Steve Brink and David Turetsky – WorldatWork 2023 – What to Expect When Hiring an HR Consultant

Connect with Steve:

Connect with Dwight:

• 
• dwight.brown@salary.com

Connect with David:

• 
• 
• david.turetsky@salary.com

Podcast Manager, Karissa Harris:

• HRDataLabs@salary.com

Production by Affogato Media

Resources:

• Address Pay Equity
• Compensation Consulting Services
• HR Data Labs Season 6 Episode 5
• HR Data Labs Season 6 Episode 3

• “When you hire a consultant, the job isn’t over for you. . . . You need to be prepared to actively work with them to get the job done.”
• “Sometimes you can use [consultants] to help educate a board, executives, managers or employees.”

Announcer: 0:02
Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology, invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR, mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker, mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, that count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here's your host, David Turetsky.

David Turetsky: 0:44
All of us use consultants, you all use them almost on a daily basis. So those of you who took a cab here, you used a consultant to get here. I know a cab driver doesn't seem like a consultant, but they're doing the job to provide you with a service for a period of time. You're paying them for that period of time. And they have the expertise to get you from point A to point B, right? So they're a consultant. And there are those micro moments in your life where you're utilizing consultants whether this morning, when I had to call Delta Airlines and rebook my ticket for tomorrow night. And they walked me through a process of being able to get, instead of going from Las Vegas to Boston, on Thursday, I had to do it for Tuesday night, she took her expertise about my current flights, as well as the lowest cost way for me to get home. So I didn't have to pay a $423 fee. And she found me a plate that actually got me a voucher for$68. So I utilized her expertise to do that. What we're going to do today is we're going to talk to you about these types of examples of how we use consultants, not in our everyday lives, but in our jobs, to be able to actively be able to get expertise, for a cost, of course, to be able to get things done that we couldn't do ourselves. We needed other help to do. We have with us, Steve Brink, who was my first real boss back more than 30 years ago. And he's one of my best friends today. Steve Brink.

Steve Brink: 2:13
Thank you. And he was my last employee. No, no, after after you have to deal with him. But no. I'm Steve Brink, I'm president of a software startup called uFlexReward. Prior to that I was CEO at a company called Air Inc, and sold that company to Japanese multinational and decided whether to retire and go go do something else. I did a startup. Prior to that I was at Mercer, where I led one of the six global businesses. Prior to that, where I met David, was at Towers Perrin, which is now that's the precursor of Willis Towers Watson. And one of the precursors, one of them, yeah. And part of that claim to fame was a vice president of another software company called Criterion where it was the first compensation management software product back in 1987.

David Turetsky: 3:06
I was still in college.

Steve Brink: 3:08
Yeah, thanks. Thanks.

David Turetsky: 3:12
So my name is David Turetsky. I'm Vice President of consulting for Salary.com. I'm also the host of the HR Data Labs podcast. And soon on Amazon, you'll be able to buy my first book, which is Welcome to the World of HR Data Labs, which is actually a graphic novel, somewhat similar to Dilbert. But it focuses on the trials and tribulations of a company who's going through the pandemic, and the things that they're trying to deal with with HR and HR data. And how do they solve that every day. But my life has been as a consultant. My first job out of college, actually, two weeks out of college, I got hired by Towers, Perrin, Foster and Crosby predates you by a year or two. And I was doing statistical analysis of weighted job questionnaires, which is very old. It's also old to say that I was working on mainframe focus. Does anybody remember mainframe focus? There you go! And doing statistical analysis and pay programs and STFS. Anybody remember STFS? And then I'm transitioned to Morgan Stanley and was comp analyst, so I went from consultant to practitioner and then did the practitioner thing for a bunch of years. And then I became a consultant again. So I've lived both sides of the fence. And the way I actually act as a consultant today, is in reaction to the consultants I had to hire and deal with on the practitioner side. And so if you hire me today, you're gonna get a much better version of me than if you had hired me before that. But what we're gonna do is we're going to talk to you about that today. And a lot of things we're going to talk about, we can go on to the next slide. So we're gonna talk about things that you should expect from a consultant. We're also going to talk about the reasons why you might hire a consultant. And then we've created these top 10 tenants. I wanted to call them the commandments, but that sounds a little bit too religious. And then we're going to talk about some of the examples of how all of these things happen. And then at the end, we're going to summarize them for you, okay? So, our first poll today! Go to your app like we asked to do. And we're going to launch the poll. How would you grade the consultants that you use? A outstanding. There's a prize for those people. B exceeds expectations. Something tells me this would be normally distributed.

Steve Brink: 5:35
Yes. I think so.

David Turetsky: 5:36
C meets expectations. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Almost meets expectations. Okay, and fails to meet expectations. Wow, oh, we nailed it! You don't need to have a statistical degree to know that most people answered meets expectations. Good context, because that means you're somewhat satisfied, you're not over the moon satisfied with the consultants that you use.

