The market median pot of gold
Are we reward professionals victims of our own success? Convince managers of the value of pay benchmarking data and they soon demand more and more of the stuff.
I started my reward career advocating the market median. I used it to bring clarity to reward strategies, objectivity to pay conversations, and simplicity to reward modelling. Perfect!
But I fear it’s gone too far and now become the answer. A pot of gold we are all searching for.
Please do take a read of my latest blog on the topic.
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*** On a career break due to health reasons *** Senior Reward Professional committed to delivering great People Experience to engage and motivate our people.
8 年Number one point I make now is that we refer to survey data as 'market' data for simplicity, but even the best survey is just a proxy for the narket using a linited selection of self selecting companies. As such it needs interpretation when applied, especially where a role only has a few incumbents in the survey (I hate finding out a role has a market median of only 3 incumbents!).
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8 年As content director at XpertHR I am responsible for overseeing a whole range of salary surveys. And I have to say I agree totally with this. Salary surveys provide a whole range of data and information about what is happening in the wider world, and should be used to make informed decisions - but they don't give you all the answers. Certainly, we try to present our data in terms of "this is what other people do" rather than "this is what you should do". Even defining your "market" for your market median (other benchmarks are available) can be fraught with difficulties, and is quite likely to differ depending on the importance of the location, industry, size of organisation, skills, qualifications and so on to your ability to recruit and keep people in the particular role. It's also important in that context to be clear about what to exclude from your definition of the market: people tend to over-specify, so that rather that describing the sort of organisations they are competing with for talent, they are actually describing themselves. There are only so many medium-sized cat sanctuaries with a religious ethos in the East Midlands - and the chances are that, even if there is a second one, they are not your only competitor for talent. Salary survey data is invaluable in helping you make a decision, but it needs to be interpreted and applied with intelligence and a healthy dose of common sense.
CEO @ The People Experience Hub - Employee Engagement, People and Employee Experience, giving your people a voice
8 年Great post as ever Sam, It is an interesting subject and I have found that the bigger the company the less they are fixed on the market data, When I looked at benchmarking for Tesco the data was great for context but did not drive the decision alone, the impact they had on the market data when they made pay decision was massive.