Live from World at Work Total Rewards 2026 with Special Guests Chelsea Hamilton & Sam Thomeier

[00:00:08] [SPEAKER_02] Welcome everyone to another very special episode of the HR and Payroll 2.0 Podcast. I'm Pete Tiliakos and we are live at the World at Work Total Rewards event here in San Antonio, Texas on the expo floor. And as always, I'm joined by the legendary Julie Fernandez. Welcome, Julie.

[00:00:21] [SPEAKER_00] Thanks so much, Pete. And I'm super excited to bring some of my favorite comp and total rewards experts on the whole planet here today, including Chelsea Hamilton, who runs our compensation HR practice. Go ahead and say hello. Hello. Thanks for having me and the feeling is mutual, very mutual. And Sam Thomeier, who I couldn't live without, he handles a lot of our relationships in this ecosystem.

[00:00:46] [SPEAKER_01] That's right. Yeah. Sometimes known as Julie's handler or the Julie whisperer at times. So yeah, super excited to be here. It's two and a half years almost to the day in the making that I'm finally on HR and Payroll 2.0. Yeah. Overdue, man. Thanks for having us. Yeah, appreciate it. This is great. Absolutely.

[00:01:05] [SPEAKER_00] Well, it seemed totally fitting because this entire conference and event is all about total rewards. And you guys are the be all end all of total rewards for a number of our clients. And I think this, I know this is my first time here. First timers as well.

[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Not first time in San Antonio, but yes, first time at the World at Work.

[00:01:26] [SPEAKER_02] We went to the Alamo yesterday, Julie and I did. Yes, we did. I don't know if you know that or not. There's no basement. Did you take some pictures? We did take pictures. Nice. I don't know if somebody's going to get that reference. Do you guys know that movie reference? No, no. Peewee Herman. Remember Peewee was looking for his bike at the base of the Alamo?

[00:01:40] [SPEAKER_04] Do you know Peewee Herman? Oh, I don't even know what it is.

[00:01:42] [SPEAKER_02] I heard there's a thing going on.

[00:01:44] [SPEAKER_04] His bike is there.

[00:01:45] [SPEAKER_02] Yes.

[00:01:46] [SPEAKER_04] One of our other colleagues took a picture with him. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:49] [SPEAKER_02] Who actually is literally obsessed with the Peewee Herman. I heard about that. I heard about that. Yeah, it's real. Anyway, no basement at the Alamo.

[00:01:56] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, that's awesome. We're also here, it's a special week where they're celebrating. It's like their quasi-Margie-Graw, right? Their fiesta. Yes. So a lot of river walk parades and things that, I don't know how that's going to work because it's kind of cold in the day out there.

[00:02:09] [SPEAKER_01] And the rainy San Antonio. Yeah. The Spurs won last night. Oh, did they? Game one.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_00] Another reason to celebrate.

[00:02:14] [SPEAKER_01] People were non-stop honking their horns and blaring music.

[00:02:17] [SPEAKER_00] I was wondering what that was for. Yeah. I figured like, I don't know.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_01] I thought I heard fireworks, so maybe that's what that was. It could have been, yeah.

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_04] There was some burnout, all kinds of things. I had a letter from the hotel under my hotel room door this morning apologizing for the noise.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_02] No.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_04] And telling me what it was for. It's like, okay.

[00:02:31] [SPEAKER_02] Never apologize for, I never think you should apologize for city pride. Yeah. Your city's rallying around a moment or something. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. You can get to sleep.

[00:02:41] [SPEAKER_00] I was looking for ambulances, but there were none. No. No ambulance. It was just pure fun. We were safe.

[00:02:48] [SPEAKER_02] So look, I think we're going to talk some total rewards today. Maybe we could start off. One of the things I was curious about is just what's hot right now? What are leaders, total reward leaders like? What are they thinking about? What are they worried about? What's keeping them up at night?

[00:03:01] [SPEAKER_04] I still think pay transparency continues to be a major issue, whatever that means. Right? It means something different for every company depending on what their philosophies are. But we continue to see some people who are kind of driving the needle towards more pay transparency and saying, you know, we're going to share everything and put it all out there. I would say there's an equal amount that are still really hesitant. A lot of times that comes down to they're not ready.

[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_04] They don't have their proverbial house in order yet to begin sharing and opening the floodgates, but still think there's still a lot of stigma or nerves right around. And pay is private. It's meant to be, it's very personal to people like shouldn't be talking about it. And so there's still a lot of working through people's own perceptions that have been developed over their own careers about, you know, what's normal behavior here? And like, are we sure that we want to put this out there?

[00:03:53] [SPEAKER_04] Is this actually a good thing? Yeah.

[00:03:54] [SPEAKER_02] Some people think it's competitive IP, right? Like this is what we do for our comp structure. But yeah, no, I hear you. It's causing a lot of angst for sure.

[00:04:01] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. It's interesting because I, you know, change is uncomfortable, right? There's obviously a lot of legislation that's, that's driving some of that. But I think that the, that the philosophy behind it has been kind of bubbling up for a while. Yeah. If you'll indulge me, I'll tell a little story. Yes, please. We love it. I'm a millennial just turned 40 this year. So I graduated from college in 2008. When I was graduating, they brought a bunch of speakers to talk to us as, you know, folks that are about to be going off into the workforce as new young professionals.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_01] They brought an HR professional to talk to us. And one of the things that she said was, what do you think is the easiest way you can get fired? And I, you know, lots of ideas were going through my mind.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_00] Could you talk about any of them? Probably not.