Steve Brink: 6:01
First confessions is, you don't want to necessarily reinvent work. And this is a great slide by Robin Ferracone of Farient Advisors, one of the best things that comp consultants there is. And one of the reasons why I took this, you know, it's in a lot of different contexts. But the context I want to talk about is just the one that's highlighted in yellow compensation consulting. Because what you really think about or what you expect, as a as a role of consultant is that advocate, advocate for the shareholder, right. And for the stakeholders. But also that trusted advisor, it's not somebody, it's somebody that's going to listen to your problems, right. That's what a trusted adviser is. They're not they're not they might not know, if they are an expert in one thing, but they're not an expert in everything, and they admit it, but they are connected to

David Turetsky: 6:49
No, we don't know anybody... other experts. And they don't know and they'll be honest with you to say they don't know, but they'll actually find an expert who will help you that's what a trusted adviser is, is about. And then lastly, what you're the role that you'd like to see is that whole fact based opinions, it's based on facts, not opinions, or not what someone else was doing, or what's something they read. It's fact based on the performance of process. But then what you sometimes see, and what some of you might have experienced right around that, is the ego. Some of them don't want to listen, they want to listen to themselves, right? Anybody relate?

Steve Brink: 7:25
Nobody at all. But you get that ego. And it's all about them. It's not about you, the the actual client. And so also you get that leadership trill. So somebody that's just they're going to please you, whatever you say, they're just going to confirm, they're not going to give you that honest advice, right? That's what so it's just almost kind of a rubber stamp. And then someone's sometimes you also get that paint by the numbers. What I mean by that is, it's a methodical way. They're not necessarily listening to, to your needs. But it's a consultant that says, I'm going to go through this process no matter what. I'm gonna paint the one in red, I'm gonna paint the two in blue, etc. Right?

David Turetsky: 8:09
Has anybody dealt with something like that, where they have a process, they're gonna go through the process no matter what? Yeah, exactly. So our second poll is now up. And it's, how do you use consultants the most? Again, this is your opinion, I'm not gonna hold against you. But this is what you think about how you use them. We're gonna try and use the app if you want. No, It's not there? Alright, forget it. How many of you use consultants as a trusted advisor? Someone you can call that you know is going to give you the answer that you're hoping for. A few of you, okay. You need an expert, you need somebody with expertise. Okay. Somebody with an external opinion, going outside getting the opinion, bring it back in. So you can go to your people and say, hey, look, they said it not me. Supplemental resources, you just can't get the job done. Okay, a few of you. Remember, even if you use something like Fiverr. Fiverr is one of those places where you're hiring a consultant to do a job for a period of time. By the way, Fiverr is not where you pay $5 for somebody. You pay them what it's worth, but you actually can find people around the world who do this stuff. You can actually see the ratings and reviews of. How about outsourcing projects, outsourcing projects and processing work where just can't get it done? You need someone to do it. Okay, a few of you as well. All right, well, that makes sense. Makes total sense. That gives us context for the next few things we're going to When we talk about hiring a consultant, and these are the talk about. things that we're going to be talking about. We are going to talk about ways in which you can address a problem in a very rapid way. I was just hired by a company to be compensation management for them for a period of time because both of their compensation resources in corporate had to go out to the emergency family leave. They lost them right before doing merit process and doing incentive processes. If you can relate, I apologize profusely. This is the worst feeling in the world, where you have one person who's left in comp or in HRIS, who can give somebody else to data. So you have to train that person on how to do the merit process. How to do the variable pay process and get it done quickly. By the way, we got it all done. And by the time they came back, we were ready to actually create the letters and get it all to happen. But that's a really horrible feeling. But when you can find someone who has those expertise right away, it's really wonderful. The second is getting people who can do things that your team can't do. And there are a lot of topics around today that you're going to hear about throughout this week. Like things like pay transparency, you're going to hear about things like pay equity. And you may not have anybody on staff who can do those things rapidly, accurately, and be able to provide a voice, especially with expertise, you'll need that person to come in and do it. And they also bring somewhat objective advice. As Steve was saying before, sometimes you get people who have what they want to tell you. And sometimes they'll listen to what you have to say and they'll be able to take their background, their experience, and be able to provide a synthesis to be able to understand not only your problem, but also put it in context for what is the world doing about this right now. And talking about the trusted advisor, that doesn't just happen. You typically meet somebody either earlier in your career, you know them, you've been with them for a long time, and you believe in them. And you will carry them forward with you as long as you can, as long as you need to. That trusted adviser is somebody that I will hold on too tightly, because that's the person who's going to help you succeed in your career and enable you to grow. And hopefully they stay being a consultant.

Steve Brink: 11:50
Almost operates like a mentor.

David Turetsky: 11:51
Yes. Just like we had that relationship where you'd mentored me.

Steve Brink: 11:56
And you mentored me!

David Turetsky: 11:58
That's only for podcasting.

Steve Brink: 11:59
Yes, that's true.

David Turetsky: 12:01
And last but not least providing focus. And what we mean by that is, sometimes you need someone to tell you, you're focusing on the wrong things. They look at your picture objectively, you may have hired them to look at x, and they go, you realize that your house is on fire? Yeah, I can install that TV for you. But you realize we actually have to put out the fire first? And that is incredibly important for you. If you're trying to focus on something, they may not necessarily be a trusted adviser yet, but they're certainly going to be after they help you put out the fire. Right? And what we've tried to do in context here is put some fun, anybody love physics? That one person thank you for being honest.

Steve Brink: 12:45
Not too many HR people love physics. We know that.

David Turetsky: 12:52
Hey, listen, we're both comp people. We're all comp people here. Right? We can all talk turkey. Yeah, we would we just use these as kind of examples to kind of go off of. So we're gonna go through each one one by one.

