Would your employees be willing to trade salary increases for lower cost-sharing on health insurance? Is training and career development more important than bonuses? The answers may surprise you.

With customized employee surveys, KY&Y can help you determine what rewards your employees truly value so that you can design a total rewards package that fits their needs while remaining cost effective.

KY&Y employee opinion surveys collect data on employee attitudes toward all aspects of the Employee Value Proposition including :

• Direct financial needs (salary and bonuses)
• Indirect financial needs (benefits and income protection)
• Career development
• Work content
• Affiliation with the organization

Additionally, we collect demographic information such as age and family status so that we can pinpoint diverse needs and expectations based on an employee's stage in life, occupation, position in an organization or other considerations. We can also develop surveys to poll employee preferences and priorities for plan design changes, as well as their perception of the services provided by your carriers and administrators.

How do your salary plans and benefit programs compare to the market? How do you want to position your organization in the marketplace? How should you define "the market" for your organization? What type of pay policies and benefit programs would help you successfully recruit, retain and motivate employees?

KY&Y will help you answer these questions and can assist in developing your organization's total compensation strategy. Our customized total compensation surveys gather up-to-date data on salary ranges, pay policies and benefit programs from comparable employers.

This data shows how your organization compares in terms of salary ranges, hiring rates, incentive programs, pay increase policies, paid time off, medical and health-related coverage and retirement benefits. As a routine part of any project, we provide our clients with all detailed source data that we gather through these surveys.

KY&Y understanding of best practices in total compensation allows us to help you create the right compensation system for your organization.

When designing a reward system, it's important to remember that rewards packages are not "one size fits all." Your organization needs to consider several questions when looking at its total rewards package:

• How might you take a more strategic total rewards approach to improve talent attraction, engagement and retention?
• How can you increase your return on your total rewards investment?
• How might you reduce your total rewards cost and/or optimize your reward investments?

By drawing on the results of internal and external research, KY&Y can help prioritize your reward investments and design a customized total rewards package that suits the particular needs of your organization. We then help implement these packages and communicate the changes to employees.

Cost is an important consideration when planning any change in compensation policies, since most reward system redesigns will have a fiscal impact on the organization. Our modeling approach removes the guesswork by identifying the immediate financial effects of implementation and providing a multi-year perspective to see what the effects will be in the long-term.

Many job classification structures require adjustment for a variety of reasons, including changes in job duties, advances in technology, changes in operational or business needs and the general erosion of job structure integrity over time.

KY&Y can help ensure that your job classes and job descriptions accurately reflect the work your employees do. By developing and analyzing job questionnaires, conducting desk audits and facilitating focus groups, KY&Y can streamline your organization's job architecture and create job descriptions that are fully compliant with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other rules and legislation.

To assist with maintaining internal pay equity, KY&Y custom develops job evaluation systems that assess the relative value of jobs based on objective, measurable factors. Because KY&Y does not sell a proprietary job evaluation tool, we can remain completely objective in evaluating and developing the approach that best meets your needs.

Large-scale changes demand effective and well-planned training. Our job is not complete until all those who manage new programs can do so effectively. This includes training on compensation and classification basics, alternative reward systems, performance management, classification restructuring and cost modeling.

KY&Y can help negotiators reach agreement based on a full understanding of available options and the economic trade-offs among them as well as the short and long-term financial and workforce demographic implications of particular choices. With "real time" cost analyses of new proposals, we can help make the negotiation process run more smoothly and efficiently.

We understand the fluid nature of collective bargaining and offer flexible assistance. We can coordinate our recommendations with clients outside legal counsel, work behind the scenes in a technical support role or become directly involved at the bargaining table. We can work from the early stages of the contract renewal cycle to develop a comprehensive bargaining strategy and specific proposals or be brought in to help resolve issues as they arise during negotiations.