Kathi Enderes – HR Tech 2024 – Breaking Free From Outdated Pay Practices

Connect with Kathi:

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Connect with David:

• • 

• david.turetsky@salary.com

Podcast Manager, Karissa Harris:

• HRDataLabs@salary.com

 

Production by Affogato Media

Resources:

• Josh Bersin Company
• Salary.com Consulting practice
• HR Data Labs Season 8 Episode 21
• HR Data Labs Season 8 Episode 19

• “In all areas of HR . . . if we speak our own language, business won’t understand it and you’re not going to gain any credibility.”

 Announcer: 0:01

The world of business is more complex than ever. The world of human resources and compensation is also getting more complex. Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources. Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data and people analytics can have on your organization. This podcast is sponsored by salary.com Your source for data technology and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now here are your hosts, David Turetsky and Dwight Brown.

 

David Turetsky: 0:38

hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky, and we are recording live from the HR Technology Conference here in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the Mandalay Bay exposition center. I have the pleasure, or the honor to be speaking to Kathi Enderes. How

 

Kathi Enderes: 0:54

I'm great, David! Thanks for having me. are you, Kathi?

 

David Turetsky: 0:57

Isn't this an amazing couple of days we've been here?

 

Kathi Enderes: 1:00

Oh my god, so much energy, so many vendors. I'm exhausted well.

 

David Turetsky: 1:04

And what's fascinating about this year is it's just so much bigger. There's so many more products to

 

Kathi Enderes: 1:07

It's so big. Yeah, it's so big. And of look at. course, everybody is talking about AI and mentioning AI, and it's very different than last year, where it was just a little blimp, and now it's everywhere.

 

David Turetsky: 1:23

The only booth that I've seen that doesn't have AI in it or on it is over there, the Omaha Steaks. But next year, I think they're gonna have an AI cow.

 

Kathi Enderes: 1:32

They have the virtual steak

 

David Turetsky: 1:34

the virtual steak that you can eat, change it to a different one, maybe get a different cut, have it cooked a different way? But no, it's really kind of fascinating. Everybody around here is all AI.

 

Kathi Enderes: 1:47

It's all AI. It's all everywhere.

 

David Turetsky: 1:50

Yes, isn't that crazy?

 

Kathi Enderes: 1:51

It is crazy.

 

David Turetsky: 1:52

Just took everything by storm.

 

Kathi Enderes: 1:54

Absolutely, absolutely. But yet, when I'm talking with some of the buyers, some of the companies, most of them are not ready yet, right? Most of them are like, you see the tech vendors go exponentially with all the features and all the functionalities, and meanwhile, the companies are still stuck, right? They're like, oh well my IT department is blocking everything, right? We can't use generative AI at all in the company. And so, yeah,

 

David Turetsky: 2:20

Well, actually, I've been talking a lot of people about that being the smart move for now, until you create the right risk strategy, the right guard walled garden strategy, yeah, so that our create our trade seekers aren't walking out the door, our data is not walking out the door, and even the the small, innocuous questions we're gonna be asking to chatGPT 4 or or Gemini or the other copilot. You know, those questions have your IP address attached to them. They have your company name probably attached to them. You probably use your email address to sign up from your company. And so you're asking things to these to these bots, and it knows what you're asking and now has ingested that?

 

Kathi Enderes: 3:00

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, the whole thing about their own data being clean and good, and can you rely on it? Can you trust it? I mean, these are all important questions for sure.

 

David Turetsky: 3:13

And before I get into this, because this is exactly what I want to talk to you about, and we're going to talk to other things. What's one fun thing that no one knows about, Kathi that we can give an update on?

 

Kathi Enderes: 3:23

Well, one fun thing, and I'm going to embarrass myself a little bit, and I'm just going to say it, because it just happened.

 

David Turetsky: 3:28

Okay.

