Will the employees get satisfied with their salary or compensation? Will the management praise my work? Will the retention rate be high this year? Few questions that always remain in compensation manager’s head.
Looking after the person’s initial employment to their retirement, from introducing the compensation and benefits schemes to rewards for employee benefit but profitable for an organization at the same. This is a work of a Compensation Manager who holds the purse strings.
Compensation manager plays a vital role as they are responsible to keep an eye over salaries, corporate trends and compensation management system.
Here are the TOP 10 skills that every compensation manager should possess:
- Good listener
Being a c&b manager, you need to be a good listener first of all. Money is the top-most concern of each employee. Employees reach you out in a hope that you will listen and understand their salary or compensation related issues. Though you are not a therapist but listening to their problems and suggesting some simple solutions or providing benefits somehow helps in reducing their pain making an employee friendly organization.
- Adaptive
Unforeseen situation occurs every now and then. Manager should be smart and intelligent enough to make quick decisions and make them implemented while working. Situations such as law amendments/policies, any mis happening or shocking resignation.
As updating policies happens often, manager should be adaptive enough to cater the changes in a correct manner.
- Communicate
A compensation manager should know how to communicate with employees as well as with management whether verbally or written. Manager should learn how to communicate well along with the different formats depending upon the requirements. It is only medium of communication.
Should have command over delivering speech, presenting documents and finalizing policies with Human Resource team.
- Resourceful
A compensation manager must know to tackle the employees to achieve the best they can offer. Do the proper job research, salary surveys, assign tasks to team and working with management to develop the packages.
One should know how to use a piece of information they acquire about an employee or the workplace of an employee and how to use them with or against the industry standards and competitors.
- Organized
If a manager is organized in his work and workspace, he can manage the team effortlessly.
Being a compensation manager, it takes a lot of mental pressure to resolve things. Therefore, manager should adapt technology by using different tools in the market to stay updated and organised. For example: policy alerts, meeting reminders, analytics report software.
- Math/analytics
From salary and benefit policies to pension schemes, a lot of solid understanding is needed in terms of statistics and analysis. Strong analytical skills is required to generate reports based on salary surveys and spot trends. Range the pay rise and succession planning that is number focused.
Gather the data and benchmark such a way that it proves to be beneficial at employee end and profitable at management level as well.
- Negotiation
Knowing how to negotiate and succeeding in it, best skill a compensation manager could ever get. As soon as an employee resigns or performance pay rise comes, their expectations are quite high which cannot be met. Being able to negotiate by using recent salary and compensation surveys with the competitors, is the key to success.
- Legal Knowledge
Compensation managers are not lawyers, nor they need to be lawyers. However, having a basic knowledge of employment laws and policies adds-on to the managers success.
For example: a 59-year old employee raises a query against health insurance, you should be knowledgeable enough to give quick response.
- Technology
Technology has introduced cloud-based solutions making the work easy and much simpler. Managers can use compensation management tools to plan and fetch the desired reports in a click. They can do market and salary surveys, planning and research, performance measurement and hikes by using different tools available online. They can even set industry alerts and sign up for various programmes in order to remain updated.
- Equalizer
Best practice that a compensation manager should follow is to act as a ‘Equalizer’. They have to be fair enough when it comes to employees and justifiable enough to prove in front of management. Employees make a company, providing them a decent work culture with good benefits is what they need. Also, to plan the future roadmap and growth of a company in order to make it a success.
Possess the desired skills and be the best compensation manager.
