Compensation and Remuneration

This essay deals with the reward management of companies. Compensation and remuneration are important issues in human resource management. In the following chapters, we will describe the reward management in detail in order to give a basic understanding about this topic. First, the different levels of remuneration are presented which is a necessary background information. Furthermore we would like to concentrate on the practical work in the human resource department. We will describe how the operational tasks in compensation management are separated between the staff and how these tasks changed in the last decades due to changes in the business environment. In the following part we will name and explain more in detail important factors which influence the compensation and rewarding strategy. We add a short excursus concerning legal minimum wages. This topic is one significant force to control and manipulate the strategic decisions in the reward and compensation strategy.

Moreover we will focus on performance related payment systems. This issue became more and more important in the last year and there are many employees who argue against such a system. We will explain it and afterwards we would like to name some arguments which are against this kind of a structure.

Finally we will present a practical example of compensation management. We have chosen the global-acting company BASF because we could organise some background information and we think that this company uses some of the strategic tools we described in their compensation management. Not every company is willing to show their strategies to the public because they think that their competitors will profit from this knowledge.