[00:04:42] [SPEAKER_01] No, not on this podcast. This is for families. And, uh, she said, if you talk about your pay outside of a one-on-one with your manager, that's the easiest way to get fired. And I remember thinking like, that doesn't make any sense. Like there's so much worse that you could do. But then I got into the workforce and I found out, she was right. Taboo. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And the only way, but people did talk about it. Once you gained some trust with your colleagues, it still was pretty shrouded in secrecy. But then, and then you started to realize why people weren't talking about it, right?

[00:05:11] [SPEAKER_01] Because they were afraid that they were going to get fired. They were afraid they're going to be in trouble. So fast forward the clock now, you know, almost 20 years. And obviously there's legislation that's driving some of this change, but I think HR professionals, people in compensation are also sort of responsible for kind of changing that narrative a little bit. And you see it with younger generations too, where it's much less of a thing. Yeah.

[00:05:34] [SPEAKER_01] But, you know, it's funny because that philosophy or that attitude towards, you know, towards keeping it a secret. Yeah. The way that it's shifting in the market now, you know, like I said, I don't think it's really driven by the law. I think it's more driven by kind of the culture of HR and how that's evolved over time. Right. It's a stigma.

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_00] Right. For sure. And don't we pass it on in some ways in our, even in our families, when families talk about, I mean, not your colleague, I'm your mother or your sister or whatever. And so there's a stigma that goes beyond the workplace, I feel.

[00:06:10] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I think the good news is, is that younger generations are used to having their whole lives exposed to the world online. Yeah. Why wouldn't you just be transparent with everything else? Yeah. You know, and share. So, you know, maybe that's, that's helpful for getting culturally getting, getting change going.

[00:06:25] [SPEAKER_04] Well, and there's so much information out there that like it or not, and whether that information is because you have some companies that are trying to lead the charge towards more transparency. So maybe it's not even driven by legislation. It's more of just, this is part of our culture, who we are, you know, we're trying to be more open. The more the cat gets out of the bag, right? There's no putting it back in. Right. Right. At this point, you as an employer can either show up and meet the moment or you can fall behind.

[00:06:52] [SPEAKER_04] And so I want to say, I think it was someone from pay scale that I heard talking about pay transparency one time and she compared it to buying a house.

[00:07:02] [SPEAKER_03] Mm hmm.

[00:07:03] [SPEAKER_04] And it's like, you're not going to go look at a house and consider putting an offer on a house if you don't know what it's listed for.

[00:07:09] [SPEAKER_02] Right. Yeah.

[00:07:09] [SPEAKER_04] Like if you're a high caliber employee and I see it firsthand all the time, like you could have a director level title that like maybe it's still an entry level.

[00:07:20] [SPEAKER_02] Yes.

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_04] Or maybe it's a truly a VP level. Who knows? Right. Titles mean nothing at this point in time. It's like the business card, which you can flash around. Who knows what the expectation is and what the pay is. So to me, I'm thinking like save everybody the time and the brain damage. Right. Yeah. So to be really clear about what is the job that we're looking to fill, how do we value it and what skillset are we looking at, it helps everybody out at the end of the day.

[00:07:45] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_00] You know, Chelsea, you started out by saying there's this spectrum of folks that kind of have done their comp homework and have this stuff in place and then others that don't. But I'm wondering how many of those that have had their proverbial stuff and in poop in a group, however you want to say it. I've never heard that one.

[00:08:03] [SPEAKER_02] That's a new one. Yeah.

[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_00] I'm going to use that one. How many of those need to actually revisit it because of what's happening with skills and how jobs are, you know, not necessarily always junior to full ranking to senior position title?

[00:08:18] [SPEAKER_04] That's the, I mean, there's no destination, right? Where you, you arrive and you're like, okay, like comp structure created transparency efforts complete. We've communicated and now we're done. You're always hiring people. You're always promoting new people into management. There's always changes that are happening and even jobs, right? Like we could finish a comp structure project and five minutes later, one of the departments decides to do a full restructure.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_04] So you're constantly having to keep your, your foot on the gas, not just with constantly evaluating and tracking. Cause it's not just about making sure the jobs are mapped appropriately. It's also about the incumbents, the butts in seats, right? Like, okay, here's the jobs that we have. Now we've got four levels of it, but we've got everybody in one. Like where should they be? And at what point do they move from a level one to a level two? And what does that look like?

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_03] Yep.

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_04] And so over the last couple of years, we've done several speaking engagements around pay transparency and they're usually to audiences of HR and finance leaders. And I always start the conversation by kind of a common sense approach to it, right? It's like, raise your hand if you agree that it's a reasonable request that employees should generally understand why they're paid, what they're paying.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_04] And everybody raises their hand. And then I'm like, okay, keep your hand up if this happens at your company. And everybody just looks at each other and laughs. Everybody's hand up there. Like you might have one lingering hand that's up, right? Yep. So it's such a common sense thing. Everybody wants it for themselves.

[00:09:47] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_04] Wants it for their company. But it's so much easier said than done because the execution is where things fall apart. And in companies where things are always changing, it's like you never feel safe enough to be like, okay. Yeah. Like we've reached the point where we're comfortable putting it out there. So. Yeah.

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, it's got that overlying, overlying cloud, like you said, of culture of, of secrecy. Yeah. And, and yeah, you can imagine, like I came out of the military very, my HR career started the military. I was in a shared service center auditing HR data, very formative. But we had of, if you know the military, it's all very much based on your rank and time and it's public information.

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_03] Mm-hmm .

