Design the Survey

Consulting firms offer a wide choice of ongoing surveys covering almost every job family and industry group imaginable. In most organizations, the responsibility for managing the survey lies with the compensation manager. But since compensation expenses have a powerful effect on profitability, including managers and employees on the task forces makes sense. There are no firm rules on how many employers to include in a survey. Large firms with a lead policy may exchange data with only a few (6 to 10) top-paying competitors. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the major source of publicly available compensation (cash, bonus, and benefits but not stock ownership) data. The BLS publishes extensive information on various occupations. Some employers routinely combine the results of several surveys and weight each survey in this composite according to somebody’s judgment of the quality of the data reported. Benchmark jobs have stable job content and are common across different employers. If the purpose of the survey is to price the entire structure, then benchmark jobs can be selected to include the entire job structure. Benchmark jobs are chosen from as many levels in each of these structures as can be matched with the descriptions of the benchmark jobs that are included in the survey. Financial data are simply used to group firms by size, expressed in terms of sales or revenues, rather than to analyze competitors’ performance. These data are used descriptively to report pay levels and mix by company size. Data on all types of pay forms is required to assess the total pay package and competitors’ practices.