Every practice makes pay decisions differently. What do you know about the rationale behind how…
By John Borrowman, CPC
Borrowman Baker, LLC, BV Staffing + Consulting
Gallatin, TN
Sounds like a silly question, doesn’t it? But the answer could be more complex than you think, and more important to employee retention than you imagined.
There is no denying pay is important. But it’s not the critical variable. How your employees feel about their pay matters as much as what they are actually being paid.
Start with the notion that ‘pay’ is bigger than just the W-2. Obviously, it includes actual dollars in both salary and bonus. It extends to flexible hours, insurance premiums, remote work, growth and learning, and more. If you think about salary as part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you can see that for some employees, salary is at the top and for others it’s only one of several elements or factors.
What if you had a written philosophy about what you consider pay, and you made that known to employees? It’s possible you could shift the thinking about pay to be more wholistic. This helps when you interview because it allows you to steer the conversation about pay. It also helps immunize your staff against the siren song of more dollars somewhere else.
Search on “Writing a compensation philosophy” and you will find page after page of suggestions.
John Borrowman
