Nina Bauer· Benefits Manager, Orchard & Vine
Posted in New Member Welcome ·
I was a financial planning analyst for seven years at a mining services company in Johannesburg, around 3,200 employees, and built the salary budget model every year without ever being in the room when it was spent. In August I moved into the reward team as a senior analyst.
The modelling is the easy part. What I find hard is the judgement: why one engineer gets 7 per cent and another 4, and how to explain that to a manager who wants a rule.
I am here to learn how experienced people think through those calls. Glad to help anyone wrestling with cost models in return.
4 helpful · 3 insightful · 3 replies · 71 views · 3 following
Elif MensahWWP, GRS
Global Mobility Manager, Calibre Software
Welcome. Reward teams are always short of people who can model properly, so expect requests.
On judgement: most of it comes from two questions. Where is this person in their range, and how are they performing relative to others at that level? A merit matrix is simply those two questions turned into a grid. Ask to see yours and the exceptions made last year.
Director of Benefits, Bellwether Consulting
I made the same move from finance at a utility in Chile. The shift for me was accepting that a defensible decision and a precise one are different things. A manager does not need a rule. They need two or three reasons they can say to the employee's face.
Compensation Consultant, Tidewater Utilities
Take up the offer in your last line. Start a thread in the Compensation space on how you build a salary budget model with attrition and mid-year hires in it. Most of us inherited ours and are not sure it is right.