Steve Brink: 13:03
All right. Let's do this.

David Turetsky: 13:05
So the first one is what goes up must come down.

Steve Brink: 13:10
I guess karaoke is later tonight. Okay, that was Remember that song? 1973. So some of you weren't even born yet. That's fine. Okay, great. Okay. But that's a law of physics what comes up must come down. Right? HR, no doesn't work! Were against the law of physics, why? The stickiness of pay? How many of you have voluntary left the job to get paid less? Change of career, startup, work life balance? That's good.

David Turetsky: 13:49
That's actually the best answer.

Steve Brink: 13:51
Good answer, good answer.

David Turetsky: 13:52
We planted you, didn't we?

Steve Brink: 13:54
Anyway. But it's silly, right, in terms of the stickiness of pay. Now we probably have all experienced kind of freezing pay, right? That's hard enough. I've had probably on two handfuls where I've had to actually go and tell somebody that they had to decrease their pay. Not a very easy conversation. Why? Because compensation, sometimes people it's about their self worth, isn't it? They get emotional. Your pay is what you're worth. Like well, no. Let's now move back over to the data space and remove that emotion to talk about the data. You are above market or whatever the reason is to reduce that pay in terms of that, right? So that stickiness of pay is always there. So once those continues to go up, right, that stickiness is not coming down. In the market when you're benchmarking! We all benchmark right? So what do we do? Well, we go we benchmark we find out what the market's doing and what do we do? We increase pay. And we're always doing what? We're always chasing that pay. And what is it doing? Going up, going up, going up, isn't it? So that whole benchmarking in the market is always moving forward is very, very, very, very important. Then you have the impact of pay transparency laws. Now with this, the pay transparency laws that are happening throughout the United States in different states is doing different, slightly different things. Europe is going to go live for total reward by the way, in 2025. Be prepared. And then all of a sudden, so what's going to pay transparency? Well, there's some of us that believe, yes, it's the right intent. Right, the right intent to be fairness and equitable and right, right, good. Good intent. But then also, what's what's going to be a possible outcome? Oh, gonna start ramping up, isn't it? Okay. What did we see with pay disclosure rules of executive compensation? That it's exponential growth in exec pay, right? Because again, all of a sudden, you have a peer group there all of a sudden, yeah. Oh, well, let's remove them from the analysis. All sudden, then that CEO, the next year had a good year? Well, look, I'm underpaid! I'm gonna be matching here. So what happened? Just a constant ramp up? And to be honest, the exec comp consultants they're kind of enabling that to some extent, aren't they? But that's in terms of the impact of pay transparency. Do you want to add some?

David Turetsky: 16:24
I would say that, to me, it's a good thing anyways. Because we've been consistently underpaying many groups. And this is a way for us to pay them what they should be paid. Those groups need to get paid equivalently to what other people are getting paid today.

Steve Brink: 16:41
100% agree. But again, the idea about unintended consequences, which is the next law.

Announcer: 16:48
Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by Salary.com. Now, back to the show.

Steve Brink: 16:57
The law for every action, there is an equal opposite action. Let's talk about fees. So rewards strategy. There are some unintended consequences. If you set up your reward strategy, and you set up incentives, and your incentive program is based on financial measures and other measures. What happens? We have some examples of some bad apples selling. Enron at the millennium, right? They were they were falsifying kind of revenue targets, right? In terms of this, because they were wanting what? They were wanting to get more options, this is great, and Enron's going through the roof. So we're moving it really good. So all of a sudden, with Enron, find out blows everything up goes bankrupt. Everybody lost jobs, everything. Really sad consequences. Some actually with fraud actually had to go to jail, right? Wells Fargo, they're much more recent 2017 or so. Right? What was happening? Setting up wow, if your incentive is to create new accounts and get new accounts, you're saying your your your incentive actually will grow? So they set up fake accounts to do that, right? Oh, what happened to Wells Fargo? A lot of people no longer there. United Airlines have slightly different twist in 2017. Remember, that person violently was was taken off the plane? I mean, this is pre COVID. So we probably forget about those things. So violently took off the thing. And the CEO stood up and says, Well, that was justified. Yikes! So much for customer service, right? You know, in terms of that, the stock price boom went down. Then the last Equifax, you know, it was 2016 I think, data breach. Oh, my gosh, we're gonna get hit with our stock price. What is the CEO do? Oh, before we go public, let me go ahead and sell some shares. Right. Holy smokes. So all of these examples are what? Are examples where there's good intent to set up these nice financial targets and some other targets. But you're going to be measured on what? People are going to be focused. So some people are going to be where you're trying to focus on these broad based financial rewards, other rewards like ethical behavior, customer service, but if the only real kind you're really measuring are those financials, but they're going to focus on the financials. Screw everything else! Right? And I'm not saying that's everybody, but these are the bad apples. This will happen again. Because on paper, it looks great. That oh my gosh, if we set this up, we're gonna incentivize people, they're gonna try, they're gonna do this and that and the stock price is going to go through the roof and we're all gonna be rich. And that's not necessarily so you kind of have those kind of unintended consequences. You'd have to have a 360 lens around those outside of those financial ones.

David Turetsky: 19:58
And the point of that is that when a consultant comes in and starts looking at the problem, they're going to help you look at some of the unintended consequences of being able to set up a plan. Now I'm not going to tell you that in those four circumstances, the consultant wasn't the one who put the plan in place, because I don't know. But nowadays, we are very focused on making sure that when you have KPIs that you're trying to drive to, that those KPIs have fail safes that don't start those types of balls rolling down the wrong lanes. Because what we're trying to do is set you up for success, and trying to build something that's not only scalable, but that meets the consequences, or the financial goals that you're trying to get to. So hopefully, with you and your team, you're giving us that information necessary. You're giving us all the information, we're going to talking about this a little bit, necessary to understand the reasons why we're coming in and changing the plans. And then what are the audiences of those plans? And then how do you necessarily work with them to be able to set them up for success? How many of you work with sales teams that love to find loopholes? And that's what we need to know. Because when we're setting up, whether it's your commission plans or variable pay plans, we're going to have to work with that to make sure that we work those loopholes out. Because if you don't tell us about the loopholes that had existed in the past that had gotten them into trouble, and you into trouble, we're going to fall into that same consequence, and probably have that same issue happen.

Steve Brink: 21:33
And he measures change behaviors, they really do. You all have a big impact on that. I can give you an example, when I was at Mercer. Mercer was around the millennium, I was running the US business, and Mercer was very geographically run. And through acquisitions and other things and, and our clients would say they bring up a France survey, they bring up a Brazilian survey, they bring up in US survey, they look like different companies. It was horrible. It was horrible. And so we weren't doing very well with global companies, or at least we as in the Mercer set. And so what Mercer decided to do was we actually said, let's go if we're going to globalize one business, kind of the data business and the software business would makes sense, right? So they did that. But they didn't change the reward system. So what ended up happening is, the Brazilian lead was a US person would sell a Brazilian survey $2,500. And I used to have hair and it used to be brown. Because I had a conversation that say, well, who gets the credit? I sold it, I should get the 2500 credit! The person in Brazil, we did all the work! Oh, my gosh, you know how many battles? Battles after battles. So I get a proposal to say, let's take that global business and take it outside and propose a new reward system that would say, we're going global. It's based on global, you would think now that Brazilian head and US head were best of friends. Oh yeah, sell more! Can I come to the US and sell more? The incentive changed overnight! In seven years the business tripled became the most profitable part of Mercer and arguably the number one data provider in the world.

David Turetsky: 23:26
By the way, you don't work at Mercer anymore. Just so you know.

Steve Brink: 23:28
I don't?

David Turetsky: 23:29
No. You don't have to sell Mercer. Darn. But that was an example in the context that I was used to. I did work there. All right. And you're still doing a great job! If you go down to their booth and ask permission on it. How many of you have gotten to the stage where

Steve Brink: 23:43
I do. you're hiring a consultant, and then the consultant says to you, are you really ready to do something here? I can't tell you how many times I've sold an assignment. I've started with a kickoff call. And then they said, Yeah, we're gonna do this in two or three months. Why not now? Well, we're not ready. That's better. That's more mature than doing the kickoff call, getting everybody on the call, starting the project, and then saying to them later on, you know, you're not ready, right? You're not ready to go. What do I mean by not ready? First of all, I mean, they don't have all of the data necessary to do the assignment. They haven't gotten buy in from everybody. They're just not prepared to move forward. And what I mean by prepared is, they haven't done their homework. When you hire a consultant, we don't just learn everything just by selling the deal. That's when everything starts kicking off. That's when we start learning about what the real problem is. Because just getting the deal. Okay, that sets up some context. But now we need to get all of your data. We need to get all of the documentation. And if you haven't done all that work to get that together, we can't do it for you. Now we can in fact, when I go into a client, I tell them I will sweep floors for you, if necessary. And I'm serious, I will. When I was that comp manager I was talking about for that company before, I literally did the mail, remember mail merging? I did the mail merge from Excel to Word. It actually works better today than you remember, that actually does work. And I'll do that for you. The problem is, the reason why I had to do it and they had to spend the billable hours on it, is because they weren't prepared to do it. And they didn't give us the templates, we had to do the templates ourselves, we had to take all the data we had from all the processes and put it together into Excel, yes, Excel spreadsheets, and put it all together and you get to the stage where we would send it to them and they go, no, these other ones, you have to put them in French. Okay, and then we do all that and get it all translated and what not. My point is, is that when you hire a consultant, remember, the job isn't over for you. You are a stakeholder in this, and you need to be prepared to be able to actively work with us to get the job done. And it's not just you. There's other people involved in that as well. Yeah, I would just add another another example of this, a software company wants to do total reward statements. Some other software companies, they say totall rewards statements are great. So let's go do one. So set it up, spend all the money getting it all ready. And boom, well, wait a minute, how are we going to communicate all this? What's going to happen when we get all those questions about why they're paid the way they are? And they're just suddenly spent all this time and money set up a total rewards system that didn't go live, because they didn't have the communication, they weren't ready. And those are just examples that happened. So you got to ask those real questions, go through the entire process, just like what Dave was saying.

