Simple Tips to Design a Salary Structure for an Employee

Having an absolute salary structure makes it easier to manage your salary expenditure. Not to mention, it can help you retain your current employees, as well as make your recruiting, hiring and promoting efforts more focused and easier to execute.

If you’re considering creating a salary structure, here are a few tips to help you get started.

Benchmark jobs

It should start from here, you need to know the value of each position you offer in your organization. Know the market, know your competition and see what others are paying for similar jobs. There are a variety available salary survey sources that can provide you with data related to salary information for various positions and different industries. You could easily know about benchmark jobs, but this mostly works out for jobs in which duties and responsibilities are generally defined. Once you have identified the benchmark jobs you can compare the market rate according to your budget, you could use statistical procedures to plan it up. Or you can simple get in touch with our HR department.

Consider company’s competitive position

The competitive position of company is its overall salary level compared to market average when compared with the benchmark jobs. This helps you answer if the salary rates for your employees currently above, below or comparable to the rates of your competitors. You should decide what competitive position suits best to your company. Some other things which could be solved by doing this could be if you need to pay at a higher-than- market level so to retain your current employees? Pay according to the market level which attracts better quality candidates or pay according to your budget.

Set-up compensable leverage

Compensable leverage refers to how much more or less salary rate increases in your company, overall, compared to the market rate increase for higher-paid positions in the organizational hierarchy. See this for an example, when employees are promoted to a higher position within the organization, will they receive an increase in salary rate that is similar to, greater than or less than the rate increase provided, on average, in the market. It’s important to determine the desired compensable leverage for your company. This will allow you strike a balance between providing attractive salary increases to employees for promotional opportunities and maintaining an affordable salary practice.

Develop a salary structure

Now that you have the data from the market and your internal and external resources together using this information, you can develop the salary structure for your company. You should also decide if you want to offer a specific salary range – with a minimum and maximum rate – for each position, or if you want to create pay grades in which multiple positions with similar market rates are grouped together within the same range.

Get your current employees up to par

Once you have established a salary structure, possibly with pay grades, then you’ll want to look at your current employees’ salary rates compared to the range to see if anyone is being paid below the minimum rate or above the maximum rate. This involves determining whether the salary rates of any employees should be adjusted to achieve market alignment to have competitive position as created through the structure. If an employee is being paid below the range minimum, it’s recommended that you increase the salary rate, either immediately or incrementally over time, until it hits the minimum rate. If an employee is being paid above the range maximum then it’s recommended that you suspend the person’s next salary increase until market movement warrants an adjustment.

Sometimes these practices are acceptable if the positions in question have a significantly greater or less of strategic importance to an organization than it has to competitors. You’ll want to do a systematic analysis of all of these things mentioned in above steps. This will help you have a good basis for creating your salary structure.

If you would like to get your organization’s salary structure in place feel free to drop us an email at info@gapeseedconsulting.com or you can also call us +91-9599444630 else drop us a line here.

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