As COVID-19 continues to enforce a new normal for businesses all over the world, HR professionals have been presented with unique challenges. Most notably, it seems, is the issue of how businesses are going to retain one of their most expensive yet valuable assets – their employees. Given the fact that employee compensation is one of the largest, if not the largest expense item on the books, it is no surprise that many companies have been forced to make some tough decisions about who to retain, who to furlough, and who to let go. However, large scale turnover resulting in experienced team members walking out the door also comes with a steep price tag – the loss of institutional knowledge. As most managers understand, a ready understanding of internal business processes and practices takes time for employees to develop and is an important business asset sacrificed when replacing experienced employees with new hires.
Looking Ahead
With the rapid pace of new challenges presenting themselves during this public health crisis, it may be difficult to start thinking ahead when so many businesses are just trying to keep their heads above water. However, it is essential that you also pay attention to the long-term outlook for your businesses. When your employees come back to work, how competitive will your compensation package be relative to your competitors who are themselves looking to replace talent they lost during the downturn? What can we learn from this crisis to improve the way you manage employee compensation, and to better communicate to your staff how much they are valued? In particular, how do you manage merit budgets and salary planning processes to properly allocate precious resources and retain your business’ most valuable components?
How About Some Solutions?
At Dartican, and for our clients in over 80 countries around the world, the solution is readily apparent: CompAccelerator. When planning for an unpredictable future, you need solutions that can offer true business agility. To maximize the value of your retention efforts at a time like this, CompAccelerator delivers a highly adaptable software solution that helps HR professionals solve problems as they arise; immediately, not three or four months after you make an important decision. Best of all, CompAccelerator’s streamlined and intuitive web-based functionality allows HR professionals to stay on top of their business without the assistance of an IT department when working remotely.
Leverage Compensation Tool Advantages
During normal operating seasons, managing bonus and salary budgets, maintaining salary ranges, and modeling compensation incentive options can be a daunting task. With all the uncertainty of the current public health crisis, businesses are challenged to react fast to almost daily changes in the future business forecast.
Compensation planning tools like CompAccelerator provide a platform to drive consistency across the organization. You can create transparent compensation strategies and objective guidelines around performance, advancement, and incentives to help manage what can often be an inconsistent and wasteful process.
With compensation management tools, you can train all decision-makers about the company’s compensation process and teach them how to properly document decisions. Using a standard platform and pushing the compensation process further down within the organization promotes a greater understanding of the process to all managers. This, in turn, promotes greater transparency as managers become able to speak to the process with greater authority.
Implementing standard pay guidelines is streamlined. The integrity of the investment a company makes when establishing and maintaining standard pay ranges is maintained by providing visibility, guidance, and even restrictions on pay increases, where necessary.
All of this was true before COVID-19. However, while many organizations may have compensation tools readily available, the new more rapid pace required for businesses to stay competitive in the post-COVID world may highlight limitations in those tools. All the advantages of using a compensation planning solution go away if the tool lacks the agility to keep pace with rapid changes in your business.
The Right Tool at the Right Time
Beyond having a compensation tool that meets your functional requirements, what considerations related to the current environment would make one tool optimal and another a burden? Three factors immediately come to mind:
- flexibility;
- turnaround time;
- resource (people) requirements.
Have you ever experienced a last-minute change to your compensation process just days or even moments before opening your compensation process to managers? If so, how did that go? With many systems, the truth is that it did not go well at all. For many, this situation resulted in a delayed “go-live”, having to accept “No” as an answer, and dealing with a cumbersome reconciliation outside the system after all the planning was done.
In business today, and especially during this COVID pandemic, the dynamic nature of business has never been more apparent. Rapid changes are no longer simply one-off incidents. Constant change is the new reality, and businesses and their processes must be fluid and adaptable. The right tool for these times will be one that offers true business agility without requiring a team of potentially limited resources to configure and administer it.
We get it! Built by compensation professionals who have lived through dynamic business changes, CompAccelerator outpaces the market and emerges as the leader in Time-to-Value and true business agility. There are numerous examples of companies that have leveraged these unique qualities within CompAccelerator during difficult times in the years prior to COVID-19. Those companies experienced significant changes to their compensation planning process at the last minute, in some cases even after launching their compensation processes, and they consider CompAccelerator to be the tool that made the difference in supporting their success during those challenging times.
Use this health crisis to consider your HR technology from a new perspective. Your next HR technology review should place a much greater value on rapidly configurable, flexible solutions that have a minimal impact on your people resources, and are intuitive to set up, change, and administer.
Selecting HR technology solutions from this perspective will ensure that tools HR departments rely on are not a distraction during challenging times, but rather an aid to support the objective of retaining one of their most valuable assets – their employees.
If you would like to see true business agility in action, please contact Dartican to schedule a demo.