How Can I Benchmark Compensation with Other Software Companies in India Quickly?

Hi Team,
I am working as Sr. HR Manager in a Medium Size Software Company. We want to Benchmark our compensation with at least 10 other software companies in India.
Can you suggest the process also How do I do the same. I have to submit the report to my Head office in a week's time.
Looking forward to help from HR fraternity
Thanks
Srividya

Hi Srividya,

Regarding the Compensation survey, the following points are most important:

1. Look for competitors in the market who are at the same level as your company (approximately staff size, projects, market standards, etc.).
2. Competitors should be from the same city.
3. Develop a result-oriented survey questionnaire.
4. Look for colleges offering professional courses (MBA, BBM, BBA) and provide them the Salary survey project and target Companies. It would be a benefit for the students as they will have live experience in the salary survey, which is very important in the HR stream. All the above needs to be planned well in advance, and the same procedure can be followed every year. The result of the survey would be 75-80% accurate. This is one of the best methods but tedious and time-consuming too.

Regards,
Lakshmi

Hi Srividya,

It would be very important for you to first identify the positions you want to conduct the survey because the designations are a bit dicey and can give you very wrong information, which may not be able to fill the gap of the level of responsibilities assigned. The next step would be to identify the companies from which you are losing employees and companies that are in similar products and processes, and of course, your market competitors. All this information shall give you a logical base and a process of accuracy for your survey.

The next step would be pretty simple as you need to only compare the positions and their compensation with each other to derive an ideal package for the positions you primarily identified.

Thanks and Regards,
Manasi

Hi,

Following are some of my suggestions:
- Identify similar organizations existing in your city.
- Check and compare their salary structure with respect to specific grades and how the compensation is determined in their industry. Generally, other company HR personnel cannot provide this information. Senior officials in your industry or the HR Head need to address this. Conduct a survey for at least 3-4 companies.
- Similarly, conduct the same comparison for the 'N' number of positions you need to compare with your salary standards. If there is a deviation of about 5%, I don't think you need to worry about it. Any deviation above 10% requires focused attention.
- When conducting the survey, prepare a set of questionnaires that need to be circulated to other companies for analysis.
- Additionally, focus on analyzing attrition before making a final decision.

With regards,
Srinivasa Rao G

Well, the compensation process requires identifying the business partner (Salary Surveyor) who will guide you on how to go about it.

Once you identify the business partner, you need to identify the peer cut. What is peer cut? Peer Cut is a consortium of companies with whom you want to benchmark your salary.

There are 4 options to choose from:

1) Identify the companies having similar business or products.
2) Identify the companies from where you lose your talent and you hire your talent (Most Common Practice).
3) Identify the companies having similar revenue and employee size in the same group of business.
4) Identify the companies where you want to be in the next one year or so.

Ideally, companies choose the 2nd point, but every company has a different philosophy of compensation.

Once you are done with the peer cut, you need to work on the Job Codes and Job Description.

I must tell you that the entire compensation process is based on Peer Cut, Job Codes, and Job Description. If you fail to identify the correct peer group or job codes or job descriptions, your process may fail.

Once you are done with placing employees on job codes according to job descriptions, then you are ready to benchmark the salary with the peer cut.

Now you can find out the Market Gap on different percentiles. Ask your company management where they want to place their employees. Here you can link the merit increase based on the performance of the employees.

You can make a matrix for merit increase for every grade.

Let me know if anyone has any questions. This process is ideal for IT companies.

Thanks, Mohit

Hi all,

I have recently joined this site and I work at a Singapore-based MNC - Invida India Pvt Ltd as an HR Executive in the OD department. I have been assigned the task of conducting a salary benchmarking exercise. Our company is of mid-size with 850 employees across India.

Could you please advise me on how to conduct this survey and what should be included in the questionnaire?

Thank you.