We seem to love to get granular with incentive plans. So many compensation professionals are tasked with not missing anything, they include darn near everything in their incentive plans. Increase revenue? CHECK! Manage safety? CHECK! Grow new clients? CHECK! Maintain old clients? CHECK! Focus on... Read More

Editor's Note:  Interested in a successful compensation career?  Chuck Csizmar shares some Classic tips! Whenever I come across self-help materials intended to assist Compensation practitioners with their professional growth I often notice an overly large emphasis on the technical side. ... Read More

Editor's Note:  What wisdom can Aristotle offer those of us who endeavor to make merit pay work? In a conversation about pay-for-performance a number of years ago, one of the participants drew a comparison between the challenge of making merit pay work and the classic dilemma the Tragedy of... Read More

Editor's Note: Motivation is a key objective for many of the plans and programs we devise.  But how well do we really understand and work to appreciate the variations and complexities of motivation?  Jim Brennan share some insights and conclusions in this Classic post. No one can motivate... Read More

Editor's Note:  Truly Classic (and invaluable) advice from Dan Walter.  Pay attention! A friend recently updated their status with the title to this article. Ironically, I saw it just as I got off a call with a client who  was explaining that somehow she was expected to serve as both the... Read More

Incentives remain one of the most powerful, and yet also one of the most misapplied, management tools out there.  While research has shown that group incentives can deliver significant return on investment, evidence abounds that our incentive design and implementation efforts often misfire or... Read More

As an independent advisor, I have often been called in to help with situations where compensation has become a very emotional and even intractable problem.  Having the opportunity to work with -- and through -- a lot of these situations over the years has taught me a few things. The biggest lesson... Read More

Experimentation, it seems, is on a lot of our minds lately. As one example, check out Mercer's great piece on Cultivating a Lab Mindset.  I agree with the direction of this thinking, that moving compensation (and all HR) programs and practices forward, at the ground level where most of us... Read More

I caught up recently with an old friend who works in an administrative position for a large professional services firm.  When I told her a little about what I do, she brought up a pet pay peeve of hers:  salary range maximums.  Having been in her role for nearly a decade, her salary has reached... Read More

Article after article tells us that we should halt our use of incentives because people aren't motivated by money.  Or because they are motivated by money, but to do the wrong things. I can't help feeling that many of them are missing the point. Many of the incentive... Read More