They Can't Refuse Paying staff what they're worth means selling HR By Christopher Koch L ike stockbrokers, IS managers have had their share of experience with volatile markets. They've seen the value of their employees' skills rise faster than the Dow on a record day. For the Times' human resources department, that meant dealing with a request from IS to boost the salary of the lone analyst at the company familiar with SAP to compete with outside job offers. Like most companies, the Times has a compensation system that assumes slow growth in salaries and bonuses, and HR wasn't prepared to deal with pleas for dramatic base-salary increases, says Laura Boyd, compensation and benefits manager.
HR is there to get people to conform across the board, and that is a big problem.
S hifts in the market value of IT skills are felt most at smaller companies like the Times, where IT resources already are scarce. Kaya, information services financial systems manager, and Dahl, vice president of information technology, had exactly one SAP technology analyst in their department, Andy Rash. Replacing him would be difficult and expensive because he covered a lot of turf. Meanwhile, Boyd struggled to balance keeping Rash on staff with maintaining fairness in compensation across the company. One of them was Kevin Funk, a former Times financial analyst who jumped to ICS during the project.