 

Kathi Enderes: 3:29

A couple of weeks ago, I was here, actually in

 

David Turetsky: 3:30

Oh my God Vegas too, for the Oracle Cloud, well, conference. And I was walking with my heels to a very nice restaurant over one of these bridges in Vegas, right over one of these bridges, and I was in a little bit of a hurry, and there were, was one of these great on the floor, and my heel, my stiletto heel, got stuck.

 

Kathi Enderes: 3:47

And I splat it all on the floor. And this grate fell away. And everybody was looking all these tourists. They were taking pictures. They looked at me, and I was on the floor with my shoe and the grate on the other side, very embarrassing.

 

David Turetsky: 4:03

Oh, no, are you okay?

 

Kathi Enderes: 4:04

I'm always all fine, but I was, of course, it was so embarrassing. And I told that story too to one of our business contacts, and afterwards, from that same company, I met some other people the next day, and they all asked me, you're the lady with the shoe? And I'm like, Yes, I'm the lady with the shoe.

 

David Turetsky: 4:21

I'm so sorry, Kathi.

 

Kathi Enderes: 4:23

So nobody should know this, but some people already know about me.

 

David Turetsky: 4:26

My gosh

 

Kathi Enderes: 4:27

Not very flattering

 

David Turetsky: 4:28

No pictures. So

 

Kathi Enderes: 4:29

There's no pictures, I hope none of the tourists took pictures of me on the floor. But nothing happened. So I was, I was happy about that.

 

David Turetsky: 4:36

We're gonna use some artificial intelligence and create a picture. No, kidding. I'm kidding. We're not gonna do that

 

Kathi Enderes: 4:41

And the shoe didn't even get hurt. Somebody asked me when I told the story like the most important question is, how is the shoe?

 

David Turetsky: 4:47

It wouldn't be my first, I would say, how are you?

 

Kathi Enderes: 4:54

No you did, you said are you okay?

 

David Turetsky: 4:55

But no

 

Kathi Enderes: 4:56

The shoe is good too

 

David Turetsky: 4:57

Okay. Well, I'm glad both of you have survived that very embarrassing, and I'm glad you're both okay, oh my goodness! Now let's transition to some of the really cool questions that we get to talk about. Because one of the reasons why I love podcasting with you, especially is I learned so much. So no, I'm serious. So let's get to the first one. The first one is really about the evolution of compensation and what you've seen from a process and a technology perspective, in what you've been thinking about or what you've been researching or talking to clients, where has compensation been? Where do you think it's going?

 

Kathi Enderes: 5:40

Well, where it's been? It's been in the 1980s.

 

David Turetsky: 5:44

Yes!

 

Kathi Enderes: 5:45

It's been stuck in the 1980s for the most part. In most companies, they're using spreadsheets. They're not thinking about transparency, communication. They're not thinking about, how can we open it up? How can we tailor it for employees? How can we personalize it? It's behind the curtains. It's behind closed doors, not tech enabled meanwhile. I mean, look around here, all these AI companies here. Hardly any of them are compensation related, right? They're all talent acquisition, employee experience, learning, whatever. Except for Salary.com and that's where we

 

David Turetsky: 6:17

Well except for Salary.com! are! But I mean, you're one of the outliers. If you look at all the other ones, obviously it's not really there yet. It has been stuck in the 80s, as we said, stuck in very top down, not very transparent, not very employee centered at all. Right.

 

Kathi Enderes: 6:37

Meanwhile, of course, it's the most important thing that you can do for the employee experience, because I guarantee you all the other things won't matter so much if people don't feel they're paid well.

 

David Turetsky: 6:47

Absolutely, it frustrates them. It disengages them. It can. It may not confuse them, necessarily, but it will certainly distract them.

 

Kathi Enderes: 6:55

It totally distracts them. And it's, it's, yeah, it's especially now with inflation and everything and employees. I mean, I just read a story study where I think every other American is living paycheck to paycheck, and even people with six figure earnings live paycheck to paycheck. So it's, it's, it's a really big deal.

