Thank you for joining me on this journey to understand one of the modern-day compensation processes in the health care industry. I hope you have enjoyed learning about how to determine the industry standard compensation for different positions and that this will give you a better gauge when deciding between or making job offers. The last key factor to the compensation game is internal equity.
Internal equity is the comparison of roles within a company to ensure fair pay for colleagues who are working in similar jobs (LinkedIn). This is especially important when looking at retention of employees in a competitive job market. Employees talk to one another about the challenges of their job and it is likely that at one point or another one will feel that they are being under compensated and will ask a colleague if they feel the same way. It is really important that there is a relative pattern and hierarchy to the pay structure.
Let's look at nurses for example. Say, in a company like the one I work at, we hire 1000 nurses and that they are split among 50 locations. That means there are 20 nurses working at each location where we have an office. There should be a range of pay for these nurses. A nurse fresh out of nursing school with little to no experience should not be compensated more than a nurse with 20 years of experience and a masters degree (that is pretty obvious). Nurses with more experience and education and tenure with the company should probably be paid the most. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. There is a shortage for nurses in today's competitive U.S. job market and a competitive industry like health care, nurses can easily be lured away from current positions by a generous signing bonus and increased pay.
Nurse retention is one of the top priorities today for the compensation team at my company. I've had the opportunity to look at several locations and run analyses on the compensation trends for entire states in order to see how we are doing with internal equity. Things get more complicated if our company acquires or merges with one of our competitors. It will take time, but eventually, we need to strategically re-evaluate our pay structure to either increase or decrease the pay of those colleagues.
Sources:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-internal-equity-matters-christopher-langer/
Comments
Post a Comment