Copyright © 2011
DeBellis Partners.
All rights reserved.
Last Revised: 4 April 2012
 

Total Compensation Development Program

Designed, developed, and implemented for a national research, development, and manufacturing technology company, in one single year, an entire compensation program, tailored to the company culture that included:

• Developing position questionnaire templates and questionnaires, creating position and job description formats and writing position and job descriptions, devising job families, selecting benchmark jobs, creating an automated job coding system for technical and non-technical exempt, nonexempt salary and hourly management and contributor jobs, reviewing position questionnaires, writing job descriptions, validating descriptions with managers, combining positions with similar activities and competencies into common jobs, and determining the FLSA status of all jobs.
• Identifying direct competitors and the appropriate market sector, determining the best survey sources, conducting market research, and determining each individual employee's market position, developing geographical salary ranges, structures, and rate tables for technical and non-technical, exempt and nonexempt jobs.
• Recommending and presenting the program to senior executives, obtained approvals, communicating the program to managers, and with managers to each, individual employee, and implementing the program, including assigning every employee to a job title, job description, and salary range, and coaching, mentoring, and assisting managers in meetings with individual employees.
• Coordinating the integration of the new program with the payroll system, and with employee tracking, record keeping, and employment functions.
• Developing an engineering gainsharing program, determining eligibility for and the allocation of equity shares per job, and recommending sales compensation plans

Market Research Projects

For national research and development laboratories within world renowned technical universities, designed, conducted, and implemented market analyses and programmed software applications that included

• Compiling and integrating market data for all surveys into a single, automated application
• Determining the competitive market position for each job and employee against multiple survey sources that included an automated look-up function for HR and staffing personnel
• Generating each employee's market position by comparing an employee's salary against survey percentiles linked to an employee's performance ranking, classification, highest degree achieved, and years of experience and service
• Calculating the equity dollars required for parity with the targeted market percentile (i.e. 75th percentile for top performers and 50th percentile for mid range performers)
• Summarizing the total cost required to bring the organization to parity with its target market position for each classification, each employee, and for the overall organizations
• Generated and presented charts, tables, and graphs that depicted the market relationships by employee, classification, and organization and total program costs

DOL FLSA Compliance Self-Audit

For a multi-billion dollar insurance company, determined the FLSA status and type exemption for all salary exempt and nonexempt jobs and positions, including recommending the redesign of nonexempt job task, duties, and responsibilities to qualify for an exemption wherever possible that included

• Interviewing management members at all levels to compile and/or validate current job description duties and qualifications
• Analyzing work flow and identifying job elements affecting exemption status for each job and position reviewed
• Assessing the information and determining the exemption status for each employee, and reviewing determinations with senior human resources management
• Developing and presenting exemption recommendations for each employee position to senior management
• Recommending and presenting to senior management business strategies to re-align jobs to free up managers to do more development work while reassigning supervisory duties to others.
• Developing an automated application that referenced the FLSA status of all jobs in the corporation, including providing the type of exemption and the reasons why the particular job was assessed as exempt or nonexempt, noting FLSA regulations, terminology, and government explanations and examples.

Managerial Incentive Compensation

For a Fortune 100 global technology company, researched, analyzed, and recommended incentive compensation programs for first level managers up to and including executive vice presidents for all functional areas that included

• Selecting primary survey sources that included chief competitors, and benchmarking the organization's managerial positions against survey jobs
• Compiling and analyzing survey data that included analyzing portion of at-risk pay and developing spreadsheet applications with automated features
• Determining the supervisory span of control and number of managerial levels required to be competitive within the industry
• Developing and recommending base salary levels, target incentive mix, and target amounts for total cash compensation
• Recommending a formulaic approach to applying incentive program compensation to new managerial positions

Leader and Contributor Assessment and Automated Processes and Tools

For a large, global technology company with a renowned reputation in its industry, developed the jobs, competencies, and incentive goal achievement levels to rank and identify key leadership and contributor talent that included

• Writing job descriptions and developing corporate-wide and individual competencies for executive, manager, salary exempt and nonexempt contributor, and hourly job types
• Designing performance review forms that incorporated job description duties, competencies, cultural standards, and incentive goal achievement for top leadership through hourly jobs, including sales.
• Automated the review process, including compilation of rating and goal information to identify key talent and rank leadership members by level of overall achievement
• Created automated graphical tools to depict leadership rankings and identified areas for further development by individual leader
• Developed automated lookup applications to quickly identify job and salary related information, as well as an automated lookup process for use by staffing personnel when developing offers.

Pay Delivery and Systems Automation

For technical corporations and research and development laboratory organizations, developed and programmed applications and automated processes for pay delivery and salary planning that included

• Incorporating historical information into the budget development and allocation process
• Automating the tracking and categorizing of transactions, including the consolidation of all types of direct compensation increases in a single application
• Generating real time automated reports that recorded actual budget expenditures, and the allocation of budget increases to all type classifications on a single page, such as sales, engineering, administration, and management for individual management and contributor exempt, and nonexempt employees
• Incorporating compensation classification salary structures and budget allocation matrices into the same application
• Rolling up all department expenditures within functions, up to the corporate level, and generating summary reports
• Integrating pay increases with payroll delivery systems

The application provided salary increase guidelines for each employee according to the recommended merit matrices for the supervisor's review, by position in salary range, performance rating, and low and high increase options, including automatically calculating actual expenditures for fractions of a year. The application provided for the inclusion or exclusion of an employee into the plan, prompted the supervisor if proposed increases were out of the salary range or accepted parameters, tracked and summarized all type increases and expenditures individually and collectively, reported the data in payroll system compatible formats to automatically feed the increases into a variety of payroll delivery systems, and generated a transaction report for use by the manager when communicating increases to the employees.