Create salary bands for every role and location in your organisation
Why salary bands?
Implementing a structured approach to pay offers numerous benefits for organisations of all sizes. From ensuring fairness and transparency to aiding in talent retention and attraction, salary bands lay the foundation for a well-managed compensation system (Learn more about the benefits of salary bands).
A quick intro to salary bands
Before jumping into the spreadsheet, it’s important to understand what a typical salary structure looks like, and the terminology.
A salary structure and corresponding bands for one job family
A deep dive into one salary band
Salary band formulas
Salary band terminology aside, you need 3 things in order to build salary bands
A job architecturefor your organisation. This is comprised of the following elements listed below and gives you a structure from which to build your salary bands from and also ensure you’re comparing apples to apples when mapping back to the market.Reliable and relevant market dataThis could come from various sources such as ‘Give to get’ salary benchmarking providers like Radford, Figures, Pave, Mercer, Ravio, Figures, job boards, recruitment surveys, and not forgetting your recruitment team who speak to candidates every day!A compensation philosophyYour North star for making comp decisions. How competitive will you be in the market? Will you set the same market position for all of your roles? How will you pay in different locations? How wide will you set your salary bands? Do you want your salary bands to overlap between levels or not? Lots of decisions to make here 🙂
How the spreadsheet works
I’ve built salary bands for 70+ organisations and I've compiled the five most common salary band models into a single spreadsheet. The model you choose typically depends on the amount of market data available for a role and any particular challenges you face such as
- The model you choose typically depends on the amount of market data available for a role and any particular challenges you face such as
- You can use different models for different teams and don’t have to use the same model for the whole organisation.
- When you download the spreadsheet you have the option to use it in both Google Sheets and Excel.
- Toggle > below for videos and instructions on how each of the salary band models work and find the right one for you situation.
You have lots of data 😀
You don’t have much data or the data doesn’t make sense 😐
✅ The models will fill in the gaps for you when you don’t have market data for every level
✅ These models will help make sense of market data when it doesn’t ‘progress’ in a logical manner i.e. a lower level job is paid more than a higher level job (this can happen a lot!)
Salary bands in a box
I’ve put the most popular models into their own separate sheets so that you can quickly spin up salary bands for all your job families in one place. I call these ‘salary bands in a box 📦’.
Convert you salary bands into another location and currency
If you employ people in more than one country, you'll probably want to convert the salary bands into different currencies and cost of labour rates. The sheet called ‘Location salary band converter 🌍’ allows you to do just that. By entering details such as the currency and location differential (i.e. the differences in cost of labour vs your baseline market), you can quickly convert your salary bands, ensuring equitable compensation across different regions.
Top tips for designing your salary bands
Setting the width of your salary bands
Deciding on a stepped or overlapping band structure
FAQs
Whenever you're ready, there are 3️⃣ ways I can help you
If you’ve downloaded a template and would like help customising it, then you can book in a 30min session with me as a jumpstart to using it.
30mins = £90
Whether you’re unsure where to begin or you have some comp ‘stuff’ in place but lack confidence, book some time to chat it through with me.
This website was built without code using Notion + Super ⚡️ by Alistair
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