Is a shaky compensation strategy holding your firm back?
In a robust economy, finding and keeping top talent can make or break your architecture, engineering, or construction firm. Unfortunately, common compensation mistakes end up stifling growth, eating up profits, and deflating morale. If your pay, benefits, and incentive plan skews too high, you aren’t competitive for projects. If you’re too low, you can’t compete for talent.
Common compensation mistakes include:
- Using position descriptions to set salaries of non-management design and technical staff.
- Allocating bonuses to shareholders based solely on the number of shares they own.
- Using formulas to compute performance bonuses.
- Overspending on employee benefits
- Using regional data or consumer price indices to adjust for employees in different locations.
Turn to PSMJ Compensation Consultants and Get A/E/C Payroll Right
Applying decades of real-world experience, data, and tested techniques, PSMJ compensation consultants turn a daunting problem into an action-oriented success strategy. Delivering way more than shallow-dive salary benchmarking, generic analysis, traditional position descriptions and salary ranges, PSMJ experts dig deep to isolate your specific problem areas, uncover opportunities, and supply defensible data that drives decisions. Benefiting from our extensive research, you get guidance based on the four factors that correlate most closely with effective market-based compensation:
- Degree
- Location
- Years of Experience
- Job Performance
But, you can’t just look at employee compensation without also considering its impact on your firm’s financial performance, so you also get help achieving target billing rates and utilization goals for each employee. Working together, we use this data to determine key performance indicators like total direct labor, total indirect labor, net labor revenue, and more.
Are you using standardized position descriptions to determine compensation levels for your technical staff? Are you basing geographic salary adjustments on Consumer Price Index data? Are you assuming that your firm’s salary levels are consistent with the market based solely on anecdotes and rumor? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, let’s talk about how we can make compensation blunders a thing of the past.
Download PSMJ’s Compensation brochure or email us at consulting@psmj.com to learn more about how PSMJ can help your firm stay competitive in today’s labor market.
About Our Experts
Don’t hire a consultant who will learn the A/E/C business at your expense. Ask the hard questions to find someone you can trust to get it right. You can get to know some of our compensation experts here: