Every time I hear that question, I think of my financial investment strategy. But there are two more investment strategies to consider:

1. How are you investing in yourself?

It is easy to default to adding something in order to solve a problem. For instance, your closet is messy, so you install a closet organizer to make it easier to find things. Instead, you could have subtracted things from your closet.

You have a conversation with an employee and realize they are burned out and overwhelmed. Their performance is suffering.

Not always.

Years ago, my VP told me I couldn’t rate two of my team members as “exceeds expectations.” I could only give that rating to one person. I argued and I lost.

It is revealing a little or a lot about how much you pay your employees.

Partial Pay Transparency:

• You share a job’s pay range when it is posted. You share pay ranges with managers for only the jobs their team performs. You share ajob’s pay range with the employee that is performing that job. You share some (but not all) of the market pricing details for each job.

We trade our talent, expertise, skill, effort, and results for money. We do that as employees, and we do that as entrepreneurs or business owners.

It is a transactional relationship.

Imagine being a business owner. One employee can build your product in two hours, and you make $20 in profit.

Next imagine that you develop a premium product. It takes four hours to build, and you make $22 in profit. Do you have your employees build the premium product?

I’m reflecting on how I have spent my time in the last year and what marketing tactics worked and which ones didn’t.

There are some things that I need to no longer spend time on if I want to maximize my ROI.

So, that has led me to create a Stop List.

The new year is about to begin and for many it means setting new year’s resolutions.

But there is a secret I want to share. You don’t have to wait until January 1st to start. If you want to change something, each moment is an opportunity to begin again.

Wealth can provide freedom in the form of choices and opportunities.

It allows for the pursuit of passions and interests and can give individuals the means to make a positive impact on the world.

Pausing and being intentional can change the way you communicate. Before you speak ask yourself if what you are going to say is…

T - True
H - Helpful

Today I am focusing on eliminating things.

Paper
Email subscriptions
Clothes not worn
Empty boxes
Business expenses that no longer make sense

I ask this question when I talk to employers about their compensation projects. I also ask this when I start working with a coaching client.

Sometimes the answer is a long pause, because they have to think about what the success metrics are. At other times it is an immediate list of ALL the things the compensation project or pay negotiation coaching is ideally going to deliver.

HR and Business Leaders:

• Your compensation philosophy will be published.

• You will invest in a job architecture project if you haven’t already.

• You will be talking about publishing your grades and pay ranges for all employees to see. And you will recognize the need to development training and resources to ensure that employees and their managers know how to talk about this information in a positive proactive way.

Grades will continue to be used and the pay ranges associated with these grades will become broader than normal by about 10% - 15% in the short-term.

Increasing the Range Spread will allow employers to hide that they are underpaying some employees who are long tenured in comparison to new hires. (Yikes, pay compression!)

Younger employees will continue to share their lives on social media. That will include how much they are paid.

You can find creators on TikTok asking people what they do for a living. They follow that question up with, “How much to you make?” And people are sharing the details. “I’m a Marketing Manager and I make $115,000.”

New hire pay offers will be competitive and more internally equitable going forward. They have to be, or candidates will decline the offer and move on quickly.

Smart employers will streamline their hiring process and decrease the Time to Hire or TTH.

Employers will prioritize doing pay compression analysis at least once a year. There will be two areas of focus.

(1) The pay differential between the highest paid direct report and their manager will be 10% - 15% for most scenarios. And employers will establish starting pay rates that are higher than the minimum of the range for some manager jobs.

There will be an increased need for experienced HR and Compensation professionals who can do the necessary total compensation analysis in Excel and use other tools (think salary survey databases, market pricing decision tools, and pay equity audit software).

Employees will ask more questions about their pay and will ask for increases if they feel they are underpaid. With more employers publishing their salary ranges on job postings, employees will have more information on what competitive pay rates are.

Human resources professionals and business leaders will spend more time managing the cost of labor.

Labor costs can account for as much as 70% of total business expenses depending on the industry. This includes employee wages, benefits, payroll, and other related taxes. Yet, HR professionals only spend 15% of their time managing the cost of labor. (Source: Paycor survey)