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_02] Everybody knows what everybody makes, which I thought was really interesting. And that would not work everywhere. I know that. Yeah. Um, but you know what? It was never a convert. There was like, it just wasn't a thing we talked about. It was, you knew if you.

[00:10:38] [SPEAKER_00] But because it was known.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_02] It was known. You earned this, you rank. That thing. Didn't matter whether you're male, female, whatever the case might be. If you had this rank and this time, that's what it was. Yeah. Um, and I, I mean, it's refreshing cause that's just out of the way. Now we can go deal with all the other stuff.

[00:10:51] [SPEAKER_04] That's exactly it. We literally have a business case slide that we put at the beginning of each one of our results presentations. And when I get to the right side of it, I make a joke that it's my dream world. And it sounds ironic as a, the leader of a compensation practice, but my dream world is you're almost taking compensation out of the conversation. And what I mean by that is you're being intentional with your process, right? So like you are using market data, you're organizing and structuring your system.

[00:11:21] [SPEAKER_04] And the same set of rules applies to how you're handling every pay decision. Yeah. Cool. We've done that. Now we're going to communicate it out. And so what that means is it's taking away from this perception that my employer is doing as little as they can get away with. Right. It's there's, we've inserted some intention and some structure behind this. So here's what you get now. And here's why here's what you can expect over time. And so then people just show up and they feel valued. Right. Yeah.

[00:11:46] [SPEAKER_01] It's not a game anymore. Yeah. I mean, I've heard it said from HR professionals that like, it's like, oh, we're, you know, what can we get them at? You know, like when you're talking about salary negotiations and stuff. And it's like, that seems a little disingenuous just to begin with. But I, you know, back to the point too, in the beginning where, you know, 20 ish years ago, it was completely shrouded in secrecy that no one's talking about at all. Like the fact that we're here today and we're having this conversation is obviously a pretty

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_01] big leap and the data supports it too. Right. So pay, pay scales newer survey probably came out, although I can't reference that one, but the one from last year is like over 50% of old, uh, HR practitioners were saying that they were providing training on communicating salary, communicating compensation, having those kinds of open conversations with managers so that they could have these types of conversations

[00:12:39] [SPEAKER_01] with their employees, preparing them for a world where a transparency is a little bit more ubiquitous. Yeah. So needed.

[00:12:46] [SPEAKER_00] It's like poor performance, like no manager, no person wants to, you know, really have to get in and address poor performance or poor pay, but it doesn't have to be poor. It can be just a coaching in an educational moment, right? That's what it's supposed to be.

[00:13:00] [SPEAKER_04] So I have, I have a, a minor in psychology and I never really envisioned how I would use it. But, and now I've been like, there's so much of compensation and rewards in general that is psychological, right? Yeah. We're trying to, yeah, at the end of the day, you have to pay people, right? So is it an expense? Of course it is. So if you have to pay them anyway, shouldn't you put some thought into like the message that you're sending and the behaviors it's going to drive.

[00:13:28] [SPEAKER_04] And if you do that, you can leverage it and tap into the fact that everybody that you're hiring and paying they're humans and they have emotional reactions, especially to things as stressful and as important as compensation can be. And so I think that Julie, what you're saying to me, it comes back to this overall aversion that we have to tough conversations. And even the way that they're framed is kind of this like inherently pessimistic approach, right? Yeah.

[00:13:56] [SPEAKER_04] It took a lot of time for me over my career to receive feedback as a gift, right? And not be like, Oh, I'm getting in trouble. No, it's like, I want, I don't want to be the smartest person in any room. I want to surround myself with people who can identify opportunities and help me continue to get better. And so Julie, to your point, it's like a compensate or a performance issue happens over time, right? With it not being addressed. And then it is contentious and it's a surprise.

[00:14:26] [SPEAKER_04] Whereas if you are willing to stay connected and have those conversations with people along the way, maybe it doesn't get to that point. Yeah. And that's always the goal. Yeah. And the same is true of compensation conversations, right? Maybe the answer is not, Hey Pete, you're right. You're underpaid. I'm going to give you a raise. Maybe it's, Hey, you're actually paid really fairly. And here's the data that I've looked at and why I feel really confident about that. And maybe you walk away being like, man, I wish I would have gotten a raise, but I understand it better. That's the transparency part. Yeah.

[00:14:55] [SPEAKER_04] And I trust you more as an employer for being willing to tell me something that I didn't want to hear and stand in it and give me data to back it up.

[00:15:02] [SPEAKER_02] Well, sometimes I think it's a cultural maturity of the organization's own culture. Like you were talking about what you, you know, like having people surrounding yourself. That's an emotional maturity that some cultures in their organizations haven't arrived at. And then it's hard to have these conversations if they're not doing it in the most modern way.

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_00] I think too, companies are becoming more agile, right? Exactly. We talk all the time about agility drivers and how to be agile. And so I don't think that your typical employee isn't really tuned into the fact that, well, my pay may be different because of my geography and where I live. Unless they're going to make a dramatic move to California from, you know, the Midwest or something. They may not be in tune to the fact that we had an M&A and two entirely different organizations came together. And that requires some alignment and level setting.

[00:15:46] [SPEAKER_00] And there's probably a million other situations, right? Where an employee could reasonably go, oh, wow, I never even thought that that was a factor. Or maybe it's not until you actually undertake some work to get your house in order.

[00:15:58] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, that underscores too why organizations need to be proactive about putting together philosophies and communicating these things out and saying, like, look, this is what the data tells us. And this is the way that we handle these situations. Like if you live in San Francisco and you make a certain amount of money based on the area, and then you move to say Pittsburgh, the San Francisco of the East. Right. And obviously you're going to be paid much less. Like those are two different markets with two different costs of labor. Yep.

