The focus on managing the effectiveness and maximizing the value of a workforce is a critical performance management imperative of this decade. This, in turn, requires a focus on the fundamentals and management of compensation. Managing compensation is not an easy task, though. It involves a variety of job categories and goes far beyond just doling out merit pay. It must address the planning for and management of the many categories of variable compensation used in the modern organization to incentivize improved performance.

Human Resources is of course central to compensation management. But responsibility for compensation is shared by operations and finance management as well; both must be involved to ensure the organization realizes the full potential. Compensation has changed dramatically in recent years within different organizational areas like call centers, sales and field service organizations. The complexities of compensation make more difficult the core challenge faced by HR: keeping employees satisfied and motivated.

The benchmark research findings help understand and improve use of total compensation management in your organization including:

• What distinguishes organizations from being innovative or tactical.
• Over half of organizations are addressing information adequacy issues that plague communication and planning.
• Why the dedicated and supporting use of spreadsheets in 73% of companies are a problem as 48% do not audit them for errors.
• How to address the high level of importance for integration of data and systems in 40% of organizations.
• Where does finance and operations play a strategic role for sponsoring, improving processes or gaining access to information.