 

David Turetsky: 7:19

And if they're not living paycheck to paycheck, they're one mistake or one illness or one accident or something away from it and they'll lose their job!

 

Kathi Enderes: 7:30

That's right.

 

David Turetsky: 7:30

And so we are in an economy that is unforgiving. We're in a time where people are getting laid off left and right. And the the knowledge worker is, is really kind of, well it's not unique anymore, and it's what the economy we've been living in, there a lot of other ways of getting that data or getting that those skills. So.

 

Kathi Enderes: 7:54

Yeah, no, it's, it's so true, yeah. So compensation really key to the employee experience, more so than anything else, and very insular right now. So we feel that it has to open up into other disciplines, into other areas of HR and the business, quite frankly, to not just be about compensation, because compensation is really not just about the money. It's about other things, right? It's about, yes, of course, it's about the money side. It's about pay for performance. It's about pay equity, of course, very important. It's about but I also, can I build a career here?

 

David Turetsky: 8:32

Yes

 

Kathi Enderes: 8:32

Can I have my essay here in this company? Does it feel like a culture where I want to want to work?

 

David Turetsky: 8:37

right

 

Kathi Enderes: 8:38

Does it feel like I have flexibility to do my job how I want to do it? Do I have the tools and resources? We showed our compensation framework once to a group of total rewards leaders, some of them said to me, we don't do, I don't do career, so don't have this on there! I'm like but an employee doesn't care!

 

David Turetsky: 8:56

Right

 

Kathi Enderes: 8:56

Who does it, right? For them, it's all part of the package.

 

David Turetsky: 8:59

Not my job is not a good answer employee.

 

Kathi Enderes: 9:02

Exactly! Because an employee doesn't understand this, and nor should they, right? They don't understand what compensation and benefits,

 

David Turetsky: 9:09

exactly

 

Kathi Enderes: 9:10

payroll!

 

David Turetsky: 9:10

Those are all walls that we've artificially put up between the HR groups, because each of those HR groups needed to have, you know, functional, well, functional alignment, but, but, but functional focus.

 

Kathi Enderes: 9:24

That's right, exactly.

 

David Turetsky: 9:25

But, but now we see with the pay transparency laws like in Colorado, where they've said, Listen, I don't care compensation if it's your problem or if it's your job, you need to publish career frameworks, and you need to have accurate job descriptions, and you need to provide that to employees. Well, that means that now they have to dust off those skills or get new skills to be able to create or hire consultants, by the way, to be able to develop those things. Because saying it's not my job isn't going to help you with the state of Colorado.

 

Kathi Enderes: 9:55

Yeah, or you work across the company, right? Work with the learning and development team to develop career frameworks, work with talent acquisition to get the right job descriptions and with the business, of course, work across the company, not just in your silos.

 

David Turetsky: 10:12

And I think those silos have to come down. We see that recruiting is evolving. And with pay transparency, again, we see that recruiting and compensation have to really spend much more time together and have to become best friends, because they're going to need to rely on each other to be able to post these ranges and be able to make sure that those are accurate, and they're also that they're relevant.

 

Kathi Enderes: 10:35

Relevant, exactly and not too broad, right? I mean, we've all seen these ranges that are like 80,000 to 800,000! Well, I mean, what's that? What's that, does that mean? Or not posted at all! I still see those that are not posted.

 

David Turetsky: 10:49

Well. And one of the things that I'm talking to companies about, and I've had a lot of conversations with clients about this, is, well, what's your strategy be across the country? And are actually globally, now with EU's pay Transparency Regulations, you know, where do I go to take or do I go each individual municipality or each individual state and do each one separately? No, choose the one that's the most rigorous and do that across your entire company. Embrace it.

 

Kathi Enderes: 11:17

Choose the highest bar, not the lowest bar, right? Because in the end of the day, it's going to help you as a company anyway, because it's going to help you have more pay equity, more pay like fairer pay, basically. And we know from all of our studies that's actually one of the most important factors that's driving business outcomes, and CEO wants it. By the way, CEOs absolutely want pay equity, but yet, most organizations can't do it.

