Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

If you read Mike Hyatt's blog you'll know that I've been tagged. It now falls to me to reveal 5 Things You Don't Know About Me and invite five others to do the same. Here goes.... 1. I was raised on a working cattle farm - It gave me an appreciation of nature, animals and hard work. My dad is a pharmacist who worked in town, so I grew up around farm hands and the "pin hookers" who bought and sold at weekly cattle auctions. I emerged from that experience as a workaholic (there's always something to do on a farm) with a really nasty mouth. Both of those have mellowed with age. Multiple hip surgeries forced me off both the farm and the football field. 2. My Hobbies are flower gardening and guitars - In a job where I deal with people almost constantly, my down time is generally solitary or with just immediate family. You can't tell that I like flowers by looking at our home right now; we moved last Christmas to Nashville and spent this past summer just...

In our first two posts on Compensation we discussed what resources we have and use to price jobs. We also discussed how we calculate base pay. Here we combine the third and fourth of our projected 10 posts on how priced jobs are built into a compensation structure, why a structure is needed, what it does, and how it's administered. What and Why? In any mid-sized or larger company you'll have several different job families. These are groupings of jobs more or less defined by similar competencies or purposes to their work. Within Nelson, we have Publishing, Marketing, Sales, HR, Facilities, Production, Distribution, Customer Service, Accounting/Credit/Collections, Tax, Information Systems, and Conferences. Every job that serves in one of these functional areas is part of that job family. Support positions such as Administrative Assistant are more generic core competencies and exist in all of these families. However, they share the same purpose as do the jobs they support, so they...