Benefits and Compensation Analysis
Our team can evaluate your compensation programs, research your competitors’ programs and recommend modifications if necessary. This could include evaluating your existing base salary, bonus and/or incentive compensation programs to determine effectiveness and developing recommendations to maximize the use of your organization’s payroll dollars. Business owners and Boards of Directors need sound compensation recommendations, and our compensation specialists can provide an outside, informed review and opinion of your existing programs.
Our consultants can develop salary ranges or salary grades to provide management with an effective compensation structure for administering salaries. Our compensation professionals will use compensation philosophies and strategies that best fit your organization’s culture and labor market.
Higginbotham’s HR Consulting team can be your outside objective source for determining if your executive compensation programs are competitive and reasonable. Our insight into competitive market practices can provide you with defensible executive compensation programs covering base salary, bonuses, long-term incentives, prerequisites and benefits. Compliance with regulations governing pay equity, reasonable compensation levels and soundness can also be assessed by our compensation professionals. We can help determine if your executive compensation practices and programs comply with governmental regulations and recommend necessary modifications to help facilitate compliance.
We are experienced in developing variable compensation plans to maximize employee productivity and reward outstanding employee performance. Variable compensation, such as incentive plans, bonus plans and commission plans, is an important component of a total compensation package.
We can conduct surveys of compensation practices on selected positions, industries and/or geographical areas to generate applicable market data relevant to your organization’s jobs. The data gathered through these customized surveys is then analyzed, developed into statistically sound market surveys and shared with participating organizations when appropriate. This type of customized compensation data is then incorporated into the market analysis, along with other valid survey data and research, to help develop competitive pay programs for your team.
Ensuring that employees are properly categorized as exempt or nonexempt under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act is critically important, and failure to properly do so can leave employers open to government scrutiny and penalties. As part of Higginbotham’s wage and hour compliance services, jobs are analyzed and tested under federal regulations to determine exempt and nonexempt wage and hour classifications. We do this to assist our clients with compliance in minimum wage, overtime, record keeping and salary basis regulations. An exemption analysis will include a management report that provides a complete explanation of whether jobs meet or do not meet the numerous FLSA wage and hour classifications. Additionally, nonexempt pay practices can be audited to determine compliance with regular rate and overtime calculations.
Our compensation consultants are proficient at job analysis and determining essential job elements. Job descriptions are written or updated to provide written documentation of reporting relationships, critical job specifications, duties, responsibilities and performance accountabilities.
Well-written job documentation is critical in compensation analyses and it can serve as the primary source for supporting and defending various management and HR decisions. Job descriptions can also be an important piece of evidence in employment-related claims and disputes.
Higginbotham’s HR consultants can analyze your benefits program against current benefits trends and develop a comprehensive comparative analysis. Benefits information is gathered from survey sources for selected markets and/or industries, and data is compiled into a report that includes existing benefits programs provided by the employer. From this comparative analysis, recommendations will be provided where appropriate for the modification of the existing benefits program.
Our team can conduct research and custom surveys of individual components of benefits programs and practices for specific industries and/or geographical areas. The data gathered through these customized surveys is then analyzed, developed into comprehensive data tables, summarized in a survey report for the organization and shared with participating organizations when appropriate.
Learn more about how Higginbotham’s HR Consulting team can help your business stay competitive.