David Turetsky: 26:50
So I know you know about inertia, right, it's getting started. Getting off of your tush to get something to happen. But what we're talking about that is that when you're starting a project, or when you want to hire a consultant, one of the hardest thing to do is to get not just you moving, and you might have a burning need for it, but to get everybody moving. But what we also find is, is that even when you hire us, and we get all the information, and we provide you that information, are you willing to do anything with it? How many of you hired consultants, they would give you something and then not use it? Come on? No, that's not, one, two people? Come on! I'm going to call BS on all of you because I know you've done this because it's happened to me. I've worked with companies, I've given them incredible stuff. And then they've gone, yeah, we just can't do it right now. Just spent tens of thousands of dollars getting this done. Yeah, you know, it's great. But we're not going to do it right now. And that's because what we've done is we've given them stuff to help them make the change. But they didn't sell it internally. And so they're not ready to actually make a change. And this is problematic, especially as we were talking before about some of the big things that are happening right now, especially around transparency as he was saying, you don't have a choice! You have to make a change, you have to do things, if you haven't updated your structures since 2018. If you haven't updated your job descriptions since turn of the century, people now have a right to see their description. People now have a right to know what you're judging them on. People now have the rights, in some ways, to see the market data. They can ask for it. What are you going to do? If the match that you have is from 2018, how are you going to explain that? Oh, well we've aged it a couple of times. Do they know what that means? No, they don't. So when we come in, and we help you create the process and the way in which you're going to then be able to get this out there, you will have you have done your homework. And we're going to talk about this several times to talk to your leadership team and say, hey, guess what? We've got to do this. We're hiring somebody, we're going to do this now. If you have any objections to it, tell me now because otherwise, we're going to be afoul of law and you don't want to pay those fines. Should I ask if anybody's actually paid fines? You were in California, there are fines right for not being transparent? Alright, just wink at me if.... But the point is, is that this takes everybody in your organization to stand behind you. Because you're gonna be the agent of change, but they have to be willing to make a change as well. So when you hire someone, how many of you get competitive bids? Okay. I've been the recipient of this many times. I'm sorry, David, your price is just too high. Wait, wait, what? I just quoted you 250 job market pricing for $10,000. What are you talking about? How is that too high? How are you going to do it? Well, we're hiring an intern and they're gonna do it for us. So, that's not hiring for fit, it's hiring for price. I will tell you, I'm going to be expensive when you hire me. But I'm also going to work my butt off and I'm going to give you hours that I don't owe you. Because I want to make sure that you're getting satisfaction with what I do. And you can go on Yelp or whatever, I'd love Yelp reviews, I'm not on Yelp, but I'd love it anyway. And be able to be the person who I turn to to say, hey, David solved the problem for me that I couldn't solve myself and he did it in a very conscientious way. Because every single company I've worked with, I want them to be a reference for me. But when you hire on price, what are you getting? You're getting a great deal, probably, but you may not be able to use it. And so what you need to do, and by the way, I'm not saying you should just hire me right now, because I'm really expensive, you have to really make sure that the person that you're hiring is going to do what you need them to do. And sometimes that's not going to be the cheapest, sometimes it's going to be the most expensive. And I know with cost cutting the way we are, in an environment where we are, that's not going to be something that's palatable. But I will tell you, you do get what you pay for, especially when we're dealing with compensation issues. And especially when we're dealing with the regulation environment that we're in, you will get what you pay for.

Steve Brink: 31:26
It's about value.

David Turetsky: 31:28
Absolutely, it's about value, how many of you value the relationships that you have with your colleagues that are consultants? Have you ever asked them for a discount? Seriously! Have you ever asked them for a discount? What have they said? Yeah, if you have an established relationship with them, they might give you money off! Of course, you're gonna have to grovel, I will have to grovel. Because I'm the CEO of my own business, I will tell you that you're going to get a good deal or you're not going to get a good deal, I'll also tell you that, because of the way I work, I'm gonna have to cut your hours back, you're gonna get all the hours, believe me. But I do that, but you're gonna get it anyways. Hire for fit. Hire someone who you trust, hire someone who you know is going to give you the work. Because if you just hire on price, you're gonna get what you pay for. And the second, you're not going to get the same work product for every consultant. Some consultancies work on the nestegg, that you hire somebody, and then you get a team of other people who come in underneath who do all the work. And that's their delivery team. We do it too. But I'm there every meeting, I'm there working with them every single hour to make sure that they're delivering for you. I'm the one who's got my name on the line. So I'm putting my reputation. And I'm putting my hours against every single, every single client that I work with. You have anything else to add to that?

Steve Brink: 32:57
Just on that last one is that you think like these big consulting companies, that's everybody, you hire somebody in San Francisco, you hire somebody in New York, you're gonna get the same result. It's not true. Unless there's a really predefined kind of methodology that's within within. There's an example I can remember where where a company actually hired somebody on the West Coast and the East Coast to do some market prices came up with different answers. More art than science, isn't it? It's embarrassing, right? So just realize go eyes wide open. Alright.

David Turetsky: 33:31
Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck, we have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast, or whatever is on your mind. Go to Salary.com/HRDLconsulting, to schedule your FREE 30 minute call today.

