Incentivize Your Team With Employee Compensation Plans

What Is Employee Compensation?

The most common objective of any employee compensation plan is to be internally equitable and externally competitive. Ed believes it is essential to not only design an employee compensation system that meets these objectives but also supports the business strategy and creates a link between work and rewards—we call this Employee Alignment.

Employee compensation systems must be monitored regularly. Be proactive in auditing your system’s effectiveness! Ed Krow can help you prevent the serious consequences that arise from employee compensation systems that are not aligned with organizational objectives.

Incentive compensation plans can be designed for any individual or combination of individuals to form the basis for an employee’s discretionary compensation. In other words, payouts only occur when specific performance or results criteria are met.

Ed believes that a solid incentive compensation system can align and focus your organization on the accomplishment of key goals and objectives. It will also reward those employees who contribute to these results.

There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it.

Jack Welch

Retired CEO, General Eletric

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How to Create Your Employee Compensation System

The first step is to determine the core business strategy of the organization. Are you looking to achieve Operational Excellence? Perhaps Product/Service Leadership is your key concern. Or maybe you are striving for Customer Intimacy. Writing clear objectives that support your business strategy is the key link between the strategy and the actions taken and behaviors exhibited by employees to achieve results.

Don’t spend the time and financial investment in an incentive compensation plan destined for failure! Ed can help you avoid the five most common reasons why variable pay plans fail! If you want an outside view, or simply do not have the internal staffing to manage a project of this size, give Ed a call. We can help you design the entire system or are more than willing to assist where needed. We truly enjoy seeing our clients experience the success that a well-conceived variable pay system can provide!

From there, Ed helps you develop an incentive compensation system that impacts four areas proven essential in achieving optimal organizational performance:From there, Ed helps you develop an incentive compensation system that impacts four areas proven essential in achieving optimal organizational performance:

Focus

We’ll clarify the important tasks/accomplishments employees must perform, and identify for them what is essential by establishing clear measures of success.

Alignment

We’ll emphasize the balance between organizational success and individual performance by cascading all goals down from the top of the organization to the individual employees.

Motivation

We’ll encourage continuous improvement by facilitating change through the use of the “pay/reward lever.”

Reinforcement

No program can succeed without a plan to reinforce key points. To do so, we’ll devise a positive reinforcement system that acknowledges desired behaviors and results.

Steps to Effective Compensation Management

In a recent study, researchers found that one of the key obstacles to successfully executing a business strategy was the lack of ownership of the strategy or execution plans by key employees. Creating alignment between employees and the business strategy is a key driver of employee engagement. Employee alignment simply means employees know and believe in the business strategy. And, they’re committed to contributing to it and know exactly what they need to do to help achieve it.

Ed Krow can help your organization achieve employee alignment through the following four-step approach:

Developing Your Core Message

First, Ed Krow helps design a communication plan to explain the organizational strategy to your team. To improve employee engagement, he believes in testing the message’s effectiveness through focus groups.​

Defining Leadership's Role

Next, Ed Krow helps senior management understand their role so they can control the organizational climate when they bring the company strategy to life for the employees.

Devising an Approach

Then, Ed Krow assists your management team to establish employee onboarding processes and an employee recognition system to reinforce the company strategy.

Measuring Success

Finally, Ed Krow helps develop organizational metrics to determine the success of the company strategy over time. Establishing clear outcomes and organizational goals proves the value of connecting employees to your business.

Ed believes you can win the hearts, minds, and hands of your employees as they help you achieve business success. You can do this by using this collaborative approach to developing messages that are meaningful and consistent, educating leaders on their role in the process, continuing the reinforcement of messages through leadership actions and organizational initiatives, and measuring success.

Contact us today to get started on aligning your employees with your business strategy!

“When our company decided that it was time to simplify our employee evaluation process and evaluate the salaries we were paying to our employees we were referred to Ed.

He made a presentation to our group and his experience and clear explanations showed us that he was the best person for the job. Ed’s work met our expectations. The new evaluation system works well for us and we are still using it. The goals we agreed on were met along the process and he provided us with a wealth of information and resources to smooth the transition into the new process and make decisions that were best for our business.

Ed is friendly, approachable, and very professional. All types of businesses could benefit from Ed’s help. Personnel is the biggest cost in service-based businesses so having that process streamlined and efficient is very important.

Jill Brewster

Senior VP of Finance, Benecon Group, Inc.

“I worked with Ed to develop and maintain compliance with our affirmative action plan. He came highly recommended to us from his work with the local SHRM chapter and working with Ed has been a great experience.

In the process of creating our affirmative action plan many small issues and questions came up but because of Ed’s vast knowledge and experience he could explain answers and provide excellent recommendations to cover any weaknesses that the government template had. Part of what Ed does for us is giving presentations to the board of trustees and this is great because he has excellent interpersonal skills and he can share the required information with them in a clear, positive, and friendly way. This really adds something special to his work with us.

Since working with Ed we’ve definitely had positive results. The plan he has set up with us has led to us being in compliance with our affirmative action plan and we have not been audited by the federal government.

William E. Griscom, Ed. D.

President, Thaddeus Stevens College

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