Competencies and Rewards: Substance or Just Style?

Competency pay is at a critical stage in its development. The next few years will define its potentially important role in company human resource strategies and tactics. The future solution must be simpler, more business-focused and pragmatic and more readily implemented and justified in terms of a powerful business case for change. Attention should be given to competencies as a foundation for pay and rewards to make them more straightforward and understandable, less vague and ambiguous. Competency pay must also be more directly connected to the realities of the competitive labor market, less laborious and time-consuming when staffs are lean and better sponsored and championed by company leaders. The new agenda to allocate an important share of available dollars to the company's “superkeepers”—people the company must keep because they possess the company's critical core competencies—makes it imperative to make competency pay workable and more business-justified.