Steve Brink: On this one: 33:56
opposite objects attract while like objects repel. So we meet diversity of thinking so often we get myopic, we get narrow vision, because this is the way we've always done it. This is the way we do! This is us! We just kind of do the same thing, we've been doing that for a long time. We just keep on doing that. So it's like, then you start asking, well, why did you do it this way? Well, I really don't know. You know, there was a company in Arkansas that had a 99 element merit guide chart grid. You know, it's like, really? Like and they go, well, that kind of goes back and they were asking other people. And well, it was the CEO like 30 years ago that wanted it this way. But why now? Why? But on this, you want that diversity of thinking, you have to have different views to kind of question what you're doing. That's a good thing! It's gonna make you better, right? It's gonna make you better.

David Turetsky: 34:58
I have an anecdote about that. Hopefully you'll follow me here. One of my closest colleagues, when I worked at a company called Work State, he told me the story that he loves roast beef. And his mother and him used to make roast beef every Thanksgiving and they would always cut the ends off. And one day, he said, I love the end, why are we cutting it off? Has anybody heard this story before? Because I've told it many times. And she didn't know the answer. So she said, call grandma, grandma knows. So we've called Grandma. Grandma, why do we keep cutting the ends off the roast beef? I love it. It's my favorite thing in the world. And she said, well, because my pan was only this big and in order to be able to get the roast in the oven, I had to cut the ends off. So if you don't ask the question why you don't know whether it's meaningful to you. Why do we do what we do? The pan is too small, is that really a good reason to cut the ends off? By the way, the ends are really delicious.

Steve Brink: 35:58
You know, how often its like, you read something, it's an article or even a presentation, and all of a sudden, it's like, wow, that sounds great! We should do that ourselves! But you have different contexts, right? You have a business, different business strategy, you have maybe different objectives. Doesn't mean maybe the concept might fit, but you just can't cookie cut and take that whatever they've done and put it to you. You know, it's just you have a different culture of work of how you get work done. All of that context is important. Context is everything. So just because peer companies are doing this in a benchmark doesn't necessarily mean it's right for you. Right? And that's something you've got to question, especially when somebody brings in, oh, best practices. This is the best practice, you should do this! Best practice for whom. Right? Next, we could do it ourselves if we had the technology! Hey, just give us technology and we're fine! No. Doesn't, doesn't, doesn't work, doesn't, does not work.

David Turetsky: 37:02
And a lot of people do it with Excel. They'll say we don't need manager self service, we can do it in Excel. How many of you do that? Sorry. They don't want to raise their hand. Really? Thank you for being honest. When I when I put this together, I said, but it goes back to making a change is hard. How many of you love working the way you work? And if somebody else came in and said, you have to do it differently, the first thing you're going to think about it: ugh I hate that idea! Because it feels like it's a loss to you. Like a lot of you work hybrid right now, right? Or you work from home. I work from home, I literally wear the same thing every day. No, I actually have multiple of it. But I wear this. If I had to go into the office, it would feel like a tremendous loss to me. I would not like it, in fact I'd hate it. And I can only go in for a couple hours because that drive all the way up to the head office in Waltham, Mass, and then drive back down because I pick up my son off the bus. They don't care about that. But that's what I'd have to do. So it would feel like an absolute loss to me. If someone came in and told me that's what I have to do. Because when somebody who thinks they're an expert on something tells you you can't do what you've been doing in the past, like using one survey source as the your ability to create a composite to then be able to do your structure development. You should use more than one. Oh geez, does that mean that I have to match to more than one survey? Well, that means I have to match to three or four, because I can't get because we're unique. And you know, there's only one survey really. Well, yeah, maybe with our corporate jobs. But that feels like a loss to you because now I've lost control. Now I have to go do something else. But you have to realize that sometimes taking out of your comfort zone is actually not a bad thing and there is logic to it. There's a reason why someone's suggesting that. It's not just because. If Steve said sometimes people, especially consultants pull the word best practice out of their shelf. Right? They say this is what other people do. How many of us think we're unique? There's no business like us in the world. We only do this this way and that's it, right? I've heard that a million times. But the answer is that sometimes in certain processes, you can do it similarly. And you have to get out of your comfort zone sometimes. And I think the greatest example of that is was pay transparency. We've been doing it wrong for so long. And actually I'm giving a presentation on pay transparency tomorrow at SHRM. And one of the things I've been thinking about is transparency has been there for many years. We've been publishing pay ranges internally, horizontally, meaning to people in the same grade structure. We've been telling them about what their grades are, how many times hae we trained them on, though, what that is? Have we ever done employee communications to say, what does a midpoint mean? How do you interpret where you are in the range? Do you need to care about what the word comp ratio means? Because it's so meaningful to your increase? Have we ever done that? Has anybody ever done that? Oh, well, congratulations, I really applaud you for doing it. When I build manager guides, and I build employee guides on pay, because of pay transparency, the first thing I do is like cut through that compensation crap we always use, like midpoint progression, the salary structures, like those words that don't mean anything to an employee, because now they're very meaningful to them. Because when they're getting their increase, their merit increase, and it's different from a couple of percentage points, because they're in one zone versus another zone, that's meaningful to them. So we have to talk to them about that. But when you get told, you have to start telling employees this kind of stuff, it's hard. But we have to change. It's meaningful.

