How to benchmark your pay and benefits against other employers

By Mark Crail, Brightmine Content Director

Employers need to take a wide range of factors into account when they are reviewing and setting pay and benefits. But while issues such as the organisation’s ability to pay a given rate are clearly important, if that rate is out of line with that available for similar roles elsewhere, the organisation will find itself either unable to recruit and retain staff, or paying over the odds to the detriment of its bottom line.

By collecting data on the pay and benefits offered by other employers an organisation will be able to gain a good understanding of the employment market. The organisation will need to decide where it wants to fit into that market, and set policies and pay rates as part of a wider reward strategy that will enable it to recruit, reward and retain staff appropriately.

This article looks at the issues that an employer should address when undertaking a benchmarking exercise, from the types of data required and the information sources available, to the ways in which the data can be put to use to help the organisation implement its reward strategy.

In this guide, learn about:

• When will external benchmarking be useful?
• Choosing the appropriate comparators
• Deciding what to benchmark
  • Basic pay
  • Bonus payments and bonus policies
  • Commission payments and commission policies
  • Employee benefits
  • Benefits strategies
  • Other payments and allowances
  • Pay rises
• Selecting sources of information
• Acting on the data

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