[00:16:27] [SPEAKER_01] And two different costs of living. Cost of living too, yeah. Well, yeah. And there's a whole different, you know, the cost of labor versus cost of living explanation. So to your point, Julie, of how do you educate people on what's different about those two things and how are they different? Because they're not the exact same thing. Yeah.

[00:16:41] [SPEAKER_04] Well, and it comes down to. True.

[00:16:43] [SPEAKER_01] Remote work showed a light on that.

[00:16:46] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:16:47] [SPEAKER_04] 100%. It's the whole nature of how you compete for talent, which is what your comp strategy is aiming to do, right, has been flipped on its head. Sam and I did a presentation late last year about remote work. Yeah. And it was something like super cool, like where you work matters or does it, you know? Very cryptic. But the idea is even if you don't have remote employees, you're competing with remote employers,

[00:17:15] [SPEAKER_04] especially for specific, like certain types of work.

[00:17:17] [SPEAKER_02] So it's not like you're… Around the world, by the way. Yeah.

[00:17:20] [SPEAKER_04] Defining your market, it's not just, okay, well, what buckets do we fit into? Yeah. Where are we competing for talent? And you have to be honest about that because if I can work remotely, which some people like, most of the data that I have seen shows that it's a small margin of people that actually want to be remote, most want to be hybrid. But if you get to work remote and you can make the same or more because you're working for a company that's based out of San Francisco but living in Pittsburgh or depending on what their approach is, you know, you just…

[00:17:48] [SPEAKER_04] You've got to think about it a lot more broadly than in the past.

[00:17:52] [SPEAKER_01] That's a whole other subject too, but the return to office phenomenon that's now happening, you know, what, five years, six years past COVID, that's a whole other thing too. And it's like probably a whole other subject, but it's related because now you've got… What is it? Almost 90-ish percent of executives are like, yeah, people need to get back in the office. And they think that everybody wants to just work remotely and be hidden. But in reality, what is it? Three quarters of people just would prefer to be treated like adults.

[00:18:22] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:18:22] [SPEAKER_01] Like if I need to stay home because my dog is sick or my kids are sick… Novel idea. Hiring adults, they don't… They don't… It's only like 20 percent of people want to be remote full time, you know what I mean? And like there's a huge, huge… There's a chasm of disconnect between the people making the decisions and the people who are working. And that needs to be addressed as well too. Yeah. That's a little bit outside…

[00:18:42] [SPEAKER_04] It spotlights this… Like there is a trend when you see organizations that have a culture of mistrust. They don't want people working remotely because they don't believe that that equates to actually working, right? They're finding ways to track it and make sure that people are actually working when they're at home. Yeah. If they're not in the office and you can have your eyes on them. It's the same way like the culture of mistrust kind of permeates into how they handle compensation, how they do other things.

[00:19:11] [SPEAKER_04] And a big part of what we coach on is, hey, you should create the culture and the comp practices that align with that to attract and engage the type of talent that you want. And to me, like I don't want talent on my team that I feel like I need to babysit, that I have to micromanage. If I have someone who's working remotely and I'm worrying about if they're actually working… Yeah. …it's a performance issue. Yeah.

[00:19:38] [SPEAKER_04] …and if I have clear expectations outlined, then I can measure and speak to if someone is having a performance issue and it has nothing to do with where they're doing the work. Yeah. And so the people that show up like that don't want you coming after them if they leave 45 minutes early to go to an after-school program for one of their kids or something, right? It's like, I'm going to get the job done. Yeah.

[00:20:00] [SPEAKER_02] If the work's getting done, the output, we talked about that on the other show. Yeah. Output is key, right? And skills and output. Yeah. I think it's where you've got to focus. Can I ask you, what do you think about… Like, what's the change management underpinning here for a corporation that might be going through… Or big or small, that might be going through trying to mature themselves? Like, what would be the kind of change management elements that they need to think about?

[00:20:23] [SPEAKER_04] I think first and foremost, you don't have structure in place from a compensation perspective. If you haven't built a structure for all of your jobs and evaluated your employees against it, I think you've got to do that before you can do anything else. Because you've got to understand what you're up against, what you're dealing with. Right. And so, in order to be able to communicate to people and say, hey, here's our philosophy and here's where we're at right now, here's where we're going, you've got to have that data and information.

[00:20:49] [SPEAKER_04] So, typically what we'll do is we'll meet with leaders first, one-on-one, and figure out kind of what their wish list… What's your… like if money's not an object… Yeah. Right? How competitive do you want to be? How do you define your market? All the things. How transparent do you want to be? What's your end goal? What do you want to be when you grow up?

[00:21:04] [SPEAKER_02] That's what I like. Exactly. Yeah, that's right.

[00:21:06] [SPEAKER_04] Exactly. So, we identify that and then the next step is, okay, well let's figure out where we're at right now. And then, how do those two meet? How far are we from where we want to go? And then, once you've identified kind of what the gap is, then you can start building your communication strategy. So, you're keeping it pretty close up front and involving your stakeholders, right? And anyone who's going to be involved in that process. And I always recommend in that process, it can't just be done behind closed doors with the HR team. You've got to have leaders involved.

[00:21:35] [SPEAKER_04] You've got to have them contributing and weighing in so that they understand it and that they buy into it. Because any comp strategy that gets launched by HR and then, you know, your frontline supervisors get questions and they just say, I don't know, go ask HR. Yeah. It's not going to work. Right?