 

David Turetsky: 11:41

But, but that flies in the face of a lot of what I've seen with leaders in the past, and what I've seen with survey results in the past, which say, Yeah, but we don't want to share everything, and we don't want to be too open and pay transparency shouldn't be everything that's not Pay transparency, that's that's being cagey, or that's being evasive.

 

Kathi Enderes: 12:03

Well, and I think you need to go beyond the letter of the law!

 

David Turetsky: 12:07

Right

 

Kathi Enderes: 12:07

Actually, look at if you're just posting on job descriptions, because the law requires it to do, what about employees? Why couldn't employees see it?

 

David Turetsky: 12:16

Exactly

 

Kathi Enderes: 12:16

That's where companies are going. I mean, we've talked with SAP, for example, not the software provider, but the company they share for all of their over 100,000 employees worldwide in SAP and the SAP system, you can see salary ranges, basically for everybody, not the individual salary, of course, what everybody makes, but of course, salary ranges for all levels, not just for your job functions, but any for job functions and executives too! So they see all of these salary ranges and it's right there. Rather than saying, oh, I need to look outside and a job maybe it's a job posting there, and then I have to scrape it and cobble it together, they said, no, why wouldn't we show it to our employees? Why would we be more transparent to job seekers than internal people?

 

David Turetsky: 13:00

Well, and some of the laws that are coming out in the US say, and in fact, this is part of the Massachusetts law, is that you need to be able to provide people, not only with candidates, with the salary range, but also anybody who wants to post internally, they have to be shown the salary ranges as well.

 

Kathi Enderes: 13:16

That's right! And so that's what these companies are doing. Other companies are doing this too, and it's it needs to be easy to do. It needs to be easy to see. And why wouldn't you share it? Or do you have something to hide? I mean, that's

 

David Turetsky: 13:27

Oh yeah!

 

Announcer: 13:29

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David Turetsky: 13:40

So do you think that there needs to be a little bit of a, what do I call it, a reboot, on all of the documentation, on all training with this, because we use a lot of terminology in compensation, HR, I mean comparation, range, penetration, yeah, like they're not statisticians. They don't understand what's the median of the market. They don't care!

 

Kathi Enderes: 14:00

They don't understand this.

 

David Turetsky: 14:01

Nor should they! How do we translate that? How do we simplify it? How do we make these things more accessible, more practical, simpler I guess?

 

Kathi Enderes: 14:10

Communication is so key. Communication of both your strategy, your compensation philosophy, how we pay and then also how you portray these salary ranges, for example, or compensation models, or any of those kind of things, is really key. And I think you hit it right on the head, it's so important to simplify it and not use HR speech, because I guarantee you nobody's going to know what this means. So nobody's going to want to learn this right?

 

David Turetsky: 14:37

And it also means we have to go back to the

 

Kathi Enderes: 14:38

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that in drawing board on a lot of the compensation plans we've created. Because if you've read a bonus plan lately, you know there are some people who... when I was at Morgan Stanley, I general, in all areas of HR is critically important. If we used to have to talk to the heads of investment banking and say, here's what an employee stock option is. It's not a tradable option. It's not what you're doing. Thing. This is something that you're granted. It's got a vesting schedule. You know, this is why we do it. Blah, blah, blah. There's speak our own language, business won't understand it, and you're forfeiture, there's other things. And you know, you because this is so emotional, because this is now part of their comp. They've never had it before. They used to get cash, and now they're getting restricted stock and options and things. And you really have to go back to simple stuff, even if not going to gain any credibility if you speak about you think this person is one of the most brilliant people in the world!

 

David Turetsky: 15:24

Right

 

Kathi Enderes: 15:24

And just a business leader really care things that the business doesn't care about or doesn't about employee experience? No, they don't care about understand. If you talk about honestly, employee experience is productivity. They care about performance. They care about like, retention and and does my customer actually get that service that they need? And that's all part of employee experience. But if you talk with the HR speech, it's, you won't another one. It's such a buzz word. get really get to the business results you need to get to.

