The benefits of salary planning tools extend beyond simply saving organizations time and money. They make it much easier, for example, to keep track of employee performance results and adjust pay accordingly. They also allow you to notice trends in employee performance across your entire organization, enabling you to identify discrepancies and avoid common pitfalls related to performance tracking. Finally, they allow you to make exceptions for employees who provide a great deal of value to your organization and thus more easily ensure their retention.
Whether your organization utilizes a pay-for-performance model or simply wishes to provide high-performing employees with some manner of award, a salary planning tool makes it simple to track which employees are eligible for merit increases and which may be underperforming in some aspect. In addition to being able to directly input compensation information into an online salary planning tool, managers are also able to input performance ratings of their direct reports into the system (if they are not tracked or managed somewhere else). These performance ratings can be based on whichever criteria your organization has chosen to track employee performance, and can be customized into the system when first implementing your salary planning tool. At Harvest HCM we have some organizations who import performance scores over from another system, and others who manually select the performance rating inside of our salary planning tool. Tracking performance ratings in the compensation tool helps those in charge of employee compensation determine which employees to reward and which may not be fulfilling the requirements of their position.
The quick tracking of employee performance ratings offered by salary planning tools can also help you spot discrepancies in said ratings. For instance, following up on an employee with a poor performance rating may reveal an issue between the manager who assigned their rating and the employee. If employees’ ratings trend higher or lower in certain departments or locations, it allows your organization to more easily notice these trends and pay closer attention to the groups associated with them in order to see what they’re doing wrong or right. This tracking also allows you to notice problems such as central tendency errors, where a manager will report employees’ performances close to the middle of the performance scale (which can make it difficult, if not impossible, to discern performance levels).
Finally, a salary planning tool enables you to quickly and easily notice the employees providing a lot of value to your organization, and reward them accordingly. Though the salary planning tool can track how much money is available for merit increases and limit the rates of said increases, it also allows you to make exceptions for employees who perform their jobs at exemplary levels. By making such exceptions and rewarding valuable employees for their performance, you increase the chances of retaining them by decreasing the chances that they feel under-appreciated for their work, making them less likely to be picked up by a competitor with a more enticing offer.
The beauty of a salary planning tool lies not only in its ability to expedite the salary planing process, but also to simultaneously allow easy access to employees’ performance ratings. This allows you to ensure that employees are being paid relative to the value they provide for the company, which can also raise job satisfaction in high-performing individuals. It also helps you keep an eye out for errors or discrepancies in performance ratings, as well as help you keep track of which areas of your organization may need attention in order to learn from their successes or mistakes, which can benefit the organization as a whole. A salary planning tool not only provides your organization with convenience – it can help provide you with the knowledge necessary to reward your top performers appropriately.