Total Compensation Insight

A Salary & Benefits Survey Tool for Municipalities

Municipal salary surveys can get complicated, especially when combined with benefits data to arrive at total compensation. Conducting them remains a time-consuming challenge for most states and local governments. Why? Mainly because outdated technology is used for information collection, reporting and analysis.

Officials responsible for determining equitable employee pay and benefits want more simplicity in the surveying process and better reporting functionality. These two areas were our focus when developing a salary & benefits survey tool for the Association of Washington Cities and the CT Conference of Municipalities,

Both WA and CT deployments have substantially improved how data is collected from municipalities and made available for a multitude of reporting purposes. Incenting more jurisdictions to submit survey responses has increased the pool of useful data to sort and compare, resulting in a more complete picture of total compensation.

The value to municipalities of access to accurate, comprehensive salary and benefits data can be considerable. Beyond just comparing salaries with neighboring towns, a well-designed survey tool is good for:

  • Illustrating to legislators through collected data what the impact to the state, school districts and local governments will be from proposed legislation
  • Instilling trust among employees and union representatives that the city or town is taking an objective look at compensation
  • Informing other staffing decisions that are tied to reporting structure, job titles, deciding whether a position should be full-time or part-time, etc.
  • Leveraging collected information for public advocacy, outreach, and education purposes
  • Demonstrating prudence to taxpayers by way of public data that municipal wage and benefits packages are competitive and defendable

There are 3 different versions of the survey tool available:

  • Government Edition – state and local government organizations
  • Education Edition – PK – 12 schools and higher education
  • Open Edition – compensation benchmarking customizable to any type of organization

For more information or a demonstration of our system, please contact us.