 

David Turetsky: 16:06

And really, you mentioned it before. These things need to be business processes, not HR processes. To be business and getting the leadership, getting the CEO, getting the people who run the company to be 100% behind. This means we have to get out of our lane. We have to start speaking their language. We have to stop being afraid when the CEO calls. We need to embrace when the CEO calls and say, Hey, I can't believe you called. It's so wonderful. Hey, I've got these things to talk to you about.

 

Kathi Enderes: 16:34

I know, I'd go a step further. I would say, can we bring these to the CEO to tell them you should really, you need to care about this. If they don't care about it today. I need to show you why you need to care about pay equity, for example, because it's critically important for your business!

 

David Turetsky: 16:50

Do we need if we're going to do that, do we need to make an ROI? Do we need to make a business case for these things? Or do we just say, Listen, this is the law. This is what we have to do. Or, you know, you see what I'm saying?

 

Kathi Enderes: 17:04

Yeah, no, I totally see it. I think there's a I mean, saying it's the law is, of course, the easy way out, right? You could say, oh, well, we can't break the law. So here's the compliance reason. I think that's it always runs the risk that you only do what the law requires, which is usually not what you need to be doing, because really, pay transparency is only a step in the right direction to pay equity, and that's what you really want to have, right? Just because you post your salary ranges, you could still hire all the men of the higher end and all the women on the low end, for example, you still have pay inequities, so you still need to focus on, what do you really want to solve for? Why is it a business imperative for my business make that case to the to the CEO, to the leadership team, because they need to be on board. Because if you want to make it right,

 

David Turetsky: 17:53

Absolutely

 

Kathi Enderes: 17:54

like it's going to require investment.

 

David Turetsky: 17:56

Do you see boards of well, especially boards of public companies, do you see them getting involved more often in compensation matters, or is it really where leadership and HR and internal HR leaders are dealing with these issues on their own?

 

Kathi Enderes: 18:14

I think the boards are getting more and more involved in that because of the regulatory requirements and the landscape and all of that. So they hear about that, and they and by their nature, they always have to govern risk, right? So they need to fend off risks. And so I think that helps us in HR, when we then go want to go a step further than what the law requires. So if that case is coming from the boards, then you can say, okay, yes, we need to do this absolutely, but we also need to do all these other things to make sure that the pay is not just transparent, but it's also equitable and fair and consistently embedded in all the processes that we have. And you mentioned it too, embedding and recruiting, of course, making sure that also all the recruiting processes are unbiased, that you mitigate bias there. But then also, you think about promotions, you think about performance management, you think about career opportunities, you think about learning opportunities, all succession planning, on and on and on. All of these need to be even location decisions in a way, right you can, you can think through all of the business decisions and think about them from an equity lens.

 

David Turetsky: 19:23

And everything that you just mentioned needs to be documented in ways that people can reach out, find them and be able to understand them, because they're making their own personal decisions too. So whether it's decisions about their career, where they're living, how they're going to drive their careers. Do you see any move to having these things being posted on internets, or is it a manager gets it? Manager communicates? Are we using manager as a fulcrum here, or are we doing something different? Is there a different technology that we should be using?

 

Kathi Enderes: 19:56

Well, managers are right now for those companies that are doing it somewhat well, they are educating managers and making sure that managers can actually communicate that in an easy to communicate way, and that they first understand it themselves, and they understand their own behavior and their own impact and their own decisions on that. So training managers and upskilling managers on that is critically important in an easy to understand way. So Schneider Electric, for example, they in their quest for pay equity, they have, like, really revamped all of their manager training to include that, not separate training, right? Not saying, Oh, now you got to go to this pay equity training, because everybody's like, Oh, now I got to do the pay equity training.

