Compensation

It's not all about the Benjamin's....but it is mostly.

Are you paying your people competitively with the market? Are your employee benefit packages attractive? Or are you just keeping up?

Want to learn about salary benchmarking, bonuses, commissions, and employee benefits?

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Compensation Basics

Salary

The baseline of what you are paying your employees. This can be done on a salaried or hourly basis. One of the most difficult things businesses encounter is a lack of information about market rates for benchmarking.

Bonus

It's important to reward employees for good performance throughout the year and incentivize the right behaviors. Used improperly it can result in massive financial burden for outcomes not tied to business objectives

Commissions

Commissioned employees have some of the most incredibly complex plans and trackers, and their comp plans need to be thought out carefully ahead of time. This type of employee has the highest turnover rate for a reason.

Employee Benefits

This is everything your company is paying for on the backend that the employees don't necessarily know about. Insurance, training and development programs, 401(k), STD/LTD, Life and AD&D etc.

The Baseline: Salary Benchmarking

TL;DR Benchmarking salaries lets you know what salary/wage rates are competitive in order to pay people fairly and prevent them from being poached. Here are my top 4 recommendations for companies that will get you accurate salary data:

Economic Research Institute

The Economic Research Institute is my top pick. IMHO the pricing for a user license is the best around. There is no limit the number of positions you're allowed to benchmark. They have a wide variety of tools that can be bought a la carte.

ERI pulls their data from a significantly larger portion of companies in the US than many of their competitors. Their tools allow users to really drill down into specifics based on city, geography, years of education, exp. etc. They also have the ability to create blended/hybrid jobs which was a feature truly unique to their product.

The must-have purchase from them is the Salary Assessor tool that helps benchmark base salaries and bonuses.

They also have:

Relocation Assessor
Geographic Assessor
Executive Compensation Assessor - delves specifically into executive compensation/ equity / stocks /options.

For those in renewable energy - as of 2021 they have data from around 50 in the renewable or solar companies in the US.

1. Click here for their Product Brochure showing examples of the various Assessor tools mentioned

2. Why ERI