[00:21:50] [SPEAKER_03] Because it's HR's rule at that point. Right.

[00:21:52] [SPEAKER_04] You've got to understand it and you've got to have an answer that says, hey, we actually benchmark jobs once a year. We just finished. Here's what we're actually benchmarking it against. You know, like you've got to be able to at least at a high level answer and field some of those questions all the way out onto the frontline. And so to me, that's the next step is once you've built that structure, then it's starting to do some of the training that Julie was talking about earlier. Yeah. Starting at the leadership level, going down through middle management all the way to frontline supervisors. And you've got to do that on a regular frequency.

[00:22:22] [SPEAKER_04] What you're communicating and sharing now versus in the future kind of depends on what you find. Yeah. So like if you find that there's all kinds of inequities, you know, that we've been hiring people based off of what it takes to get them in the door or if there's been favoritism or whatever the reason is. Right. And the bigger company, the greater the risk for those types of things to sneak in.

[00:22:42] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:22:42] [SPEAKER_04] You have to be cautious. You can't just start sharing and touting these things until you've figured it out. Because ultimately, people are talking behind closed doors. But when you start advertising it or you put the salary ranges on job postings and I see it and I'm like, wait, the range starts at $75,000, but I'm paid $68,000. That's not fair. Yeah. Those are the things that you've got to make sure that you don't overstep. Yeah.

[00:23:05] [SPEAKER_02] And it shouldn't come down. I think we talked about this. We implied this a little bit. It shouldn't come down to who negotiates the best. Right. I mean, to your point, if a business is like, hey, we got one over on this one. We, you know, we got it cheaper than we would have. Well, who wins in that?

[00:23:20] [SPEAKER_00] The other thing is, I don't think, I mean, you tell me, but do a lot of employers come in and say, I want to pay at 100% of market? Or are most of them like, no, I kind of want to pay at like 80% of market or some portion of market?

[00:23:32] [SPEAKER_04] What I would say, my personal view is that any market data point from the 10th percentile to the 90th is market. It's just, who is it market for? Right. And so a lot of times people will think that the goal and employees in particular will think they see a range and they even think they deserve to be paid at the middle of it or at the top of it. Right. And nowhere in between. Any salary range we build represents market data. It's just, if it's more towards the beginning of the range.

[00:23:59] [SPEAKER_04] If I'm brand new to a job, I'm a people manager for the first time. It makes sense for me to be paid somewhere in the first quartile of that range.

[00:24:06] [SPEAKER_02] Right.

[00:24:06] [SPEAKER_04] And it's, and that's how you grow and develop people too, right? Without having to promote them every step of the way. The longer I'm managing people, the more that I stop relying on my supervisor and having questions every five minutes, you know, move me more into the second quartile closer to the midpoint.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_03] Right. Right.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_04] If I'm happy being at that manager level and don't want to continue climbing, once I've been doing it for 20 years, you know, and I'm really seasoned, I'm mentoring other new managers or supervisors, put me near the top of the market at the top of the range.

[00:24:33] [SPEAKER_00] Right. And I think if people observe that, you know, all you have to do is bring in a competitive market range and then they pop you up to whatever it is, that also crushes your strategy. Yeah.

[00:24:44] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. I also think, you know, Sam and I several years ago created this idea of the magical market unicorn, which is to say, like, there's this one single data point that if you're an HR generalist, all HR journalists should be paid $65,000 in every location, every company size.

[00:25:02] [SPEAKER_04] And so it is coming back to some of these just reasonable, common sense things to explain to people kind of like, Julie, you were talking about earlier of, hey, if I'm like, let's use an HR director as an example. If I'm an HR director on a team of three or a company of 100 compared to an HR director on an HR team of 40 plus people, right, a much bigger company, those are not the same job.

[00:25:27] [SPEAKER_02] It's not even with industry to industry. I mean, a director when I was at Disney, a director in media and entertainment is pretty much a vice president in any other sector. Yeah. And the way we compensated them was very just unique. Right. And we had so many different things we had to deal with. But, yeah, I don't think you can. I mean, now you shouldn't be looking. I think roles, titles are it's almost arbitrary. It's really the skill. You mentioned that in the beginning, right? It just, yeah.

[00:25:54] [SPEAKER_00] We talk all the time on the payroll topics about the job having fundamentally changed. And when technology is enabling payroll, payroll calcs, payroll, you know, the running of payroll and the job becomes materially different. And you have to be that knowledge worker. So if you used to pay your payroll people $35,000 a year, you might not maybe should be surprised if they're $100,000 a year role now, for example. And that's happening all over.

[00:26:20] [SPEAKER_02] It is. It is. Yeah. Skills pay, right? I mean, yeah. So what happens next? I mean, where do we go from here? Like, I mean, is AI going to solve some of these problems? Is it going to make it worse? Like, what are you guys seeing in that regard? I feel like the back end, to your point, having your data, knowing your bands, knowing, you know, knowing, having good information about the market, right, is key. But what else can you do to help?

[00:26:43] [SPEAKER_01] So there's interesting tools out there that can, that support some of the things like job matching and benchmarking and just pulling massive amounts of data and moving massive amounts of data. There's some tools that I've seen where what they're telling you is, we have this AI tool that will go and scrub the internet of every single job posting that there is. And we can aggregate that data to show you what salaries look like.

[00:27:08] [SPEAKER_01] But that's, this is a caution to folks out there that that's an interesting tool, but job postings are advertisement. Right. So that's like. And the ranges are insane. I've seen some ranges where it's like, oh, 200% spread. And they're not telling you what the person actually got paid. Right. They're telling you what someone offered. And it could be in a ridiculous spread, like you said. Yeah.