 

David Turetsky: 20:39

They roll their eyes and go oh no, another HR

 

Kathi Enderes: 20:42

Okay great, I'm gonna go there, I'm gonna sit training! through it, and then I'm gonna forget all about it. But they put it into all of their existing management development programs where it fits, right? So they revising that, and I think that's the way to go on the manager enablement. I think absolutely like making sure that you communicated, though, directly to employees as well that they have access to the information. AI can really help with that, by the way, because you can communicate with them in a personalized way, right? Personalization of communication, all of that through internet or through other media, whatever the best medium for for the for the employee is, I think that's that's really where the next step should go to. And then if they have questions, of course, as the manager talks with them, the manager has to be right there. If it's an HR communication, it's guaranteed to fail, right? Because if HR just says, Oh, here's a big pay transparency thing. Now please pay attention to that. Managers are going to like, well, not gonna work.

 

David Turetsky: 21:42

They roll their eyes, and they say again, another HR thing, another thing that they're trying to get me to do instead, if it become, if it comes from leadership, and it gets built into their training, then it's their way of being able to communicate to the employee and be able to connect to the employee,

 

Kathi Enderes: 21:57

that's right

 

David Turetsky: 21:57

then it drives deeper relationships!

 

Kathi Enderes: 21:59

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's have talked with companies that said we don't want to communicate to people that they have a pay equity increase because, and I said, why? Didn't want to? Oh but because then they think they were not

 

David Turetsky: 22:13

right

 

Kathi Enderes: 22:14

paid fairly before, but that's a really, like, short sighted way, because employere really will value it, and they will say, Oh, my God, the company is actually looking out for me. I never complained, and yet, still they're doing this!

 

David Turetsky: 22:25

That's trust. I mean,

 

Kathi Enderes: 22:26

It's trust.

 

David Turetsky: 22:27

You're not trusting that the employee is going to be mature about this, and you're basically saying knee jerk reaction. I'm going to give them an increase, but I'm not going to tell them why. Okay, well, that's not the good reason to do it. What's the ROI of that increase then?

 

Kathi Enderes: 22:41

Exactly, yeah.

 

David Turetsky: 22:44

Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this. Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind. Go to salary.com/HRDLconsulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today. I want to shift yours for a second. I want to ask you a question about pay for performance. If you don't mind.

 

Kathi Enderes: 23:15

Yeah, let's talk about that. Gosh, we need another full podcast on this one!

 

David Turetsky: 23:20

You're gonna like this one, though, because I've been talking to companies about retiring merit programs and instead using a cost of living adjustment, or a flat adjustment for pay increases, for merit, for salary increase. But then using an incentive program. It doesn't have to be, you know, 30 40, 50% of base, but using a targeted incentive program that then replaces merit, and it becomes the mechanism for dealing with performance issues. So you do the performance valuation instead of saying, Oh, the 2 or 3% you're getting is now 1% or zero, which I don't know how that helps anything. Instead, take the 10, the 5, 10% you're going to give them in terms of an incentive or that you should be, or you could, and make that variable based on not only company performance, to drive the thought process of as a team or as a, you know, as an individual performance. How did you do? You get more or you get less based on your performance.

 

Kathi Enderes: 24:23

Yeah, that's exactly actually what we have seen most successful. Because when you do, when you use the base salary for pay for performance, you are introducing automatically pay inequities, right? Somebody has a great year, because it's especially on the on the upside, right? Somebody has a great year you give them a significantly higher increase on the on the base side, well, next year, what about all these other people? Then they are further ahead, and sometimes they get, if they are high performer consistently, to get further and further ahead. Is that really like, it's gonna, like, basically reduce your your pay equity potential. So when? And also, I think, on the other side, when you think about what you can actually do with a with an incentive pay, with a one time pay, basically you can go much higher because you're not increasing your cost line, right, you do it once!

 

David Turetsky: 25:14

Exactly! Oh, I love that! So what you're saying is, is that I can pay for the great performance within a year, and that stays within that year.

 

Kathi Enderes: 25:21

Exactly

 

David Turetsky: 25:22

But next year we're all reset.

