Saturday, July 29, 2006

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Two New Match Tools

Two new tools have been added to the Match Tools feature of the My Matches table.

The new tools are:

  • Delete all excluded matches
  • Change match weights for all matches

You can access the tools by clicking on the Match Tools reveal button, and then clicking on the Other Tools button. Click on an image to see a larger version of the image.







The ability to delete all excluded matches allows you to clean up a pay plan to include only those matches that are being used to calculate the overall average market data for each benchmark job. As you can see, this is a very simple tool with only one option, whether or not to update the pay plan now or later.



The ability to change weights allows you to use the survey match’s number or survey organizations or incumbents as the weighting value for the match.

Monday, July 24, 2006

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New job "configuration" fields added

We've just added 17 new job related fields to the My Jobs and Custom Query configuration tools. The new fields are:

  • Update Date
  • EEO Code
  • EEO Description
  • Job Family / Group 2
  • Job Family / Group 3
  • Cost Center
  • Job Skill Level
  • Incentive Plan
  • Short Term Incentive - Minimum %
  • Short Term Incentive - Target %
  • Short Term Incentive - Maximum %
  • Long Term Incentive - Minimum %
  • Long Term Incentive - Target %
  • Long Term Incentive - Maximum %
  • Total Direct Compensation - Minimum %
  • Total Direct Compensation - Target %
  • Total Direct Compensation - Maximum %


We're making some changes to the Job Edit Form to allow you to edit some of these fields directly in NextComp rather than importing them in the Excel template. These changes will be ready in the next two days.

Friday, July 21, 2006

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Survey searching

We've resolved the "full text" search issue that arose yesterday. The search engine is now performing as expected returning results in less than 30 seconds on full text job title searches and full text job summary searches.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

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Reports, searching, and table configuration

We changed the sort order of the standard match "verification" and "job summary" reports (report numbers 01 through 15) so that they are all consistent. We noticed that the order was slightly different in how the matches were displayed between reports which can cause confusion when reviewing a large number of matches across reports.

Also, we've been experiencing some technical difficult with our "full text" search server this afternoon. We will have the issue resolved by this evening. This will affect the "Search Surveys" page in NextComp when you attempt to search on job titles or key words in job summaries. We'll post on the blog when the issue is resolved.

We are working on several enhancements to the "My Matches" table as well as adding fields to the My Jobs, My Matches and Custom Query configuration tools. These will be released as soon as possible most likely over the weekend.

Please contact info@nextcomp.net with any questions.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

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Northwest Compensation and Rewards Forum meeting

Elliott and I will be attending the NWCRF's meeting on Wednesday, July 19th. The topic is "The neXt Generation" about Gen X. I'm looking forward to attending as I haven't been to a meeting in the last year.

Here's a link to the meeting's page on the Forum's website:

The neXt generation presentation at McCormick and Schmicks in Seattle hosted by the Northwest Compensation and Rewards Forum

Saturday, July 08, 2006

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Gen X

The July 3rd edition of Business Week has a great article on the rise of mobile workers.. I think this goes along nicely with the Northwest Compensation and Rewards Forum's next meeting topic of The NeXt Revolution. I'm a part of Gen X (at least based on this definition from wikipedia).

I often work from the office, but I'm just as likely to be on the road working from a local coffee house with wifi and at least once a week I'll work from my home office, especially during the summer when the kids are out of school.

One of the defining characteristics of Gen X for me, in talking with people in their 30's, is the desire for choice: the choice of when, where, and how to work. BusinessWeek quotes James Ludwig, director of design for SteelCase, Inc. "All things are becoming output-oriented, rather than location- or time- oriented." Beyond the choice of when, where and how, Gen X is also looking for choices in compensation, benefits, and work-life balance.

An article in the June 2006 Benefits and Compensation Solutions magazine describes the benefits and compensation package at The Home Depot. One of the key features of both packages is the ability for employees at all levels from the entry level associate to the high level manager to have choice in benefits. It's more difficult to define choice into a compensation package, but The Home Depot makes extensive use of incentives to reward performance, which points out another key features of Gen Xers - the need for recognition.

Choice and recognition are going to be key design features of compensation, benefits and work-life programs designed to meet the needs and expectations of the population of employees known as Gen X.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

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"Best Practices for Using Salary Surveys" audio conference

Our friend Steve Treder from Western Management Group is facilitating an IOMA audio conference on "Best Practices for Using Salary Surveys." The audio conference is on July 26th. It sounds like a great program and it's also worth 1.5 CE credit hours toward your PHR and SPHR recertification.

Steve is very experienced and he's a great speaker/facilitator.

Click here to find out more or register for the program.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

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Cool websites

I had a chance to take a little time off over the last two weeks. Of course it's hard to totally get away. But I did have some time to do some relaxing with my family. I find the time recharges me and gets me motivated to work harder when I return from vacation. I found a couple of websites that I wanted to share because they are so cool.

The first one is Websites as Graphs. It creates a "map" of how traffic is reaching a website [Update: actually after closer inspection, it creates a map of the website structure, not of the traffic to/from the site]. You enter a web address and it makes a map. Here's a map of NextComp.net.



Try http://www.apple.com or http://www.msn.com those are big maps!

The best part of the map is watching it unfold. It's looks alive!

The other website is newsmap. This site creates a visual map of the Google news aggregator.



It really shows the news in a new way. I think this site has been around for a year or so, but I just found it last week. Take a look.