Steve Brink: 40:57
I just, I just add this, the second one about planting seeds does not guarantee success. One of the things that companies now are are looking at rewards more holistically, really total rewards, right? And it's the whole trend is, you know, how do you personalize? How do you do that? Optimization of total rewards for every for every individual, about their perception of that value that they get from these different reward elements? Right? That's a growing thing. And so some companies in terms of do you actually just want to plant the seed and do a pilot, so we got a consumer goods company, over 100,000 employees across 100 countries to try to implement that overnight is going to be too much. But you can plant seeds there. So what they did, they did a division where they said, Okay, you have guaranteed comp, and you can move money into variable comp, what you want? Would anybody moved guaranteed comp $10,000? Over to variable comp 10,000 that's at risk? Anybody?

David Turetsky: 41:57
If I could make more money?

Steve Brink: 41:58
That's the question. It's only 10,000. I just got this mental picture of your grandkids going, Grandpa Exactly. So what they ended up doing. So for every decrease in guaranteed comp, you got 1.25 as an opportunity target, not Well, one of them actually is like that. She's a trip! guaranteed right? Amazing results, what happened with that. They did it just a bit because they wanted to test this out, which is a great way. Piloting and testing things out first with a small group is a great way to try things out. So what they ended up doing as the end result was 50% of the of the eligible and this division said, you know what, I'm gonna wait and see, you know, I'm gonna keep my leverage as it is, but I'm gonna go, you know, just keep it going as it is. But I love the choice! So sometime next year, maybe I can change it, then it was two tails. 25% said, Yeah, I'll actually take that to earn more, you know, this whole, we're talking about just that the main thing, you know, a 1% doesn't really drive behavior. But if all of a sudden you're moving some money within guardrails, you couldn't go to zero salary. But moving that over to somewhere your opportunity is significantly higher? That could be a positive! People value that. So when you looked at it from a thematic perspective, yes, what what type of employees were that? They were actually more later stage employees, because they valued maybe wealth you wouldn't believe the cost of daycare today! accumulation more. But then on the flip side, on the other 25%, did what? They actually took variable, what you could do take variable, and actually bring it over to guarantee but 0.75 basis. And when you looked at those 25%, again, wasn't 100%. But thematically, those were early stage career people because why? They were valuing cash more than this variable. That stability while they're getting a mortgage, daycare! Crazy daycare, talk to my grandkids. Well, I don't talk to my grandkids and talk to my kids. We talk about the grandkids' daycare. Anyway, so for them it's like, it's like very interesting, but now they can assess would that make sense for the broader company? That's what in terms of doing a plant those seeds can be really helpful.

David Turetsky: 44:37
As we've talked about before, sometimes it's hard to change. Inertia. It's sometimes really difficult, even if you're getting that expert, that trusted advisor to help you. It's hard to change what's been done before. We've been doing this way for 30 years. You know, the person who's still here, implemented this 30 years ago. But what happens is, is what we found, is that when you tell people why, and you educate them as to why, you can get them off of what has always happened. Because there's a reason why we have to get off, something's not happening the way it needs to. Some legislation has been introduced, something's different, we now have to move. So one of the things that consultants can help you with is, actually being able to build, whether it's change management, whether it's communication program, an education program, you don't actually have to hire someone to fix something. Sometimes you can use us to help educate, whether it's educating the board, whether it's educating executives, whether it's educating managers and employees, one of the things that we can do, because we're a third party, we're not you, they will listen to us, probably, maybe someone somewhat, a little bit. And I mean by that by it, sometimes some people will listen to you, sometimes they'll, it'll resonate with them. But what we have to do as the advisor as the person who's coming from outside and looking in, as long as we get from you how communication has to happen, then we can help you find out what resonates with the people internally so change management can happen. How many of you have an internal change management team that HR can utilize? I saw some people rolling their eyes, which really tells me a lot about your change management team. Sometimes we can help you with that because whether you can leverage your change management team, or whether we can actually just reach out to them to say, tell us the kinds of communications that work at your organization, we're going to be the experts in being able to create the data, create the understanding, then your change management team can help us whether it's with videos, whether it's with things inside of a store, whether it's fliers to their homes, whatever resonates with your people, let us help build the content, let them help it get resonated out, because they're the experts in your organization and being able to connect with the right people, or connect with people in the right way. We can't do it all, I'll be honest with you. We're not perfect in every way, consultants try. We actually might even have communication themes. But you guys are gonna have the people internally who are going to be the champions for making this work. So we're going to leverage them to make it happen. Sometimes that's your leadership team, sometimes that's employees who can help us resonate with the rest of the employees. We'll need to work together is what I'm saying. So, when we talk about resistance to change, you guys aren't resistant to change, are you? I heard no. No, we change all the time, right? Especially lately, when we had to stay home, everybody had to stay home during COVID. Right? Sometimes we were home with our spouses, sometimes we were home with our boyfriend or girlfriend, we were definitely home with our kids! That change was really hard. But we had to do it. At work, sometimes we resist change. And we talked about this before, because we've been doing things the same way for years. You get your participation materials, you fill them out, you send it back in, you're usually doing the same surveys year over year, right? It's our habits, we'll get into it, you know, whether it's April or May or whatever, you get them back to analyze and you do the QA work, whatever, you send it back and get the results you analyze, and you get ready for September for the upcoming merit. We get in our head these things. And sometimes we don't want to change but we actually have to. I hear this all the time. I don't want to change, I don't need to change. We're unique. The reason why we do this is nobody does this. I said this before, nobody does this, we do this. It becomes a battle cry. I can't tell you how many times I laugh internally, I never laugh at clients. But I laugh because I hear this from every company in the same damn industry, we're unique! Really? The company down the street said the same thing yesterday! Of course, I don't say that with my external voice. I say it with my internal voice. But you're right, you are unique. You have unique leadership, you have unique problems, you have unique issues, but don't make it a battlecry the reason why we're not going to change because that's horseshit. Pardon me, I apologize for anybody who doesn't like bad language, it's horseshit though. Sometimes we have to change because we have to change, something's happening that makes us or forces us to change. We have to do it. We can't keep doing what we're doing, or we'll get sued or we'll get in trouble with the DOL or we'll get in trouble with employees. Or we're gonna lose money! We have to change. And I'm just here to tell you that if a consultant tells you they have the answer, they're liars. We don't know what the answer is. We don't have a drug for every problem there is, and sometimes we're gonna be wrong. That's another confession. We had a lot of things saying we're gonna have confessions, we have yet to talk about myths though. Yeah, no, if I have to do that we're liars. But seriously, folks, the answer isn't every consultant will give you an answer that's the correct answer. Sometimes you do need to say, are you sure? Do we really need to do that? And the first place I would turn would be your legal counsel. Especially if it's something that could have actually had to do with regulations or laws. Turn to your legal counsel and say, does this make sense to you? There's a reason why you pay them. And sometimes you actually have a labor attorney on your payroll. Does anybody actually have a labor attorney in house? Excellent. Do any of you have anybody, have any relationships with labor attorneys that your general counsel utilizes? Great. For those of you who didn't raise your hand? I hope that your general counsel has someone they can turn to because you will desperately need that, especially when we're talking about transparency. And I think I'm right in saying that not everybody's in California. Right? Right. But you all have operations, or at least one person in California, right? No. Okay. Do you have anybody who is in any state that has to transparency laws? Oh, you're so lucky. Well, was it Hawaii that just now adopted it? Yeah. So it's gonna come. And if you see the map, not everyone's gonna have a pay transparency laws. But if you have at least one employee, or somebody who works, they don't actually have to live in that state, they could work in that state, too. But that's why you have to have a good attorney to help you with those issues. Because we might give you advice that might be wrong. And you need to test it. Not everything we're gonna say is gonna be right. So check our

