Compensation and benefits surveys provide excellent value for your members. This includes not only the individual members who can make compensation comparisons but also business owners and managers who can compare pay levels with other organizations. 

Surveys of this type provide an excellent opportunity to generate sponsorship revenue. Sponsors that we've worked with have included executive recruitment firms and accounting firms.

As well as collecting basic salary information, the compensation and benefits survey will cover topics such as:

•  Years working for current employer

•  Hourly wage or an annual salary

•  Satisfaction with base salary

•  Previous salary increase and anticipated salary increase

•  Items included in the benefits package

•  Satisfaction with benefits package

Other topics may include job responsibilities and satisfaction, professional development and work/life balance.

Findings (and sponsor recognition) can be promoted in print, roundtables, webinars, conference presentations and via an online salary calculator (that we can create for you). 

Here are some challenges that you can run into when you conduct a compensation survey. 
Challenge #1 – A crucial element in completing a successful compensation and benefits survey is getting the job descriptions right. It is not sufficient to simply provide a job title and ask for the base salary. There is usually a considerable variation in the responsibilities of individuals with similarities. Therefore it’s important to spend the time to develop comprehensive job descriptions.

Challenge #2 – Even with the best efforts to get the job description correct there will be occasions when the responsibilities of the individual in question will exceed or fall below the description provided. To handle this eventuality, give respondents the latitude through a scaled and open-ended question to indicate whether the individual(s) have more or less responsibility than outlined in the job description. At the analysis stage this information can be factored into the salary information. It’s also important to spend the time at the analysis stage cleaning data and looking at outliers. In some incidences it maybe necessary to re-contact respondents for clarification if there is a miss-match between salary and job description.

Challenge #3– At the reporting stage it is critical to use variety of descriptive statistics when reporting the salary information. Because mean or average salary levels can be influenced by outliers, typically results are reported using medians and quartiles.

For more information on salary surveys please drop me a note. I'd be happy to answer any of your questions.