A well-designed, equitable and legally defensible compensation plan is an essential tool for organizations of any size, especially as businesses compete for talent in today’s competitive market. Our compensation professionals have the skills, experience and knowledge to help you develop practical compensation plans that support your business operations.
What Compensation Plan Design Covers
A compensation plan is the full set of decisions your organization makes about pay: who earns what, how raises happen, how new hires get slotted in, how managers stay consistent, and how the structure holds up if anyone asks how it was built. We build the whole plan, or we focus on the piece that’s giving you trouble.
The result is a documented pay structure: market-priced salary grades with a minimum, midpoint, and maximum for every role, plus the rules for administering them. Some people call it a compensation structure or a salary structure.
Our compensation services include:
Market Pricing
We establish competitive pay levels for all of your jobs, or for a defined segment of jobs, so you can see where your salaries are competitive and where you’re exposed.
Job Evaluation and Internal Hierarchy
We apply EANE’s job evaluation system to internally classify your jobs, develop a clear job hierarchy, and ensure internal equity across roles, departments, and locations.
Salary Grade Structure
A grade structure with clear minimums, midpoints, and maximums, so every job has a defensible range and managers stop guessing.
Merit Metrics
The math behind annual increases, tied to performance and position in range, so merit decisions are consistent across managers.
Salary Administration Guidelines
The written rules for hiring offers, promotions, in-range adjustments, and reclassifications. Built for the managers who actually have to use them.
Communication Tools
The plain-language documents and talking points your leaders, managers, and employees need so the structure is understood, not just installed.
How We Build a Compensation Plan
Every engagement starts with what’s actually happening in your organization. The methodology is consistent. The plan is yours.
1. Scope the engagement and gather your job data. We confirm the goals, the jobs in scope, and the timeline, then pull together current job descriptions and existing pay practices.
2. Price your jobs against local, regional, and national data. We benchmark using EANE’s own data plus local, industry-specific, and national survey data.
3. Apply EANE’s job evaluation system. We work through your roles using an evaluation method we’ve refined over decades.
4. Build the structure, merit, and administration guidelines. We deliver the salary grades, merit matrices, salary administration guidelines, and communication.
Additional Compensation Services
Most base compensation engagements stop at the pay structure. Some need a little more, and we handle those alongside (or independently of) the core program.
- Incentive plan development and revision. Bonus, commission, and variable pay structures that reward what you want to see. We build new incentive plans, revise plans that aren’t producing the behavior they’re supposed to, and align incentive design with your base structure.
- FLSA reviews and management training. Confirming exempt and non-exempt classifications hold up under scrutiny, and training your managers so you don’t drift back into trouble.
- Wage, salary, and benefit surveys. Beyond our Regional Wage Benchmark Survey, we conduct custom surveys for member groups, industry consortiums, and individual employers who need market data on a specific role set or geography.
Why EANE for Compensation Work
Three things make our compensation practice different.
New England wage data nobody else has.
Our Regional Wage Benchmark Survey reflects what employers in MA, CT, and RI actually pay, not a national average skewed by tech hubs.
A proprietary job evaluation system.
Internal equity is where most comp efforts fall apart, and EANE’s job evaluation method, refined over decades, delivers a defensible internal hierarchy that holds up under scrutiny.
A team you can call.
Cassie Vaughn, our Manager of Total Rewards, is a CCP, certified by World at Work, the global leader in Total Rewards.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How long does a compensation plan design engagement take?
A full plan typically runs three to six months from kickoff to handoff, depending on the size of your organization and the scope of the work. A targeted piece, like an FLSA review, a single market pricing project, or a pay equity audit, can run in four to eight weeks.
How is the engagement priced?
Project-based, with a clear scope and a clear fee before we start. We don’t run an open-ended hourly meter. Members get preferred pricing. We walk you through the scope and the cost in the first conversation, so there are no surprises later.
What types of pay structures do you build?
Most often, a graded salary structure: a set of pay grades, each with a market-priced minimum, midpoint, and maximum. If a different model fits your organization better, like broadbands or a step structure, we’ll build that instead.
Where does the wage data come from?
EANE’s own Regional Wage Benchmark Survey is the primary data source, with hundreds of Northeast organizations contributing to the dataset. We supplement with published national surveys (BLS, industry-specific surveys) when a role isn’t well covered in our regional data. You’ll see where every benchmark comes from in the deliverable.
How often should we update our pay structure?
Markets move, so most structures need a look every year or two, and sooner if you’re growing fast or seeing offers get rejected on pay. We’ll tell you what your data shows and when a refresh is worth the effort.
Do you work with organizations that already have a salary structure, or only new builds?
Both. Most engagements are refreshes, audits, or partial rebuilds, not building from scratch. We start from what you have, identify what’s still working, and rebuild the parts that aren’t.
How does this fit with our existing HR person, or our lack of one?
If you have an HR leader, we work alongside them. They stay at the center of day-to-day; we handle the strategic, technical, and time-intensive pieces. If you don’t have an HR leader, we can run the engagement with your CEO, COO, or finance lead as the point of contact, or wrap compensation work into a broader strategic HR engagement so you have ongoing support.
Can you handle pay equity and FLSA classification at the same time as compensation design?
Yes, and we usually recommend it. Pay equity and FLSA issues tend to surface in the same data we’re already pulling for a compensation project. Handling them together costs less and produces a stronger plan than running three separate engagements.
Do we have to be an EANE member to engage with you?
No. Compensation services are available to non-members at standard rates, with members getting preferred pricing. If membership makes sense for your organization, we’ll talk about it after we understand your needs, not before.
EANE’s Compensation Plan Design Service At a Glance
| What it is | A consulting engagement that builds a documented pay structure: market-priced salary grades with a minimum, midpoint, and maximum for every role, plus the rules for administering them. |
| Who it’s for | Employers that need pay decisions, including hiring offers, raises, and promotions, to be consistent, equitable, and legally defensible. Open to EANE members and non-members. |
| Problems it solves | Pay decisions made one at a time with no structure behind them; uncertainty about whether salaries are competitive; pay-equity risk across roles and departments; no documented rules for raises, offers, or reclassifications. |
| Geography | Serves Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island employers as the core focus, with jobs priced against New England wage data. Available nationally. |
| Delivery model | Project-based consulting from EANE’s compensation team, led by a Certified Compensation Professional (CCP). Four stages: scope and gather job data, price jobs against market data, apply EANE’s job evaluation system, and build the structure and administration materials. |
| What you receive | Market pricing for every role, a job evaluation and internal hierarchy, a salary grade structure (minimum, midpoint, and maximum), merit increase metrics, salary administration guidelines, and plain-language communication tools for leaders and employees. |
| Timeline | Three to six months for a full compensation plan; four to eight weeks for targeted work. |
| How it’s different | Jobs are priced against regional New England wage data rather than national averages, and job evaluation uses EANE’s own system, refined over decades. |
| Pricing | Project-based, with a clear scope and a clear fee before work starts. EANE members receive preferred pricing. |