Seeking feedback on your compensation process

Organizations put a lot of efforts in choosing the people who can award compensation to their workforce. They may even decide to have a different set of people for different type of compensations awards (i.e. Salary allocation or Stock Grant) as per their business needs. But the question is after giving compensation allocation responsibility and various tools to make informed decisions to these people; do you seek their feedback on compensation allocation process in a planned manner?

It is critical to seek feedback from your compensation decision makers as it will:

• Help you to overcome any shortcomings in your existing compensation policy.
• Help you to understand good and not-so-good things about the tools provided for compensation planning.
• Help you to discover how determined your decision makers are to voice their opinion for betterment of your compensation policy.

Every compensation round has a theme or a predefined objective that needs to be fulfilled and it varies with the type of compensation you are dealing with. It’s best to collect feedback and keep it associated with specific compensation round. This association will not only help you to closely analyze context specific feedback but also to take the corrective actions. In case you need collective and only one set of feedback you can always combine compensation round specific feedback into one.

You should decide on feedback questionnaire if you are planning to collect specific feedback and can request people to rate things you want to be rated. However, it will be good to provide some free hand where feedback provider can share feedback not related to questionnaire.

Finally, you need to analyze the collected feedback; work on to resolve the highlighted problems (if possible) and follow-up with feedback providers (if required).  Publishing corrective actions or changes incorporated as a result of this exercise will convey that you value feedback and will motivate people to participate in future. You can expect some real value addition to your compensation strategy by this exercise as you will be working with the people important to your business and compensation process.