Employee Wellness programs are easy to implement and benefit everyone involved.

Employee Wellness events and programs are a relatively easy way to motivate healthy behaviors in the workplace. The Employee Wellness Blog writes extensively about preparation, benefits and communication of these fun programs in a recent entry. Wellness programs can improve overall health of employees and this may result in increased productivity, decreased absenteeism and improved profitability. The key to success when it comes to Employee Wellness programs is participation, and the level of participation all depends on your company’s communication…

Money and time off are the most important factors for compensation plan success.

When creating a compensation plan for your start-up, it is easy to follow the “incentive pay” path and attempt to attract top talent with oodles of benefits. However, the new generation of workers (Gen Y) are a more family-focused lot.  According to PayScale’s Compensation Today blog, this generation wants, “more money and more time off.” This means that more base pay goes a heck of a lot farther for recruitment than the “incentives” of yesteryear. The blogger cites the…

Compensation Force presents compensation practice data from Colletti & Fiss.

Anne Bares, Managing Partner of Altura Consulting Group, recently reviewed a report from Colletti & Fiss on rewarding and retaining strategic account sellers. The data reviewed comes from a Colletti & Fiss report on SAM (Strategic Account Manager) Compensation Practices. Bares writes, “While I discourage over-reliance on benchmarking in sales compensation design, I found their profile of a typical annual compensation plan for these important sales roles to be interesting and worth highlighting here.” You can view the detailed table of Colleti…

Keeping salaries secret leads to mistrust among employees.

For as long as most of us can remember, keeping salaries secret has been the norm. Talking about how much you make, or what someone else makes, is like opening Pandora’s box. Mayhem is bound to ensue. However, Chief Happiness Officer and blogger, Alexander Kjerulf thinks that secret salaries are ridiculous relics of the past. In a recent blog, Kjerulf shares the following reasons not to keep salaries secret: 1. It frustrates employees because they are not able to address unfairness directly. 2. People…

At the expansion stage, one particular topic seems to frequently trip up companies’ sales team management. How should sales teams be compensated and what are the many variables that can sometimes complicate that pay structure? Through my experience providing marketing and sales support to OpenView Venture Partners’ portfolio companies, I’ve seen management sometimes spend too much time developing a complex pay structure and not enough time forming a quality sales team and implementing methodologies that ultimately help move the company forward. The following tips will help simplify the process. That way, you can be sure that your sales team is…

For an entrepreneur, balancing work and life is a constant struggle.

At the root of the matter is a constant desire to progress your startup. Motivating you is the idea that if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. Separating your personal life from your work has distinct benefits on both aspects, however. Here’s how you’ll see benefits from taming this vicious circle: Create a mission and stick to it. If you don’t, you’ll be wasting a lot of time on things that aren’t important. Do your best to avoid…

The idea of fixing a problem by throwing money at it is sometimes romanticized.

Got a problem? Pour money on it, that’ll fix it. But this solution is actually not a solution at all. Sometimes, it’ll compound the matter. Other times, it’ll do nothing but suspend an issue, only to be continued at a future date. When it comes to counter offers to defecting employees, this mirage of a solution is obviously a bad decision. Here’s why: If an employee of yours is leaving, it’s probably not about the money. If it…

The benefits of having motivated employees are obvious.

For one, your staff will actually want to do their work, as opposed to feeling forced to. Employee performance can drastically suffer if they’re unmotivated. As such, it’s a worthwhile investment to get them producing high quality work – and not because they must, but because they want to. The easy route is to douse them in money until they’ve been satisfied. But that’s a temporary and costly fix. Here are some alternatives to motivating with money: Create clarity in the workplace: Employees like…

Sales compensation plans are not one size fits all. When creating a sales compensation plan, many companies look for best practices, or popular methods and “paste” those practices into a plan.

According to Ann Bares’ Compensation Force Blog, this rarely results in a successful sales compensation plan. Bares writes that in order to create an effective compensation plan, companies must consider, “sales strategy, structure, process and circumstances in their organization.” Bares also writes that the number one tool for creating a good sales comp plan is a “deep sales dive.” The…