2020 compensation best practices

TL;DR: The top performing organisations leverage the following compensation best practices for employees:

• Consult?salary market data more frequently than non-top performing organisations
• More generous with variable pay and incentive-based bonuses than?non-top performers
• More?likely to have trained managers on communicating compensation?compared to non top-performers.
• Have a dedicated compensation team (40% of top performers vs 28% of non top-performers)
• Employees are more likely to know how to get to the next level of their career (66% vs 53%)

Now that you've had the TL;DR version, let's dive deeper into some best practices for employee compensation in 2020 and ahead, driven by?PayScale?s 2020?Compensation Best Practices Report.

Although the insights are based on compensation trends from nearly 5,000 US employers, we are confident that you will find Asia-relevant ideas and takeaways in the following points:

C&B best practice 1: Use more compensation data

Top-performing organisations consult salary market data more frequently than non-top performing organisations. About one-third (31%) of top-performers?have completed a market study within the last six months compared to 23% of non-top performing organisations.

The majority of organisations (52%) also reference market data for?individual job titles at least twice to year; 17% did so monthly, 14% did so weekly, and 6% do so daily. Further, 84%?percent of organisations use more than two data sources while 4% use more than five data sources.

C&B best practice 2: Give more and varied bonuses

Top-performing organisations are more generous with variable pay and incentive-based bonuses (81%) than non-top performing organisations (77%).?Giving a company-wide bonus was particularly more common in top-performing organisations.

The most popular type of bonus is still the individual incentive bonus (66%), which includes the common annual performance bonus. The employee referral bonus (48%) and spot bonus (46%) were the next most frequent bonus types, according to respondents.

C&B best practice 3: Train managers on communicating compensation

Top performing organisations are more likely to have trained managers on communicating compensation (36%) compared to non-top performers (30%). The differentiation was especially apparent in training on compensation basics (79%) and organisational performance (71%).

Top performing organisations also tend to provide total compensation statements to employees more (43%) compared to non-top performing organisations (38%).

Lead photo / 123RF Graphics / PayScale