[00:27:28] [SPEAKER_00] Or even geographies. I don't know how sophisticated you're saying, but, you know, geographies and industries.

[00:27:33] [SPEAKER_01] So that's one thing. Yeah, totally. And again, just the legislation's not going away. Right. There are, it's over half the states now that have at least pending legislation at the state level. It was introduced at the federal level, but unsurprisingly, it hasn't gone anywhere. Yeah.

[00:27:49] [SPEAKER_02] Do you think we'll get there eventually, though? We'll have a federal, sort of like a federal minimum wage kind of a directive?

[00:27:53] [SPEAKER_01] You know, the current administration, obviously not, it's not a priority. And I think it's worked to a certain extent at the state level. So, but my point just being that it continues to grow. Yeah. If you look at the, you know, if you look at a map today, you'll see a bunch of states that have it. You'll see a bunch of states that have pending legislation. If you looked at it 15 years ago, it was blank. Right. It was just a map of the United States. Yeah. So there's.

[00:28:18] [SPEAKER_04] It's becoming table stakes. Like there's enough of them out there. And then the first thing that came to my mind when you asked the question is more of like employees using AI. And so like in some ways there are AI tools that is making it easier for comp professionals to manage. But they're also facing more questions than ever of, hey, I just, you know, ask Microsoft Copilot how much my job title is worth. And I saw, I can't remember who made the post. It may have also been someone from A-Scale.

[00:28:48] [SPEAKER_04] But they were basically saying they had done their own research where they basically asked one of the different tools, how much is a specific job worth? And then they added some demographics into it. Like, so, hey, I'm a white female. How much should I be paid for this job? And then you change the demographics, you ask it, and suddenly the value is smaller for like a white female in that same job.

[00:29:12] [SPEAKER_04] And so I just think more than ever, there's all kinds of information out there. Good, bad, different. Ugly. Right? Yeah. And so you just have, you don't have to pay the highest out of everyone for any given job. You just have to do it in a way where you can play ball. It's in alignment. It's defensible with data. And the how, more so than the how much, I think, goes a long way in creating actual sticky employment because it's creating connection and trust.

[00:29:41] [SPEAKER_04] And that doesn't, that's still pretty rare, honestly. When you see companies that have figured this out and they've created that culture, you can feel it pretty quickly. And you can see it permeates past just compensation. You feel it in how they're managing performance and staying on top of that with each other. And that translates directly to productivity and better business outcomes. Yeah. And so that to me is like AI is going to put a lot of good and bad information out there that people are going to have questions about.

[00:30:09] [SPEAKER_04] So it just underscores the importance of HR people to be prepared to field those questions and answer them in an honest and compelling way. And then to Sam's point, I think there are several tools out there and they're getting better every day. Yeah. And there are new ones every day of ways that you can leverage them to manage your compensation processes, especially if you're part of a small team. You know, it's a standalone full-time job. Right, right.

[00:30:37] [SPEAKER_04] And a lot of the companies that we work with don't actually have anyone doing that job. Yeah. They're doing it alongside 16 others. So there's got to be.

[00:30:44] [SPEAKER_02] It's part of one of the hats they're wearing. Yeah.

[00:30:46] [SPEAKER_04] There's got to be tools out there to even make this possible.

[00:30:50] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:30:51] [SPEAKER_00] I think it's also important, you know, that there are different questions being asked of consultants and folks that work in this field. Like when you were talking about the different state rules versus the universal rules, in payroll, we have clients that are looking at, should I have just one universal PTO payout policy or do I need to contemplate state specifics?

[00:31:12] [SPEAKER_00] I mean, whether it's leaves or whether it's the compensation base or the different programs, like those conundrums are being set up all over the place. And you might want to have a universal thing, but if you have a universal thing, you know, you're probably going to have a bigger base base across your organization. Right. Simpler, bigger, you know, those tradeoffs. Yeah.

[00:31:33] [SPEAKER_02] I think you might have said this maybe collectively along the way, but what are the key characteristics that you notice of companies that are really getting this right and making this transition to a more transparent, equitable comp approach or total rewards?

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_04] This may be too woo-woo of an answer.

[00:31:48] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. No, seriously though.

[00:31:50] [SPEAKER_04] The first word that pops into my head is courage, honestly. Or like a lack of, like they're unwilling to be complacent. They're driven by leaders who are not just putting things into autopilot. I think that's what happens a lot of times is the danger zone is either, you know, people that are just comfortable doing things the way they've always done it. Because, you know, if it's not broken, don't fix it. I've had leaders tell me, hey, if people aren't asking me about pay, why would I bring it up? Yeah. You know, like there's other things I can do with my time.

[00:32:19] [SPEAKER_04] So I think that when you have courageous leaders, especially, and we work with a lot of them where they're like, this is going to hurt. We know it. It's not going to be fun. That's the change part. But it's necessary.

[00:32:30] [SPEAKER_03] Right.

[00:32:30] [SPEAKER_04] And I feel like that's one of the things that's most notable is the leading with courageousness, understanding that it's necessary. Again, it's becoming table stakes. Yes, it is. There will be a point in time where people are not going to apply for jobs if they don't know what it's valued at. Yeah, it's fair.

[00:32:51] [SPEAKER_01] And the data backs that up too, right? It's upwards of 85% of people pulled say they won't even apply to a job if there's not a salary range on the rec. So, yeah. You could be inadvertently hurting yourself as an employer by limiting your candidate pool. Yeah. By not, you know, by being complacent or just, you know, avoiding it. Yeah.

