Benefits and Compensation

Four Metrics ‘Gotchas’—Blindsided in the C-Suite

Greene, a member of the Ann Arbor, Michigan, office of the law firm Dykema Gossett, and director of the firm’s Employment Law Department, offered his tips at BLR’s recent Employment Law Update in Las Vegas.

Gotcha #1. Different Interpretation of Results

Say you have submitted statistics showing that retention has improved. Your stats are unassailable—checked by a statistician friend—and, in spite of yourself, you are pretty proud of what you have accomplished in retention. Don’t be surprised when a senior manager says, "I think ‘improved retention’ just reflects the fact that we’re hiring less qualified people—no one else wants them."

Gotcha #2. Inaccurate or Misleading Information

Managers always make decisions with incomplete information, so they are used to that. But they want the information they do have to be reliable, warns Greene.  Make sure that information you do supply is accurate, and that you can back your figures with clean, readily available original data. If your data are questionable, be up-front about it, says Greene.  Clarify what the problem is, how far off the conclusions might be, and why you still think the information is worth considering.


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Gotcha #3. You Measured It, Why Didn’t You Fix It?

You have done extensive studies and have unearthed several significant problems. Expecting a pat on the back? Be wary of approaching management with metrics that indicate a problem, says Greene. They often will respond, "When you found this problem, why didn’t you fix it?"

Gotcha #4. You Measured X, Why Didn’t You Measure Y?

Similarly, whenever you present one measurement, at least one senior manager is going to think of something else that you could have measured instead.

What can you do about gotchas? Although it’s worth trying to anticipate gotchas, it’s unlikely that you will predict them all. Fortunately, in many cases, grilling the presenter is just management’s way of checking that you are confident of what you are presenting.

Overall Outcomes for HR

Ultimately, says Greene, if you can master metrics, you’ll see a clearly improved communication of HR’s impact, and a repositioning of HR with respect to organizational leadership.

King of Metrics

Of course, comp metrics are the most-commonly used of all. Compensation managers have always compared their organizations’ data with data from competitors nationwide and from neighboring employers of all kinds. For more than 20 years, they’ve relied on an extraordinary program from BLR to deliver those data.

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Each edition of the Employee Compensation in [Your State] service contains these key elements:

–Recommended Rate Ranges localized for your state and region for hundreds of jobs, based on surveys and official data. You shouldn’t pay the same in Manhattan, Kansas, as you do on Manhattan Island in New York. This program makes sure you don’t.

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–Free newsletter and updates. The Employee Compensation newsletter helps keep you on top of new state and federal compensation and benefits laws. Six updates throughout the year keep your book current with all new compensation laws.

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Use the links below to see samples of the program and newsletter, as well as a full table of contents of what’s included.

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You can check out the entire program in your own office for up to 30 days, with no need to buy. (We even pay return postage.) Just click the link below, and we’ll be happy to set things up.

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