To Pay or Not to Pay, is that the question?

  1. Every day we encounter questions regarding what benefits and allowances to pay in the new working world. In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, getting the salary and benefits package right means the difference between filling those vacancies, retaining staff, or losing them to competitors.

Organisations are trying to decide, do they go back to the office, do they work remotely, or do they have a hybrid of the two? What works for them as an organisation and what works for their employees?

Do you pay London weighting as staff are not in the office, or not all the time? If no London weighting, do you pay travel and other expenses for their infrequent visits to the office or give a home working allowance? What other benefits will no longer be available or necessary, and what do you offer instead?

Recruitment can be a long and costly process, whether done internally or using an external agency with high fees. Candidates are now applying for multiple roles and then, once they get to final stages, can compare salaries and packages offered that influences their decision making.

The competition for talent remains with the effect of Brexit still felt as well as the changes of the impact from the pandemic where individuals now have different requirements from their roles. What employee wellbeing options are in their packages? Can they work remotely or hybrid?

Employers need to have a well-rounded offering, potentially where the employees can choose which benefits work for them rather than them being set. To review your base salaries and benefits, you need a tool or service that will provide benchmarking data. There are many tools out in the market, but how old is the data?LIVE benchmarking is a valuable tool for employers. Providing evidence for the HR department to inform salary increases, pay progression, pay frameworks, assist with successful recruitment processes, access data for new locations, and inform on the competitiveness of their offering.

So…What is the value of conducting a salary benchmarking project and how is it different from getting data from a Salary Survey?

If you take data from a salary survey, yes, you can multiply against the ONS CPI rate, but that will not consider recent influences in the market. Survey data that is simply calculated from the date of the original data to now can be very misleading. Advertising roles at the wrong salary level can have a negative impact on your #employerbranding and will more than likely result in less candidates and a prolonged length of time to #recruit.

SME Publications/ SME XPO 2024

Vanessa Moreton, our Head of Analytics, talked about “the importance of having data that is current, reflective of the actual role in your organisation and knowing what is happening in the market.” The data we provide our clients with, allows them to make informed decisions about the salary reward strategy.

Turning Point HR Solutions offer two main Benchmarking services:

1. Bespoke Projects – Using role content, not just job title. We contact relevant comparators, consider your turnover, FTE, sector, location and much more. The data provided, allows you to make informed decisions about your pay & reward strategy.

2. Orbit Pro Benchmarking Software – Providing SMEs to Global Enterprises on demand access to the most comprehensively validated salary database in Europe. Enabling you to search over 16,000,000 individual data points, by region, sector, seniority, company turnover and specialisation.

Both options provide LIVE benchmarking, using role content not title, and cater for UK & Global requirements. Our reports include 10-90th percentiles, quartiles, and narrative on the findings. Whether one role or hundreds, Turning Point HR have a solution that works. To Find out how we can assist visit www.turningpointhr.com/contacts, email us on [email protected] or call (0) 203 475 2270

Turning Point HR Solutions also produce sector reports on a quarterly basis and have just completed our UK Remuneration overview report for Q1 2022. This is a free product, available now. We have a full market trends version and a housing sector specific option also. If you would like to sign up to receive these insightful reports visit: https://www.turningpointhr.com/renumeration-report-request/

Turning Point HR Solutions Ltd are a UK based international reward consultancy, with offices in the UK, Dubai, Lisbon and Manila. Collectively we provide strategic International HR, and Compensation and Benefits Consultancy advice for private and public sector companies. We also provide a wide range of inhouse developed software to help our clients with their reward strategies including Organisational charting, job evaluation, gender and equal pay audits and salary benchmarking.

Peter Brauer is the Chief Executive Officer of Turning Point HR Solutions and has over 20 years of HR consultancy experience, with a broad focus of specialisation. His expertise includes; design and delivery of cross-organisational pay and grading solutions; pay modelling design to assess P&L impact linked to remuneration; benchmarking; performance management; appraisal systems; complete design and delivery of job evaluation process; culture definition; market pay assessments; equal pay audits; executive remuneration, union negotiation and designing and delivering training solutions.

Visit https://www.turningpointhr.com/
Connect Peter Brauer
Follow @TurningPointHR

SME Publications/ SME XPO 2024