Senner and Johansen, obviously proud of their accomplishment, shared the outcomes of their work and some of the raves from employee, recruiters, and candidates.
Senner is Division VP, Compensation, and Johansen, CBP, CCP, is Director International Compensation & Global Programs. They offered their tips at WorldatWork”s Total Rewards Conference and Exhibition, held recently in San Diego.
What Candidates View
One of Abbott’s innovations is structuring the site so that applicants can access a model of the compensation that would be offered to them. (See more on this in yesterday’s issue.)
Applicants see all compensation and benefits information in one place. This helps illustrate the value of Abbott’s total compensation package, Johansen notes.
The system allows candidates below senior level to log in to the self-serve site, but the site does not model long-term incentives. So, for executive/senior management candidates, recruiters create statements for that do include long-term incentives.
What Talent Acquisition Employees Are Saying
One gratifying source of positive comments came from Abbott’s talent acquisition team members, the ones who used the statements to attract candidates:
- “Tool is easy to use and very comprehensive.”
- “Fabulous – this has helped candidates in getting to YES quickly.”
- “This tool is fantastic! Instrumental in closing a number of high level candidates.”
- “Candidates are impressed with the tool.”
- “I think it’s a wonderful tool that helps everyone understand what they are truly getting from Abbott.”
- “I use this tool for every offer I extend. The tool has great information that is helpful as I have discussions with the candidates.”
- “Comprehensive vision of what Abbott is truly offering.”
- “I really like having the back-up documentation when doing offers!”
- “Candidates find the tool very useful and helpful.”
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What Employees Are Seeing
Employees see all compensation and benefits information in one place, says Johansen. We’re able to illustrate the value of Abbott’s total compensation package in a personalized and customized way:
- The landing page illustrates a breakdown of total compensation programs
- We are able to include important new Information, even messaging targeted to the employee or groups of employees
- We provide links to other HR tools – easy access to internal and external resources to manage programs
- We can update schedules and assumptions
- Employees can input different amounts (for example, of 401(k) contributions) to forecast outcomes under different scenarios.
What Employees are Saying
Finally, Senner and Johansen say, employees comments are making it clear how successful the program is:
- “This is FANTASTIC. We are using this extensively with the sales force to increase job satisfaction and morale”
- “Wow, this is awesome! It really helped me get some important questions answered quickly.
- It also gave me a new appreciation for the benefits I receive from Abbott! Thank YOU!”
- “Recently spent some time on financial planning and the new Total Compensation Statement is an outstanding resource.
- “I love this. Thank you, thank you thank you!”
- “Thank you Abbott for your commitment to us! Your support and commitment make me strive to be my best!”
- “This online system is fantastic! It’s much better than receiving the total compensation once a year via a mailed statement/ brochure. I have the ability to review it several times during the year to assist in various financial and retirement planning & modeling. THANK YOU!”
- “You have done a fantastic job in providing this important information. I have worked at Abbott for more than 25 years—this is the best I have ever seen!”
Developing a new total rewards statement, one of, what, a dozen key challenges you’re dealing with?
No doubt, compensation managers have a lot on their plates. “Maintain internal equity and external competitiveness and control turnover, but still meet management’s demands for lowered costs.” Heard that one before? Many of the professionals we serve find helpful answers to all their compensation questions at Compensation.BLR.com, BLR’s comprehensive compensation website.
And there’s great news: The site has just been revamped in two important ways. First, compliance focus information has been updated to include the latest on COBRA, Lilly Ledbetter, and FMLA. Second, user features are enhanced to make the site even quicker to respond to your particular needs:
- Topics Navigator—Lets you drill down by topical areas to get to the right data fast.
- Customizable Homepage—Can be configured to display whatever content you want to see most often.
- Menu Navigation—Displays all of the main content areas and tools that you need in a simple, easy format.
- Quick Links—Enables you to quickly navigate to all the new and updated content areas.
The services provided by this unique tool include:
- Localized Salary Finder. Based on reliable research among thousands of employers, here are pay scales (including 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles) for hundreds of commonly held jobs, from line worker to president of the company. The data are customized for your state and metro area, your industry, and your company size, so you can base your salaries on what’s offered in your specific market, not nationally.
Try BLR’s all-in-one compensation website, Compensation.BLR.com, and get a complimentary special report, Top 100 FLSA Overtime Q&As, no matter what you decide. Find out more.
- State and Federal Wage-Hour and Other Legal Advice. Plain-English explanations of wage-hour and other compensation and benefits-related law at both federal and state levels. “State” means the laws of your state because the site is customized to your use. (Other states can be added at a modest extra charge.)
- Job Descriptions. The website provides them by the hundreds, already written, legally reviewed, and compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) mandate that essential job functions be separated from those less critical. All descriptions carry employment grade levels to current norms—another huge time-saver.
- Merit Increase, Salary, and Benefits Surveys. The service includes the results of three surveys a year. Results for exempt and nonexempt employees are reported separately.
- Daily Updates. Comp and benefits news updated daily (as is the whole site).
- "Ask the Experts" Service. E-mail a question to our editors and get a personalized response within 3 business days.
If we sound as if we’re excited about the program, it’s because we are. For about $3.50 a working day, the help it offers to those with compensation responsibilities is enormous.
This one’s definitely worth a look, which you can get by clicking the links below.
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Communication is incredibly important. A competitive benefits package can count for nothing if employers don’t understand what’s on offer to them. The mployee feedback you’ve highlighted shows that the more aware employees are of the benefits on offer, the happier they are with them. If companies aren’t communicating this as clearly as they can then they’re really missing an opportunity to improve engagement and employee satisfaction.
This might of interest to follew mumblers:Taking the primary vote figures from Galaxy’s poll and aggregating and weighting by sample size those results with the most recent poll from Nielsen in mid May, shows us it’s almost a mirror image of the national situation. Where the ALP’s primary vote has bled to the Greens almost exclusively, with the Others mopping up the rest plus with a bit from the Coalition.Election ALP 42.9a0 L-NP 44.5a0 GR 5.6a0 a0 OTH 7.0… TPPa0 ALP 50.44 L-NP 49.56Polls…….ALP 35.5a0 L-NP 43.8a0 a0GR 12.5a0 OTH 8.2… TPPa0 ALP 48.81 L-NP 51.19Change……..(-7.4)… .(-0.7)…..(+6.9)… (+1.2)……… (-1.63)……..(+1.63)The preference flows to the ALP in QLD at the last election were 75% from the Greens and 48% from all the Others.I’ve calculated the same here, however, you could make a case for a higher flow to the ALP from the Greens as the leakage since the last election is almost a 1 to 1 shift.If you increased the flow to 80% (the 2007 national result) it would give you an ALP TPP of 49.4%, a swing away of about 1% since the last election.A 1.63% swing away has the ALP losing no seats, as Longman, its lowest margin seat, sits on 1.9%, and obviously a 1% swing even less so. (ignoring the notional ALP seats following re-distributions)You’d think from the headline that Labor was set to lose a dozen seats, but these raw numbers show this to be false.a0 QLD is no graveyard for the ALP.You can make all sorts of cases for this seat vs that seat, but on the pure numbers, this is what it shows.(NB Those who don’t like seeing decimal points in poll analysis, ignore them, and look at the larger implication)