As a previous Corporate Recruiter for an international technology company, this issue of competitive pay systems was a daily struggle for both salaried and hourly employees. I personally prefer market competitiveness because candidates are going to reference salaries they can find online externally versus internally published salaries.
The most important workplace value for full-time employees is fair pay, according to a recent survey from Clutch, a B2B ratings and reviews firm. More than half of employees (55%) ranked “compensates me fairly” as the first- or second-most important workplace attribute. While every generation ranked fair pay as the most important attribute, generations differed in their level of emphasis. Baby boomers value whether their company compensates them fairly the most (42%), ahead of Generation X (32%), and millennials (29%)
When employees don’t feel valued at their workplace satisfaction wise, and compensation wise, it could lead to bigger problems. Psalm 55:22 (ESV) tells us to, “Cast your burden upon the Lord and he will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken”. Working with this company was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but this scripture always reminded me to express my burdens to God and pray that the work will sustain me or guide me in the right direction.
We conceptualize corporate social performance as a form of strategic differentiation and predict that the positive link between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance is strongest when a firm competes in an environment that is not conducive to corporate social performance (Gras & Krause, 2020).
In the absence of compensation survey data, compensation professionals would have to use guesswork to try to build market-competitive compensation systems, and making too many wrong guesses could lead to noncompetitive compensation systems that undermine competitive advantage (Martocchio, 2014).
Companies can easily develop compensation that is both internally consistent and market competitive by running a report of the current salaries and researching salaries of competitors. Some challenges to accomplishing this goal is that some people like my former director, don’t want to acknowledge that our site wasn’t the most competitive, and he wasn’t doing anything to fix the issue. So, when you have someone who’s running from leveling the pay scale across the company, it makes it hard to even start on the project.
References:
Bible gateway passage: Psalm 55:22, Proverbs 16:3, 1 Peter 5:7 – New American Standard Bible. Bible Gateway. (n.d.).
Employees Value Fair Pay Most in Employers but Also Emphasize Fair Treatment and Ethical Standards: Competitive pay and fair treatment are key to attracting, engaging, and retaining quality staff, according to a new survey of 540 full-time employees. (2018, Dec 06). PR Newswire
Gras, D., & Krause, R. (2020). When does it pay to stand out as stand-up? competitive contingencies in the corporate social performance–corporate financial performance relationship. Strategic Organization, 18(3), 448-471.
Martocchio, J. J. (2014). Strategic compensation: A human resource management approach with MyLab (10th ed.). Pearson Education Limited.
