards for critical positions in your industry/region.
Give us a list of potential participants and details about the information you desire, and we will create a custom survey that meets your needs. We provide you with the data you need while meeting all legal antitrust requirements.
Annual Retainers
We are available on an annual retainer basis for larger-scale HR and compensation efforts.
Specialized Compensation
Our powerful specialized compensation programs help motivate your employees to do their best work. And we help you better link pay to performance.
Compensation Strategy Design
We ensure that your compensation strategy supports your overall organizational strategy, that you spend your compensation dollars effectively, and that all of your compensation and benefits decisions are sound.
Incentive/Variable Programs
We help you measure and recognize performance more effectively by creating incentive plans and other variable compensation programs. The benefits of these programs include:
- Improved teamwork
- Employee focus on common goals and a sense of personal ownership in your organization
- Increased employee engagement
- Suppression of entitlement mentality
- Positive impact on the bottom line
Ready to simplify your incentive program? Automate incentive compensation with our Flare® software’s Incentive/Sales Commission Tracker module.
Sales Compensation
With the right sales compensation program, you’ll raise revenues and profitability, boost morale, and minimize recordkeeping.
To design your sales compensation plan, our first step is working with you to determine organizational sales priorities. Then we meet with your sales force to get their take on the current pay situation and to identify what they’d like in a sales compensation plan.
The result? A compensation plan that will motivate your sales force like never before.
Take control of your sales compensation strategy and check out our Flare® software’s Incentive/Sales Commission Tracker module.
Performance Management
We help you create a performance management system that is ideal for your organization. We create as many variations of your system as needed — one approach for all employees or different approaches for different organizational levels or lengths of tenure.
If you’re ready to improve how your organization handles performance management, check out our Flare® software’s Performance Management module.
Career Progression Programs
We help you build clearly mapped career paths that:
- Strengthen employees’ engagement and give them a sense of direction.
- Reduce turnover, saving you money on recruitment and onboarding.
- Strengthen your leadership pipeline.
- Facilitate recruitment from within, reducing “time to fill” vacancies and dependence on agencies.
- Provide a framework for recruitment and promotional planning.
- Improve communication with employees on professional development.
- Help you identify training needs and opportunities.
If you want to automate and simplify career pathing, check out our Flare® software’s Staff Advancement Monitor™.
Executive Compensation
Executive compensation is a unique challenge that is critical to getting right. Use Astron’s expert, independent guidance to avoid legal pitfalls and achieve a successful result in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
Performance Management Schedule
We help you navigate through the process of switching from an anniversary date performance review system to a common review date system. This includes training your managers and employees to ensure successful implementation.
Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or to seek a bit of HR advice. We’re always happy to offer more detail on how we can help your organization with its specific needs.
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