Variable Pay: Improving Performance with Variable Pay (C12/GR6)

Variable pay compensation can improve employee motivation and performance along with positively impacting your organization’s goals for profitability and productivity. This course will teach you the fundamentals of variable pay with a focus on compensation strategy. 

In this course you will cover: 

• Identifying common business strategies and objectives for achieving them.
• Aligning variable pay programs with business strategy.
• The three categories of variable pay.
• Examining internal and external factors affecting variable pay plans.
• The activities for designing variable pay compensation strategy, including funding and distributing plan earnings.
• How to implement, communicate and evaluate the success of variable pay compensation and benefits plans. 

This course is ideal for the human resources professional responsible for designing, assessing and maintaining variable pay plans.

In the course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of variable pay programs, including: 

• Supporting the Business Objective through Variable Pay
  Learn about the elements of compensation, business strategy and how that drives business objectives, the business lifecycle and how variable pay helps achieve business objectives.
  
  
• Types of Variable Pay
  Dive into the three categories of variable pay programs, including Incentive plans, bonus plans and recognition plans:
  • Incentive plans covers short-term incentive plans, including profit-sharing, performance-sharing and individual performance-based plans.
  • Long-term incentive plans covers equity- and non-equity based plans.
  • For bonus plans, learn about referral bonus, hiring (sign-on) bonus, retention (stay) bonus and project completion bonus.
  • For recognition plans, understand spot awards, managerial recognition, nominations and organization-wide recognition.

• Developing a Variable Pay Plan: Phases 1 and 2
  In Phase 1, discover internal and external factors impacting variable pay plans, how to obtain management support and identify a variable pay design team. In Phase 2, learn about plan objectives and plan types, how to define eligibility and select performance measures.
  
  
• Developing a Variable Pay Plan: Phases 3
  In Phase 3, you’ll learn about funding and distribution by determining performance targets and payouts, funding the variable pay plan, distributing plan earnings and obtaining final approval.
  
  
• Implementation and Evaluation
  Bring your learning together with this final unit on how to implement the variable pay program including selecting the implementation team, developing the communication plan, introducing the plan and coordinating the plans administration. You will also learn how to evaluate the plan’s effectiveness, why variable pay plans fail and potential evaluation outcomes.

Variable pay plans support and impact your organization’s business goals and objectives. Understanding this form of compensation strategy is an essential skill for today’s HR compensation professional. This course will empower you with the knowledge you need to design, implement and evaluate variable pay plans. 

Ready to get started? 

This course is available in a variety of formats, including online, self-study and in-person. 

Find a class format that works for you and register today.