The Times of London
July 1, 2004
Premier Executive: New Software Solutions
By Philip Whiteley
COMPUTERS can fly a plane, pinpoint your position on the globe and bring live football to your desktop. They can also set your pay. Software providers are devising automatic salary-planning systems to try to reduce the guesswork and subjectivity when determining pay levels.
The system may take into account individual performance, company performance and the market rates to determine salary level. Alex Bartfeld, who sells such systems for the Boston-based Softscape, considers that an advantage of such an approach is fairness, although in practice staff like to see some element of human oversight to the procedure.
"There is definitely a motivating factor to the idea that you don't have to be sat near the right manager to get the best pay," he says.
Softscape is one of many US-based specialists looking to expand or set themselves up in Europe. As one might expect, automation of pay calculations is more established in America. Technology has been used aggressively to improve market information in hiring short-term contractors. This can drive rates down. Shell Oil Products US has been using a system provided by IQNavigator to automate recruitment of contract labour. There is a bidding process, in which the employer asks employment agencies to match the required skills then go for the best rate. This would have been slow and impractical using just telephone and paper. John Martin, senior vice-president at IQNavigator, says: "Agencies are motivated to give you the best price, because they know they are competing for the opening. The hiring manager gives the opportunity to multiple agencies rather than just the person they last went to lunch with."
The plus side for the workers and agencies is that with information spread more easily and quickly, it can mean a shorter wait between contracts. IQNavigator, based in Denver, Colorado, is starting to promote the product over here. US software firms new to Europe were strongly in evidence at a recent human-resources software exhibition in London.
Some large employers have carried out comprehensive internal labour market analyses, using computing power to crunch the numbers. For example, Fleetboston Financial in the US worked with Mercer Consulting to analyse the reasons that people leave. The result was that blocked career paths appeared as statistically a higher risk factor in people leaving, rather than anything to do with pay. In this way, some projections of the wider impact of an across-the-board pay increase can be produced. So what else can the software do? It is now possible for employers to have a built-in redundancy pay calculator, automatically updating each day the minimum you would be entitled to should the P45 be delivered (presumably in electronic format). That's a comforting thought.
© 2004 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved
