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The Strategic Value of Compensation

Are we paying our people fairly? What kind of retention issues do we have? Are our rewards competitive? Are we leveraging the full strategic value of compensation?

These are questions we hear from HR practitioners as they consider the future of work and technology. A changing workplace, developing technologies, and a growing need for transparency mean that now might be the time for compensation management to be given a high priority in systems planning.

Compensation data is a gold mine

Up until recently, most of the talk in HR recruiting technology has centered around the use of data to make educated decisions during the recruitment process. Now there is a growing realization that strategic use of compensation data has the power to provide at least as much value, with the potential to help not just in the recruitment cycle, but also later on, as a tool to mitigate any retention issues that a company faces, as well as to drive performance. 

Compensation strategy is more important than ever

When strategized, compensation can be applied to be competitive, market-based, and gender-fair. As social agendas increase—such as initiatives from California to report on the gender and CEO pay gap, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and corporate efforts towards diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—it is more important than ever to analyze and understand your compensation data.

When the pay decisions you make are fair, market-based, and transparent, they will naturally promote DEI goals, foster loyalty, improve retention, and free management and HR from the worry of losing top talent.

Meaningful analytics lead to effective compensation

If you really are looking to manage compensation strategically, analytics have to be applied to understand pay fairness and pay equity on a geographical and gender basis. It is only once paired with additional data from inside and outside the organization — survey, benchmark, and retention data — that meaningful analytics can provide true effectiveness, opening up the ability to fine tune compensation and answer the questions at the top of this post.

To tap into the rich repository of data from which you can extract meaningful analytics, it is important to have the data centralized—no longer living in a matrix of disparate systems or databases, across various servers. Centralizing this data and gaining visibility across your entire range of compensation processes lets you begin to use compensation as a strategic differentiator, and allows you to leverage the investment in your HR system and data.

The time is now for better compensation technology

Whatever the reason has been in the past for delaying the discussion on upgrading compensation technology – whether it’s been a reliance on homegrown or spreadsheet-based systems, attempting to stretch the functionality of HRIS solutions, or other factors – the growing requirement for transparency, equity, and compliance means that it’s a conversation that can no longer wait.

By taking the strategic nature of compensation management seriously, companies can make informed, fair, and effective pay decisions, showing employees how their pay is managed and giving them a deeper understanding of their purpose within the organization. beqom provides this strategic value to customers by taking a unified approach to compensation management and providing dedicated technology that goes above and beyond what HR systems can provide.

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