Steve Brink: 51:52
Okay, so just to start our final tenant, the law work. of physics applied to compensation in HR, is that you've got to seek out counsel the most ardent critics. I mean, one of the things that, that, you know, there was a company that actually says, you know what? Our IT is the worst possible people that we that we have to have to get approval for to do anything with any kind of technology. But there are some companies that, oh, we got to stay away from IT as much as possible, because they're going to be a barrier, right? Well, you've got to bring in those early on, you've got to, because otherwise, you're gonna go down the line. And guess what, then it's going to slam the door on you. So so having that is really, really, really important to understand who those who those critics are, and that goes back through anyone! It's a business leader or whatever, who's going to slam the door on certain things because they don't want change, but be able to make that happen.

David Turetsky: 52:56
So as far as tips go, when you're hiring a consultant, be honest with them, especially in the beginning stages! Don't hide anything, because it's going to come up and bite us. And we've talked about this yesterday, if you're not honest about the, and I think we're gonna get to this in the next slide, too. So I'm not gonna go into some great detail. But look at these tips. They make sense, right? They're kind of obvious. We saved the last obvious stuff to the last for the end two, the last one need to be agile. You guys know what agile means? I'm not just talking about development. Being able to make changes fast in a project with a consultant. Yes, the consultants should also be agile and be flexible as well. But you should be as well. But the company should be too.

Steve Brink: 53:39
Just like on scope creep, I always use a triangle as three Ds, right? Delivery, dollars and deadline, you get to pick it two. You can't pick all three, because it changes the shape of the triangle, and it becomes a insolvable equation, right? Oh, I want all this additional work. And I want the timeline, the deadline to stay the same, the money, I don't want to pay any more. So you get two pick two of the three, right? The three Ds, delivery what the outcome is, right? What the dollars are, and what the what the deadline is.

David Turetsky: 54:13
So good. Why don't we skip the next slide and just go read the questions. You guys have questions, you want to hit the next slide? Anybody have any questions. No? Okay, let's hit the next slide. You need to spend time with your consultants. Don't think we can do everything ourselves. Now the consultant may say, don't worry about it. We're going to go away for a while. We're going to come up with all the answers and then

Announcer: 54:34
That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the we're going to give it to you. That's not a consultant you should work with. Show, have the consultants show their work. Have them show the map to you. So you can do it for yourself next time. Make sure you're honest with them about all the problems because otherwise it's going to hit that triangle that Steve was talking about. Give access to your internal leaders. Allow the consultant to get their phone numbers, to talk to them, to interview them, to find out their side of the story. So it's not saying you're gonna misrepresent, it's just saying, let's let them see or have an opportunity to speak to the consultant to try and solve the problem. And the last thing, prioritize the things that have to happen first. Again, if the house is on fire, you're not going to fix your salary structures until the house is not on fire anymore, like fixing your data. How many of you who have looked at your data before you go and do market pricing to make sure that people are in the right jobs, the job descriptions are still relevant, that the market pricing is still gonna be relevant. So when you start creating those structures, they're going to be accurate. episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week, and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.