Salary data are the cornerstone of effective compensation management
Most organizations use a variety of market data sources to inform their pay strategy, with the general best practice being to use at least three sources. According to the 2024 Compensation Best Practices Report (CBPR), 56 percent of organizations rely on two to four sources, with larger organizations — especially those with over 5,000 employees — generally using more than five sources to ensure accuracy and competitiveness in their pay practices.
Salary surveys are trusted but challenging to manage
While dynamic data sources have gained popularity more recently, the CBPR shows that salary survey data from traditional publishers still represent the most popular and most trusted source, year after year. Traditional surveys can provide valuable information but managing them can be a significant challenge — especially for comp pros who need data that cover multiple industries and geographies.
When survey results come in, generally between August and November, comp pros have to get busy updating their pricings year-over-year, often for multiple surveys. Then in the spring, organizations must participate in these surveys by submitting data back, usually in specific formats to various vendors. If you don’t have time to do that, the non-participant rate can be costly.
To help comp pros more easily manage this process, we’ve built the new Surveys Experience in Payfactors, available with the Advanced subscription as of September 25, 2024.
This release is designed to streamline your survey management and participation processes like never before, helping you maximize your survey investments and stay ahead in the competitive compensation landscape. (Payscale is also leveraging AI to further improve your experience with the recent release of Peer Auto-Match plus another exciting feature coming soon!)
What’s new in the Surveys Experience?
Here are some of the key features you can now access as part of our new survey experience:
- Utilization metrics: See which surveys provide you with the most matches at a glance. Surveys are a hefty investment, and this is an easy way to monitor your ROI.
- An actionable timeline: A visual timeline guides you through the survey workflow and shows you where to take action in Payfactors throughout the calendar year. This way, every step is clear and manageable, you can more easily see where you need to go, and you can proactively plan ahead.
- Survey statuses: From a single view, see the statuses of your surveys as they progress through the survey lifecycle and even add surveys you plan to use in the future.
Finally, our new experience also offers a guided participation workflow to help you navigate the process according to industry best practices. First, it’ll help you use your current pricing matches without leaving the platform. It will also make it easy to audit for duplicate matches and errors and then save your finalized matches for reuse. That way, you’ll reduce the risk of inaccuracies, eliminate the need for repetitive data cleanup every year, and ensure continuity, efficiency, and data accuracy.
Getting started
Ready to revolutionize your survey processes? If you already manage surveys with Payfactors, log in to check out this new experience. Or, if you’re interested in getting started with Payfactors, contact us today.
