Get a best friend at work and other tips on work and life wellbeing

At the recommendation of the Alabama Society of Human Resource Management’s Wellness Director, I downloaded a copy of Wellbeing:  The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter. The book describes the five essential elements of wellbeing (in order of importance) to be:  Career Social Financial Physical Community The authors emphasize how each element is intricately interwoven with each other. Here are some tips for maximizing work wellbeing by seeing wellbeing from a holistic perspective: Don’t be a workaholic.  “While you might think that people with high career wellbeing spend too much time working, they actually take more time

Throwing compensation structure out the window

I’m going to contradict myself (again). I seem to do this a lot, outlining a way to be process oriented by designing a traditional talent management program.  We’ve done this over the last couple of weeks by describing how to do job analysis, job descriptions and design a compensation plan.  But the key to knowing how to design any talent management program is to know yourself, or rather know your company. For mid to large companies, having job descriptions and a wage structure to define how you compensate people is more than likely completely necessary. It keeps things consistent, fair

Want to keep great employees? Know how to compensate them.

We’re working on a compensation project now with a company to redesign their exempt salary structure. When thinking about how to best design a system, it’s important to realize there are two key factors:  Internal Equity– Are you paying people fairly compared to what other people within the organization are making based on the knowledge, skills and abilities required for each role?  External Competitiveness– Are you paying what the market demands for certain knowledge, skills and abilities required for each role in order to recruit and retain people? Basic steps to consider when designing a compensation structure:  You gotta do

2 Ways to Get What You’re Worth

Out looking for a job or considering a discussion with your boss about a raise?  If you are, you need to do your research to consider what the knowledge, skills and abilities you have are worth in the marketplace and to the company in which you work or are negotiating with. (Note:  The best time to negotiate your worth is before you accept a job. Once you get locked in a job and a salary range, usually the only way to get a substantial raise is to switch jobs either through a promotion or a move to another organization.)  

Now don’t go changing your compensation structure without….

You’re worried you’re not attracting the right talent or that you aren’t able to keep good talent around for long and you think it might be because of your salary structure.   Before you launch into a compensation structure overhaul (we’ll tell you how to do this next week on the blog), you need to: Know for sure that the reason you are having the problems you are having is in fact compensation related.  It may be that all your supervisors are jerks and people may leave even if you paid them twice as much.  Surveying employees, especially through exit