I Can't Do Salary Surveys Anymore

I love spreadsheets. Is it the ISTJ in me that loves the boxes, the formulas, and the grids? Does anything compare to the excitement of figuring out how to round down in Excel instead of rounding up? I enjoy compensation. I could spend hours, reviewing salary surveys; analyzing data; determining benchmark rates; and working with others to develop and articulate a compensation philosophy. Even better, I get to use spreadsheets with compensation. Yeah!

I am in the cities now for a 2 day course on compensation.  We are one organization with no less than four different and distinct ways to set pay complete with all the intricacies, rules, exceptions and spreadsheets one could ask for. I am in heaven. The geek in me is joyous.

The geek in me is in mourning. For most of the participants, they are being introduced to pay surveys for the first time. They are here so they can learn and take on the task for their medical centers. For me, this is a refresher.  A refresher before I can confidently pass the torch to the lucky member of my staff sitting beside me. Yes, you read that right. I am going to delegate salary surveys to another. You can't believe I am doing that, right? I know, neither can I. But I am.

I need to relinquish this task for the betterment of the process. Salary surveys take blocks of uninterrupted time. Blocks of uninterrupted time are things that I do not have right now and this is negatively impacting others. I need to ensure the ensure the timeliness of the process and can only do that by doing things differently. How? By providing leadership to the compensation process and by not doing it.

I love this part of HR and I am not the right person to do work on salary surveys right now. Fortunately, I know just the person who can take this process from me and do it better that I ever did.

I wonder if she will let me color code cells, create some drop down menus or embed a few formulas for old times sake?