Comments on: What would you do? They think they’re getting shortchanged after seeing Web salary ‘estimates’

By: john

john — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:41:15 +0000

Linda Russo’s comment of totalling salary + vacation + sick days is not proper to do. As an exempt salary employee, you receive the same pay whether or not you use your vacation and sick days, and some companies have “use it or lose it” vacation policies and a small number of managers/supervisors are wickedly notorious for making it difficult, if not impossible, for employees to use all their days. I know I’ve ran into this several times in my career.
Furthermore, an employee can rightly throw back an attitude of, “oh yeah, well I regularly put in 50 hours a week, and have worked a holiday here and there, as well as the occasional weekend, so if you want to nitpick, I should be getting more than those posted salaries.”

By: Kim Silva

Kim Silva — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:42:09 +0000

We provide a compensation value statement which gives the employee a “total” amount. This includes their base salary + benefits (profit sharing, retirement, pto, medical premium costs etc). We try to stay competitive for our area, so we look at what the local market is paying, as well as the immediate region. Employees typically forget the various components of their “total” compensation, so it’s helpful to provide them with this information.

By: Judy Blair

Judy Blair — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:24:39 +0000

Another source of “real” figures would be local business in your area. That’s what we did. One of our employees got figures from another office in our building, and our personnel manager asked her to get “non-profit” figures, since that’s what we are. Well, surprise (to the personnel mgr), non-profit figures were in the same range, and the employees did need a raise.

Now we annually provide a statement of cash plus benefits (and our benefits percentage is higher than most).