[00:33:09] [SPEAKER_02] You know, I want to kind of talk about the other lens of this, right? The worker, right? Especially the new grad or any of us who are out there navigating a lot of folks that are, you know, in the market now, unemployed and looking for jobs. I work with veterans and spouses who are coming out of the military and help them with their career transition. And the answer that I would have given them or a young professional trying to enter the workforce five, ten years ago about salary negotiation has changed the way I would advise them.

[00:33:36] [SPEAKER_02] Like, what would you say to that new grad or new, you know, someone new or someone who's lived the old way and now is kind of in the new world? Like, how would you tell them to be successful as a candidate on the other side of that? Any advice?

[00:33:51] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. I mean, honestly, my advice a year or so ago would look very different than now. Right. Because the market has changed in a lot of ways. And so I think it would be very personalized, honestly, because it depends on everybody's current situation, right? Right. How much wiggle room or buffer, how much of a safety net do you have? How urgent is it that you find a job?

[00:34:12] [SPEAKER_04] Because the reality is, you know, in some cases, in some industries right now, I mean, I have seen several really high caliber professionals that were unfortunately let go as part of a reduction in force or something like that. They're really talented people. Right. Right. But there was just no longer a space for them. I would offer that some of those we witnessed firsthand were from overreactions when the market was high. Right. Right.

[00:34:39] [SPEAKER_04] Like you enter the name your price candidate experience and people were leaving to get double their pay somewhere. And that was never sustainable. And you create these unrealistic expectations where now if I'm that person where, well, suddenly my job went from 50 grand to 100 grand. Now I believe that's what my job is worth. Yeah. Because this one employer was willing to pay it.

[00:34:59] [SPEAKER_04] And so that's maybe one thing I would offer is access, leverage the tools that you have to try and get a solid understanding of what your job is truly valued at. And then to me, when the market starts to head towards where it is now, I feel like that's where employers have the biggest opportunity to show who they are.

[00:35:20] [SPEAKER_03] Right. Good point.

[00:35:21] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of that like you're forced to show up as your best when you're trying to get people towards you. But what do you do when things are cooling off? And this is where I think that people with that long term plan really shine because they can highlight things like people centered decisions. It's not just about paying you well. It's not just about providing benefits that take care of you and your family.

[00:35:43] [SPEAKER_04] It's also about making responsible business decisions that create that sustainability of the business and job security. So to me, again, it comes back to as an employee, as a prospect or someone who's looking for a job. I think to the degree that you can be picky, those are the things that I'm looking at, looking for. And I'm trying to demonstrate myself as someone who has some of the soft skills that I think people are looking for. Right.

[00:36:09] [SPEAKER_04] And in a time where workforces are shrinking, it's like businesses are always trying to see how much can they get out of every hire that they have. If they're leaning out a team, they want the sharpest, the most curious, the like unicorn talent. And so if you can position yourself as someone, I joke about hiring unicorns on my team all the time. I need someone who understands data, but they can't be someone who's just a data person and doesn't know how to speak to people or that can't convert it to bigger picture. I need you in the forest. I need you up in the tree. Like I need you everywhere. Right.

[00:36:39] [SPEAKER_04] And then 16 other places. And so I think if you can spotlight a diverse set of skills and kind of being some of the talent we've talked about throughout, like I think those, that's what would stand out to me.

[00:36:49] [SPEAKER_01] I would say that culture matters too. And like it matters. And you got to think about that stuff, you know, as part of the kind of total rewards picture. Right. I mean, there's obviously benefits and other things to think about, but you know, we, there are organizations that have missions that you might be behind. You know, you talked about working with veterans and things like that. Like there are things that are important to you personally that might fulfill your life more. Right. Those are, you know, pursue those as well rather than just thinking about dollar signs.

[00:37:18] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. There's an opportunity to do your own soul searching and valuation, right, of what is important to you. Watching my Gen Zs go through it. They had, they, they actually knew whether they, you know, valued every other Friday off or, you know, some other thing. And, and so that's super important. And then I can imagine there's just so much to learn by asking questions and being comfortable to engage in a conversation about it. Yeah.

[00:37:41] [SPEAKER_00] I mean, learn before you get hired, get yourself hired, whether or not, you know, your employer is going to have this secrecy, you know, kind of taboo culture or whether they're also embracing having a legit conversation about stuff.

[00:37:56] [SPEAKER_04] I love that. So, cause again, at a certain point, you know, people are, you take a job so that you can get a paycheck, right? So there is a point where it's like, all right, if, if things are super tough, we've got to take what you can get. I feel like what you're talking about is spot on because it, it's what's best for everyone and it's what's going to last. And sometimes that might mean, Hey, they're like the opening that exists at this company right now is a little lower level than what I was hoping for.

[00:38:22] [SPEAKER_04] But I, I vibe with the interview process, what they've shared this company. Like I'm looking at the long game. And so sometimes that's your foot in the door, right? And I think that those things that you're talking about are, are so important to identify if you're looking to go somewhere and stay there. And you're, I think a lot of times interviews are viewed as, you know, the company's trying to decide if they want me, but it really is bi-directional. It's the other one too.

[00:38:47] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think when I, when I talk to veterans about this, I, you know, so many people, especially younger people who are, who are less mature with the workforce, they are purely focused on salary, right? As that tip of the iceberg. But I'm like, you got to look below the waterline because there's a lot of flexibility enablers and intangibles, growth opportunities and other things that you have to, and total comp. You have to, you know, for example, working at Disney, heavy on the benefits, right? I mean, there were so many benefits they offered us that were just something other employers couldn't offer that had a really rich, I mean, getting into the parks, right?

