How to Design a Compensation Survey Instrument
A compensation survey instrument is often designed as a way to gauge a company's level of competitiveness in the marketplace in terms of what kind of compensation packages it offers employees. The results of a compensation survey may be used to inform major changes in a company's policies, compensation plan or benefits offerings. To get useful information from a compensation survey, the instrument used needs to be well designed. Proper planning is required to develop an effective survey instrument.
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Instructions
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Determine the goals of the survey. Be as specific as possible in stating them. For example, a goal might be to determine where the company ranks in compensation and benefits compared to the competition for the 10 most difficult positions to fill.
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Prioritize the goals of the survey. Not all goals may be accomplished by one survey instrument or by surveying the same group of people. For example, you might need different survey instruments for union employees versus senior management employees.
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Create a list of the data necessary to meet the information goals you have set. For example, you may need hourly rates for some job grades and annual salary rates for other jobs. Or you may need information on benefits that are not related to compensation such as whether a company offers gym benefits, employee discounts or paid sick leave.
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Decide on the level of precision in the data you need to capture for each data element. For example, you may need to decide if you would be satisfied with knowing the range of salary paid to a specific job grade, if you need to know the exact salary paid to each person in the job grade at the current time.
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Create questions that will elicit the responses that will best give you the information you need. For example, if you only want to know the range of salary an employee is paid, your question could be designed to have a respondent check the box next to the current salary range. However, if you want to know the exact salary a respondent earns, then the question would require a fill-in-the-blank answer. Be sure your questions will elicit quantitative data if that is your desire, such as a specific numerical answer. Qualitative data can be elicited, but it is not as easy to categorize and analyze qualitative answers because there is so much room for interpretation. For example, asking employees how they like the current compensation system is unlikely to yield valuable responses. Asking them to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being "perfectly satisfied," gives you useful data you can analyze.
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Test the survey instrument with a small group of respondents before submitting it to your entire survey population. You may find that a question is not worded clearly or that respondents are not answering a question properly. Use the results from the test to make necessary changes to your survey instrument.
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Tips & Warnings
Keep the survey as short as possible. Unless responding is compulsory and you have a way to enforce a response, people are more likely to choose to respond to a short, focused survey.
References
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