When we look at compensation, it has certainly increased from 2009, when the market bottomed out from a salary increase perspective. We conducted a global hi-tech salary survey and of the 115 different countries reporting in our increase budget section of the survey, in Q3 of 2011, only 5 reported a double digit increase and India was one of them. As we continue to emerge from the economic downturn, many organizations are curious to know when things are going to get back to “normal”; unfortunately we just need to understand that normal has changed and that the environment we are operating in now is the new normal. As far as organizations are concerned, the focus continues to be on performance and retention of top performers. The concern is primarily how to retain top talent and reward them appropriately. With smaller increases in budgets, organizations are being challenged with ways to motivate and retain their top performers without necessarily providing large salary increases. Whatever precious increase amounts are available, are being reserved for the top performers. In many situations, companies are looking at ways to tap into other areas within the total rewards architecture to do just that.

With reference to non-cash rewards, it has to be understood that while they may be non-cash benefits, there is invariably a cost to the company. Organizations are reaching out to employees and surveying to find out what they value. Smart organizations are carrying out extensive surveys to find out what their employees are looking for and then they are trying to align their benefits and rewards to the expectations of their employees. The focus of some companies has moved to other non-cash awards that are also very effective in retaining top performers. Every organization is different from each other, so one needs to find out what the employees are looking for, as a standard format will not work. For example, in a new start-up organization, the culture, expectations and priorities of the workforce are completely different from perhaps more stable or mature organizations.

As far as outsourcing is concerned, organizations have spent a lot of time in building infrastructure and now they need to recognize what things they can do well. It is a matter of assessing what their needs are, assessing their individual core competencies and then looking for the organizations that fill the gap. At Kenexa, we pride ourselves in providing the best in class content, technology and services to assist organizations in the acquisition, development and retention of top performers in order to drive success.

In the compensation space, we have the CompAnalyst product, a web-based tool for managing salary survey data and assessing whether employees are being paid competitively. CompAnalyst also provides job description development tools, supported by a large library of functional competency data. It is a complete solution that enables compensation teams to work more effectively, which allows them to spend less time crunching data and more time on strategic activities that add value to the organization.