Employee Compensation System

Pedagogy
The pedagogy in this course is “student driven learning” or “active learning pedagogy”.
This essentially means that the instructor will create an ambience for discussions and let
the participant’s active participation take care of the rest. The students are welcome to
correct me whenever and wherever I go wrong, especially with respect to what is happening
in the organizations as of today. Please note however, that the course is about knowledge
and not about information sharing.
The text book for the course is “compensation” by Milkovich and Newman (MN).

S. No Theme Chapters from MN

1 Compensation-an introduction Chapter 2 and
2 Compensation strategy Chapter 7
3 From Strategy to Policy
4 Getting to the Basics of a pay package Chapter 1
5 Internal alignment-Job evaluation Chapter 4,5 and 6
6 Comprehending job vs. person driven
structures
7 Designing pay levels, mix and pay Chapter 8 &chapter
structures 18
8 Pay for performance: Introduction Chapter 10
9 Pay for performance contd.
10 CONTINGENCY SESSION

Performance evaluation and rewards

Since the course focuses on continuous learning, the course believes in continuous
evaluation as opposed to episodic evaluation. Hence, we will have quizzes usually very
short ones almost every session. The breakup by weight is given below.
1. Quizzes: 40% (weight for quizzes may move upwards depending on number of
quizzes)
2. Project-I: 25%
3. End-Term exam: 35 %

Students will be graded relatively. I.e. their performance will be graded relative to the
performance of the whole class (Usually the average marks in any components gets C+).
Some threshold level performance is expected from the students; hence at the extremes
some absolute grading system might be employed to take care of threshold level
performance.
Since almost every session can have a quiz in it, I do not entertain people requesting me to
re-conduct any quiz because of their absence in any particular session, however genuine
the reasons for absenteeism is. The quizzes can happen anytime during the session. Hence
late comers cannot demand or request re-conduction of any quiz.

EMPLOYEE COMPENSATION-INDIVIDUAL PROJECT

GUIDELINE (PROJECT I)
The objective of this project is to allow the student to have a “hands-on” experience in
appreciating a critical component of compensation design and execution.
Students shall choose one topic from the following for their project:
1. Job evaluation
2. Designing pay levels-broad bands etc
3. Pay for performance schemes
4. International compensation
5. Equity (stock/stock options) based compensation

First, the student shall introduce the student to his/her organization’s compensation
system by giving an overview of
1. Compensation strategy (as discussed in class)
2. Pay bands/ranges
3. What role compensation plays in the entire HR system.
The above shall not take more than one full page.

The student shall then choose any of the above topics and discuss at length. The
length of this component should not be more than 4-5 pages.

Remember that, I am not looking forward to a lengthy report; be brief, specific, and show
individuality. The above is a guideline and need not be strictly adhered to. I am content
with soft copies.
Finally Plagiarism shall be punished severely. Hence if you source any information from
anywhere, acknowledge the source. You shall be graded for your individual original
contribution only.