Taking a ‘Lean In’ View of Compensation for Women

In her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg makes a strong case for how women miss opportunities for advancement when they “lean out” — when they fail to take advantage of opportunities early on in their careers.

It’s a perspective that bears serious consideration by anyone responsible for compensation
management.

The argument is especially intriguing for those involved in compensation management in light of recent studies that do in fact conclude that most of the male-female pay gap results from the career decisions women make rather than compensation policies.

Common wisdom and current federal reports put the pay gap between the sexes at 18 to 23 cents per dollar (women, on average, earn between 77 and 82 cents for every dollar a man earns doing the same job). However, as reported in an extensive and well-researched article in the March issue of Time magazine, an estimated two-thirds of the supposed pay gap can be attributed “not to institutional discrimination, but to choices that women make.” This report and others like it bolster Sandberg’s argument.

So, what can compensation management do if the choices women make are more important in closing the pay gap than company policies are? Here are six points to consider:

1. Understand the huge role that compensation management and performance-development strategies can play in creating and promoting career choices throughout your organization.

2. Be sure your pay grades are accurately tied to straightforward, up-to-date job descriptions or salary ranges, and that they’re completely gender-neutral.

3. Actively differentiate your high performers from your high-potential employees and provide the right development strategies for each group throughout your enterprise.

4. Employ 360 degree feedback that truly captures a full and accurate view of each employee’s performance and reviewers, and that gives insight into possibilities for career development.

 5. Be sure you link compensation with performance across the board to motivate and reward the most successful behaviors.

 6. Integrate your learning programs into your development plans — and tie them to compensation incentives and rewards — to be gender-inclusive as you reduce the chance of skills gaps and knowledge drain.

If you want to continue to develop and retain all of your best employees, it’s crucial that you combine the hard-core data and statistics of compensation management with the attitudes and beliefs that drive the choices women make about their careers.

Developing Internal Case Studies: 5 Tips to Market LMS Value

Companies have been putting more money into their learning and development budgets. In fact, Bersin by Deloitte’s 2013 Corporate Learning Factbook shows that U.S. organizations grew their

spending by 12 percent in 2012.

With all those dollars being allocated to training, are your employees taking advantage of the opportunities? It’s easy for employees to forget or even miss that there’s learning management software available to them. Courses that are relevant to their job might be hard to find, lost in a large library of titles.

Instead of sending reminders, take a marketing spin and create internal case studies of what employees learned and how the training applies to the job.

1.     Find people who are your power users. Your LMS or learning content management system should track who’s using what courses or downloading additional resources.

2.     Interview them about the courses they’ve been taking. Approach the power users and ask about their experience. Make sure they’re getting value from the training and would be willing to participate in a promotional case study.

3.     Learn how the training has impacted their performance. Training should help employees do their jobs better, so ask how the training has made a difference. Also ask how the team’s performance might have been improved.

4.     Include insight from their managers. Managers could be encouraging development, or they might not even know employees are going the extra mile to train themselves. Find out what each manager knows, including how improved performance could be changing the way those managers work toward developing the rest of their teams.

5.     Capture the story. You can capture the story in any number of ways — writing an article, taping a Q&A, or even making a video. Make sure you put the story in a format that’s easy for other employees to consume when you share it with the rest of the organization.

Keep tracking use in your LMS so you can find additional power users and see which case studies might have increased usage overall. It’ll be powerful information to share with your executive team, and it can help ensure future budget increases for training.

Focusing Performance Efforts on Midlevel Managers

Middle management has been stuck between a rock and a hard place for the last several years. The tough financial times after 2008 might have stripped many of the jobs in the middle for the sake of a leaner organization. As things perk up, there’s more pressure to attract and retain young millennial workers. A middle manager might one day say, “I’m tired of being stuck in the middle.”

Before that happens, make sure you’re targeting midlevel managers in your performance process. They’re the people who have to bridge the gap between strategic thinking and everyday logistics. They bring experience that millennials haven’t yet acquired. And they’ve learned how to do a lot more with less as organizations pushed lean to a new extreme.

First, set clear performance expectations. When a middle manager has strategic and tactical responsibilities, performance management for his level is likely to be vague. Utilize tools like cascading goals to identify which responsibilities have strategic components and what tactical activities will help accomplish those goals.

Next, communicate frequently. One Huffington Post article noted that digital communication tools are removing some of the good communication habits that make successful managers. These middle managers need to maintain those skills, but executives should be exhibiting the same direct communication behavior. Disseminate information in an effective manner so middle managers are informed. They can then make the right decisions for their teams because they have all the information. Sharing frequent updates will make sure their performance is aligned with executive expectations.  

Finally, be ready to make a shift when necessary. Goals for middle managers can sometimes remain stagnant, especially if they’re not clearly linked to overall strategic initiatives. Instead, when new priorities arise, revisit goals for middle management. Which ones need to be updated, which ones need to be dropped, and which ones need to be added?

Performance management is important for all levels of the organization, but middle management is still where strategic vision comes to life. Make sure you’re setting your organization up for success by creating a targeted performance management plan for this critical group.

Performance Review Automation: Even Innovative Higher Ed Institutions Need the Basics

Today’s universities lead innovative research programs — developing robots, curing diseases, and finding alternate fuel sources. In contrast to these cutting-edge endeavors is the fact that the

university probably runs on antiquated internal management systems.

The danger in an antiquated system, for any business process, is that information accuracy becomes compromised. The system might not have been configured for the higher education environment. Updates might never have been installed. And user adoption could be low, raising the administrative responsibility of system owners and primary users.

Updating system automation doesn’t have to be a massive overhaul. In particular, performance management systems might be one of the easiest to move from manual, paper-based processes to an online system.

Higher education institutions achieve three things with automation:

1.     Increased user adoption: SaaS systems make it easy for individuals to manage their own information, rate their own performance, maintain their goals, and even provide feedback to other employees.

2.     Reduced costs: While the upfront cost of a system upgrade or installation might hurt the budget, over the long run, universities can save money on administration and paper management. Additionally, everyone saves time because it's clear who’s filled out their reviews and who’s behind. System notifications are a faster way to communicate than chasing down every staff and faculty member’s review.

3.     Flexibility: Performance management has to be meaningful for employees in order to really have an impact. Customizing the competencies is another easy way to make sure that, say, an aerodynamics professor and the undergraduate admissions director are getting the same performance management.

Look into systems such as Reviewsnap when it's time to upgrade your performance management solution. Find a provider that understands the challenges of a higher education institution and can help get the most value from the solution.