 

Kathi Enderes: 25:23

We start again. Because, who knows? Because, like, just because you had a great year one year, right? It doesn't mean, like, you should indefinitely get more and more compensated. And from a company perspective, of course, you carry that load, right?

 

David Turetsky: 25:35

That's right

 

Kathi Enderes: 25:35

You carry that forward versus when you pay it once!

 

David Turetsky: 25:37

Exactly

 

Kathi Enderes: 25:38

Pay it once, and that way you can make it bigger. Because I guarantee. I mean, I see this so many times. Employees don't like it either. They talk with each other, right? And somebody got a 5% increase, somebody getting 5.2% increase, and they're like, why?

 

David Turetsky: 25:51

Why did they get more than me?

 

Kathi Enderes: 25:52

And it usually it's a few hundred dollars, right? So it's not even big money, but they get so hung up on the actual increase percentage, why not make it dependent on market? Right? Market condition, cost of living whatever?

 

David Turetsky: 26:04

Yeah, right.

 

Kathi Enderes: 26:04

Make it dependent on the market, how the market has moved for those jobs. So make it a market increase, not a merit increase. And the varied is, is the bonus, it's the incentive. But pay for performance.

 

David Turetsky: 26:15

Love it! We are so aligned on this. It's

 

Kathi Enderes: 26:17

Totally the same way!

 

David Turetsky: 26:18

but, but I love, I love your thought process around how I can pay those jobs now more similarly, because we're not introducing another difference in pay, the pay can stay similar, can stay the same, actually

 

Kathi Enderes: 26:31

exactly

 

David Turetsky: 26:32

in terms of the proportion of pay to each person in that job, because now I'm not introducing yet another factor into it, merit's taken out of that completely.

 

Kathi Enderes: 26:41

Exactly, exactly. And I think it simplifies the process too. And it could allow organizations to actually maybe do more frequent pay? Yeah, pay increases or bonus, because business doesn't happen annually, right? But business happens really on a quarterly basis. But yet, pay only happens on an annual basis. That's kind of also not working how the business works.

 

David Turetsky: 27:06

We also have distinctions in like administrative or non exempt or support or manufacturing jobs, where we say these are going to be on step rates, and these other ones are going to be, you know, once a year. But they're not getting merit. They're just getting cost of living. Now, if you're doing it across all of your levels, across all the different types of jobs, in a similar way. Now there's no artificial distinction!

 

Kathi Enderes: 27:26

That's right, exactly.

 

David Turetsky: 27:27

There's really no difference between a professional and a non exempt when it comes to a merit increase.

 

Kathi Enderes: 27:31

Yeah, why would you? Why would you do it differently?

 

David Turetsky: 27:34

Going back to your point before about we live in the 80s!

 

Kathi Enderes: 27:35

Exactly! It's like we've always done it like this. When you ask companies, why do you do it like this? Well, this is how we've always done it, but employees have moved on. Right? Employee expectations have moved on. Technology has moved on. Businesses are changing rapidly, but yet this is still static and kind of, yeah.

 

David Turetsky: 27:57

It's disappointing. I mean, I've been doing competition for 35 years, we still hold on to some of the old precepts, because this is what's worked, and this is what's always, I mean, it hasn't always worked, but, but this, this is what we know.

 

Kathi Enderes: 28:10

This is what we know! That's it! Exactly, this is what we know.

 

David Turetsky: 28:13

I mean, other than Salary.com, because there's a lot of innovation there, but because that's my boss. But other than that, there's very little innovation that's been happening. I'm sure you've seen this, but I get RFPs now that are looking for job evaluation, point factor job evaluation. I did point factor job evaluation when I graduated from college in 1989 and we used to do replication. We used to regression analysis to figure out job points. You know, the know how, skills and abilities and working conditions?

 

Kathi Enderes: 28:44

Yeah

 

David Turetsky: 28:44

Kathi, that's, it's still happening!