[00:39:17] [SPEAKER_02] Or having that monetary value that was greater than, than, than salary. But in the total, you add it all up and it's like, wow, I'm actually getting a lot more than maybe what the market might say about my salary entirely. Um, so I don't think that, I don't know that sometimes the job seekers, younger, newer job seekers, especially military coming in, they don't know what they don't know. And they're focused on that salary, but then there's all these other opportunities and things that are under the waterline that they need to calibrate into that.

[00:39:41] [SPEAKER_04] So that's the hardest part about all of it is you have all of these different, even, I mean, generational assumptions that people make, but also just within the same generation, there's, there's differences in what people value. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It's figuring out how to strike the right balance of what do we offer that checks the most boxes for the most people. And it all comes back to communication, right? I obviously value benchmarking, but who cares if you're doing what everybody else does, if your employees don't actually value it.

[00:40:10] [SPEAKER_04] So it's like, that's one step. The other step is I was on a, an HR round table last week, um, or a couple of weeks ago with some folks out of Phoenix. And when someone brought up a really interesting benefit idea and the idea itself didn't get a lot of support. It was very unique and different. However, the process she followed in the way that she outlined it, she was like, well, I had this idea that worked well at my last employer. And so I brought it here. I talked to leadership first and asked if it was interesting enough.

[00:40:39] [SPEAKER_01] Tell us the idea. What was the idea?

[00:40:40] [SPEAKER_04] It was, I want to say it was ketamine, uh, treatment. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. So they, they had covered that, um, in one way or another, but essentially what she did is she had seen it work at another company. She brought it up with leadership to see if leadership was even going to allow it by it. And then the next step was they met, they kind of introduced it to their employees through some focus groups and a survey to see if they were, if there was an appetite for it.

[00:41:05] [SPEAKER_04] And then, um, there was, they launched it. It was super successful. So now she's kind of tracking what the wins are and the ROI from it and figuring out how to continue to push the needle further and build on it. And I'm like, that, that is it. Out of the box thinking. It's stakeholder buy-in so that it's not HR on an island. Right. It's employees confirm interest in it and perceive value and then measuring, okay, well, everybody said they like it. Do they actually? Like, are they using it? Where they're using it and it's helping.

[00:41:33] [SPEAKER_00] Nice.

[00:41:33] [SPEAKER_04] And, um, and so I feel like it, again, it comes back to communication.

[00:41:37] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I think that's become a very big part of Total Reward Leaders, you know, mission these days with all the expansion of wellness type stuff, all the benefits and voluntary things, and just trying to appeal to so many different generations of value out there. I, I do, I can only imagine, Chelsea, how often you get somebody who wants to talk about that and they're, they don't have their basic poop in a group, right? Yeah.

[00:42:00] [SPEAKER_04] That's so it, because it doesn't, like, the differentiators don't matter if you're competent. I would even say your comp and your primary health and welfare benefits, if those are aggressively trailing the market, you don't get to graduate talking about differentiators. Like, you can't tell me where we, you know, we're a family here and we value you, but meanwhile, I feel like you're taking advantage of me with my pay or, you know, but I think also people need to understand that they do impact one another.

[00:42:27] [SPEAKER_04] So, if we decide to pay in the middle of the market instead of leading it, but then our benefits, like, our health plan is top of the market, then you need to be able to connect the dots to explain to people that I actually keep more of my paycheck because, you know, maybe the medical plan is 100% paid. Like, because people don't think about, my husband is, is the repeat offender here. Like, he took a different job a couple years ago and he didn't even ask about their benefits. I'm like, I take this personally. Like, benefits matter too.

[00:42:57] [SPEAKER_02] Yes, yes.

[00:42:58] [SPEAKER_04] You know, but, and so I, I say that in jest, but the point is, you know, I think there's still a lot of education and re-education and just reminding people to view the entire picture like you were talking about.

[00:43:09] [SPEAKER_03] Agreed, agreed.

[00:43:10] [SPEAKER_00] Hey, listen, that stigma we talked about at the beginning, employees have it too because they're afraid they don't understand anything in this space.

[00:43:16] [SPEAKER_02] And most people are afraid to rock the cart when you're trying to be a good candidate and put forth the best foot. I completely understand it, but then they leave a lot of value on the table, you know, so hopefully we get it, you know, we get there where we need to be. But, uh, look, this has been fantastic. You guys have some great insights. We need to make this more of a regular thing. Maybe you guys come back for an annual total rewards and comp discussion. We do. Yeah. Um, but where can everybody get in touch with you? What, what, where, where would you want to be engaged? LinkedIn is probably the best.

[00:43:42] [SPEAKER_01] Um, for me. That's.

[00:43:43] [SPEAKER_00] I would agree. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:43:45] [SPEAKER_02] And here in Palmer.com we'll make sure we share that, but. Yeah. There's some links. Yeah.

[00:43:48] [SPEAKER_00] Maybe even, uh, I think you've put out maybe an infographic or a article or a newsletter. You do have a newsletter that you guys do.

[00:43:54] [SPEAKER_02] And you guys do spot research all the time on these topics too. Absolutely. So yeah, we, we try to share those, but yeah, look for that. But, uh, look guys, thank you so much. It's been great having you. Yeah. I appreciate it. Um, yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks.

[00:44:04] [SPEAKER_04] Thanks for having us.