Survey Job Matching for Compensation Updates

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

One issue with using either publicly or privately available surveys is the matching of the organization‘s positions with those described in the survey. It is highly unlikely that the organization‘s position descriptions and those in the survey will match much more that 70%-to 80%. The exception to this situation is when the organization contracts with a vendor to conduct a customized survey just for the client organization. The role of the analyst is to determine if the match is close enough on the major functions of the position to make the data from the survey valid. This usually involves the input from others within the organization who are more intimately familiar with the position’s duties than the analyst.

Some on-line salary survey tools allow the analyst to merge two or more positions and achieve a degree of “hybridization” of those positions. The resulting hybrid position has one or more tasks associated with several parent positions and generally can be weighted heavier towards one parent or another. Since the hybrid position may contain tasks from two or more parent positions, each selected individual task may make up a minority of the organization’s position responsibilities. As an example, consider the short haul truck driver that also operates a forklift to load and unload trucks when not driving, and functions as the local depot manager. The analyst will need to determine to what degree each of those tasked are weighted as a percentage of the whole in order to price the job.

There are a number of methodologies with which the analyst can determine the weighting of tasks hybridized from the parent positions.

Time on Task: In this method the time spent performing on each task is determined, either by measurement or estimation. The weighting of the task is the ratio of the task time to the total time of all tasks assigned to the position. Incidental duties may be disregarded.

Revenue Earned: With this method, the organization has to have the ability to determine the revenue (could also use sales, expenses, … etc.) generated by each task. The weighting of the individual task is the ratio of the revenue from a given task to the total revenue of all tasks generated by to the position.

Job Evaluation: If the organization uses a point-factor based job evaluation process, the point value for each task can be individually evaluated and that becomes the basis for the weighting. Plus this adds credibility to the process since the organization’s job evaluation committee is involved in the process.

Production Metrics: In some organizations it may be possible to use “production metrics” as a proxy for time, revenue or job evaluation points. An example is a fixed wing aircraft pilot that flies a single engine piston aircraft a portion of the time and a multi engine turbo prop the remainder of the time. It is possible to use miles flown as a proxy for the relative value and the position tasks weighting.

Estimation: It is possible that an analyst will not be able to apply any of the above methodologies and be forced to rank the tasks in order of importance and then assign them a “best estimate” of their relative value and tasks weighting. If this can be done in concert with an internal management review team, there may be a degree of validity and credibility to the process.

The key is to achieve the maximum correlation between matching the organization’s positions to those used in the survey (even if it less than 100%) in order to obtain the most valid measurement of the current market wage rates.