 

Kathi Enderes: 28:46

It's still happening! And, I mean, if you look at all the like grading systems and and job bands and all that, it's still the same that we've done for the last 40 50, years and but when you think what was in place in 1989 we didn't have smartphones. We didn't have phones, cell phones, even we didn't have the internet. We didn't have AI, we didn't like all of this. The world was completely different.

 

David Turetsky: 29:12

It was, I mean, we barely had computers on every desk!

 

Kathi Enderes: 29:15

Barely! Desktops, right?

 

David Turetsky: 29:18

No, that, well,

 

Kathi Enderes: 29:18

There weren't desktops.

 

David Turetsky: 29:20

Yeah, I went to one, I went to interview for one manufacturing, auto manufacturing company, and they said, Well, here's the HR computer. It's in the middle of the floor. If you need it, you can borrow it for that time. I said, I've been using computers at college now for four years, and before that, on my own, why can't I have one on my desk? Well, that's kind of selfish! Everybody shares this one!

 

Kathi Enderes: 29:40

Was too expensive, right? That's why you can't because they couldn't afford it.

 

David Turetsky: 29:44

But they also didn't have that ROI. As to,

 

Kathi Enderes: 29:46

Why would you need one? Well, why would you need one? You are an HR person. Why do you need one?

 

David Turetsky: 29:51

They hadn't gotten to that level. So that's what I'm saying, is, yeah, to your point, the the innovation cycles that we're in right now, the technologies here, I mean, we're at the HR Tech. Yeah, it's starting to happen, and we're starting to drive there.

 

Kathi Enderes: 30:03

Because when you think about what could be possible with AI, when you could personalize completely the pay, benefits, all of that, not just the statement, but let people, for example, tailor this year I want to have more, maybe more bonus at stake, because this year maybe I don't have a big mortgage or whatever next year. I want to have a much more, like less at stake thing, like all of those kind of things. You could let people tailor

 

David Turetsky: 30:29

Well, okay, but then the problem with that is, then there's that constructive receipt. And so now we have to deal with the election. That has to be a election in the year prior. Remember, the whole thing about qualified plans are, if I make you can do deferrals of your base salary into bonus, or bonus into your 401, K or whatever, but you can't do it in the year happens. It has to be the year before.

 

Kathi Enderes: 30:50

Well, and then it doesn't really make sense,

 

David Turetsky: 30:53

no

 

Kathi Enderes: 30:54

because it's not flexible.

 

David Turetsky: 30:55

But that's the government not keeping up with technology.

 

Kathi Enderes: 30:57

Yeah. I mean, that's, of course, that's all. That's always the case. I know we talked about how tech companies are ahead of organizations, and the governance government is even slower, right to adopt so, yeah. I mean, that's, that's a whole different

 

David Turetsky: 31:12

We could actually have another podcast on that completely

 

Kathi Enderes: 31:14

That too, and a pay for performance we could talk about another few hours too, because lots of, lots of opportunities. I mean, performance management is such a big topic, continues to be a big topic!

 

David Turetsky: 31:25

All the time, all the time.

 

Kathi Enderes: 31:27

It's like it's never going away. Nobody gets it right anytime.

 

David Turetsky: 31:39

Actually, what I'm going to do is I want to ask you back, and we're going to do one specifically on performance

 

Kathi Enderes: 31:44

Oh, let's do that! I can't wait. I can't wait management. because I have so many things to say about that.

 

David Turetsky: 31:49

Awesome. Thank you, Kathi. I appreciate your time. You're awesome.

 

Kathi Enderes: 31:53

Thank you, David. It's so great to talk with you anytime. I know, we could talk for another few hours on comp and tech and all of that.

 

David Turetsky: 32:00

Exactly.

 

Kathi Enderes: 32:00

It was great, thanks.

 

David Turetsky: 32:02

Thank you. Take care. Have a great, well, get home safely.

 

Kathi Enderes: 32:06

Thank you

 

David Turetsky: 32:06

Take care.

 

Announcer: 32:08

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