How BambooHR Helps Employees Buy Into Your Compensation Strategy

There are many considerations that go into creating a successful compensation strategy. But like leading horses to water, simply making the elements of your compensation strategy available to your employees doesn’t guarantee they’ll fully understand, use, or appreciate them. Using the right software tools removes logistical barriers in this process, helping employees fully appreciate their compensation and reciprocate with great work for their employer.

Once you’ve identified the needs of your employees and created a compensation plan to help with recruitment and employee retention, you’ll need to make that plan a consistent reality. Using BambooHR to showcase both the direct and indirect compensation you deliver helps you show your employees the full value you offer as an employer—making an irresistible case for employees to stay.

Time-Off Management

Employees want balance in their lives—a situation where they feel they’re doing meaningful work while still having time for personal pursuits. When taking time off is too much work or comes with too many tradeoffs, employees are more likely to let it sit unused, putting themselves at greater risk of burnout.

Time off management can also become a burden on managers, pulling them away from other tasks, when there’s not an intuitive way to coordinate team schedules and respond to requests.

Here’s how BambooHR helps: Sick leave, paid time off, volunteer hours—no matter which inventive time off policies you include in your compensation plan, BambooHR makes it easy to create your time off landscape and encourage employees to use all their great options. When employees log into BambooHR on their computer or phone, they see time off balances right on the homepage with a clear button to make a request.

The system then walks employees through a simple process of selecting their time off type, selecting dates and hours for the request, making notes for anyone who needs to approve time off, and submitting it. BambooHR coordinates the rest, sending managers notifications they can approve or deny and showing who else may be out on requested days.

Benefits Tracking

Just as employees might not know how their employer recognizes their value, they might not recognize the value their employer puts toward benefits. In many cases, this hidden compensation piece is a significant chunk of an employer’s investment in each employee. Surfacing this contribution is another way to promote the full value of your compensation package.

Here’s how BambooHR helps: BambooHR gives employees direct visibility into their benefit elections by storing them directly on their profiles. They can better understand their health, HSA, and 401k contributions all in one place and better understand employer contributions.

Representing Every Benefits Pillar

It can be helpful to think of a well-rounded benefits programs as a series of interconnected pillars supporting employees’ lives:

• Physical: Healthcare, dental, workplace safety, anti-harassment training
• Wellbeing: Mental health, fitness, employee assistance programs
• Career: Professional development, tuition reimbursement, promoting from within
• Community: Time off for volunteering, remote work policies to help parents and caregivers
• Financial: Retirement, financial education, HSA company match

When reviewing benefits to add to your compensation strategy, prioritize benefits that support multiple pillars. For example, providing an HSA match might encourage employees to contribute to their physical health while helping with their financial health as well.

In the benefits display in BambooHR, each benefit highlights both the amount the employee pays and the contribution the employer makes, helping employees recognize the investment their employer makes in their personal safety and success reinforces their sense of security—both in their everyday workplace experiences and in their ability to thrive in the future.

Administrators can also set up company links on this homepage with further benefit details, giving employees resources to answer their questions and freeing up the time spent tracking down HR to ask them.

Payroll and Compensation Expectations

For employees to trust your compensation strategy, getting paid should never be an issue. In 2019, CareerBuilder found that 78 percent of employees were living paycheck to paycheck. Since then, financial footing has only gotten more uncertain with shutdowns, inflation, and big shifts in the labor market. These uncertainties can shake employees out of their comfort zones and seek out other potential employers, especially if an organization isn’t consistent in paying them.

Employees Believe in Their Compensation

Economic research published at MIT found that employees are generally content with their compensation, even when data showed they could earn more money by switching jobs. When comparing what employees believe with what their outside options look like, workers had the following outlook:

• Objectively low-paid workers are overpessimistic about their outside options.
• Objectively high-paid workers are overoptimistic about their outside options. (According to Payscale, 66% of employees believe they’re underpaid.)
• Both sets of workers believe that the relevant external labor market resembles their own employer more than it actually does.

This is likely one of the underlying causes of the Great Resignation: whether through researching salary benchmarks while working from home or out of desperation during a furlough, employees had every opportunity to educate themselves on their potential compensation. Perceiving better opportunities was enough for millions of Americans to seek new employment, with more than 4.5 million employees resigning in March 2022 alone.

While paying fairly is important, preserving an employee’s belief in the fairness of their compensation is equally important. The payroll process is the first line of defense for both concerns.

Automating Payroll

Every pay period, payroll professionals need to ensure countless points of data for every employee, whether those points are the same as the last 51 pay periods or there’s one small change. Accurate payroll can’t assume data is correct—it needs to verify payroll information from a trusted source.

In spite of all this work, many employees never question their paycheck. For most employees, there’s not even a physical check to cash anymore. They go to work, then money appears in their direct deposit account. Compensation fades into the background, only surfacing when employees question whether they’re earning enough.

If your employees are going to fully appreciate their compensation, it has to be more than an afterthought. With the right presentation and accessibility, helping employees update and view their payroll information can help them more fully appreciate your compensation plan.

Here’s how BambooHR helps:
The Pay Info tab in BambooHR takes all the hassle out of viewing payroll information and confirming changes. When employees need to view or print paystubs, they can reference this page for their most recent pay stub, their full pay history, and W2 information. That beats logging into a separate payroll system twice a year and trying to remember the password.

Employees can also update their withholding or direct deposit information from this tab. This is a much more efficient process than having employees track down HR to review or change their information. The Pay Info page also breaks down the amounts employees pay for taxes and withholdings, helping them translate their gross salary into useful data for their personal budget.

BambooHR ensures any relevant changes in personal data make it into each payroll run, whether you’re using our built-in payroll processing or integrating with another payroll provider. With your payroll data and people data in a single contained system, the payroll administrator doesn’t need to hunt down new employees or their managers to get missing payroll details, and the employee doesn’t need to fill out forms in triplicate.

Keeping payroll records in BambooHR also helps with the process of filing taxes, complying with the ACA, and many other compliance requirements, all without worrying whether the data made it through a spreadsheet export/import process intact.

With BambooHR handling payroll, employees and managers can spend time on compensation discussions instead of fighting payroll fires.

Reporting and Retargeting

A compensation strategy, like any other plan, will run into obstacles and exceptions. Keeping a compensation strategy functioning means assessing how it’s affecting key metrics in your organization’s health, such as performance and turnover—a process that requires accurate reporting.

One of the biggest challenges with reporting is measuring what you think you’re measuring. For example, sending out a quick Google survey asking if employees are satisfied may return a high percentage of positive responses—all with the employee’s email attached. Do you know how many of those responses are putting the best face on a bad situation to preserve their chance at a promotion? If employees are having trouble with their manager but their manager is the only one who reports on performance for their team, how can you resolve their issues before they’ve had enough and decide to leave?

Here’s how BambooHR helps: To avoid a “they’re not paying me enough for this” situation, BambooHR features insight tools for your compensation strategy. These include turnover reports, salary history, PTO usage reports, and benefits utilization reports.

BambooHR also developed anonymous surveys to measure employee satisfaction and employee wellbeing. With all responses routed through BambooHR, employees are free to be honest without leadership losing important demographic information to analyze the responses. This employee feedback can be invaluable when assessing the effectiveness of your compensation strategy.

Your Compensation Strategy, Your Culture

A well-executed compensation strategy is so much more than finding the right numbers to put on a page. It has the potential to create a highly attractive workplace where employees know how much their employer values them. BambooHR emphasizes that value, showcasing the compensation and perks employees receive along with the full contribution you make to their success.

For more on how BambooHR helps support every facet of your compensation strategy, sign up for a free demo.