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If it makes you feel better, compensation has improved.

I’m not talking about the amount. I’m talking about how it’s administered.

Not that long ago, many companies gave men raises when they got married. Women’s careers stalled under the same circumstances.

The logic was impeccable: Married men needed more money to support their households. Married women, on the other hand, no longer needed as much. After all, they had husbands to support them.

The world does sometimes get better. Achieving perfection is another matter. If you expect it, you’re sure to be disappointed, especially where compensation is concerned.

This, and other thoughts, occurred to me as I read my correspondence from last week’s column on fair compensation (“Poor Joe,” Keep the Joint Running, 10/22/2007). What other thoughts? Glad you asked.

Why not base pay on value? Most employees think their pay is and should be based on the value they contribute.

It’s a reasonable thought. That value is why companies employ people in the first place (for more, see “The 70% solution,” IS Survival Guide, InfoWorld, 3/4/1996).

Here’s the problem: Whenever a company bases compensation on anything other than what the market will bear, it faces one of two situations. Either it can get the same value for less by replacing its employees with less expensive alternatives, or its employees will leave for better paying employers.

Basing pay on value is inherently unstable.

There’s another problem with value-based pay: Measuring the value. When you’re dealing with the sales force it’s easy. They sell. What they sell has a known margin. Do the math. No problem.

For just about anyone else, the connection between their work and the value they deliver can’t be turned into a number that will make much sense. The value is there. Measuring it unambiguously isn’t a problem any of us are likely to solve any time soon.

Can you really give a $75,000 employee a $20,000 annual bonus? No, you probably can’t. The problem is that every year you employ this computation, you’re assuming the employee will stay another ten years. Some employees will; many won’t. If that sort of longevity is typical in your company, annual bonuses this large might not be a bad idea. If it isn’t, don’t fret.

First of all, unless your company is a truly awful place to work, the average employee turnover in IT is unlikely to exceed 20%, which means the average duration of employment is at least five years. That still allows more than $10,000, which isn’t bad at all.

There’s another alternative, too, at least in publicly held or soon-to-be publicly held companies: stock options, vested over ten years. It’s true that the accounting for stock options has become controversial. The basic idea remains sound. Vesting options over ten years eliminates the risk of basing compensation on the assumption of ten years while getting much less, and in addition creates a financial incentive for employees to stay with the company.

In fact, you can give a smaller option grant and vest it over five years, especially if your company has a reasonable track record of stock price increases, because it’s the employee’s expectation of value that matters most.

Not a bad set of outcomes.

Pay for performance? Great. One question: How do you measure performance? This is the magic question, whether you recognize performance with variable compensation or prefer to use simple raises.

As a manager you have to have a way to assess … not measure, assess … how well employees are doing their jobs. The distinction between measurement and assessment is vital.

When you measure — when you establish clear, objective criteria regarding how well each employee accomplished the goals, objectives and responsibilities you’ve established — you face a hazard: You get what you measure. That means anything you mis-measure employees will get wrong, when you measure the wrong things you’ll get the wrong results, and anything you don’t measure you won’t get. Especially, what you don’t measure you won’t get.

Think of what you ask employees to do, all the time, in addition to their formal responsibilities: Participate in ad hoc committees; take the initiative when something needs doing that you don’t know about; and help each other out when one gets stuck and another knows the solution; to name just three typical examples.

If you assess employee performance, these will count in their favor. If, instead, you measure it, when you ask you’ll get a predictable, and entirely deserved response:

“Why would I want to do that?”

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Poor Joe Torre.

George Steinbrenner’s offer would allow most Americans to retire in comfort after a single year of work. Add the incentive payment for success and their children could retire too.

Torre was, he said, “insulted” Steinbrenner wanted to connect his pay to his performance. (He didn’t, of course, phrase it quite that way.)

Not that I’m siding with Steinbrenner. I have a firm policy: When rich people negotiate, I don’t choose sides. Joe, George, anyone else in this position: Don’t tell me how unfair the other party was. Don’t tell me about the other side’s greed. Don’t tell me you’re insulted, hurt, generous, undemanding, or anything else.

Stop complaining in public — it’s undignified, serves no purpose, and annoys everyone. You negotiated and didn’t get what you wanted. Grow up and shut up. Nobody cares.

While we’re at it … could we have less complaining about what players earn? They might not do anything important. They might look more like employees than executives or investors. They did, on the other hand, work very hard to reach the top of their craft, and negotiated well. Not my business either.

Ridiculing Accenture for choosing Tiger Woods as its non sequitorial celebrity symbol is, on the other hand, just fine.

Getting back to compensation, it’s a dental subject for executives — necessary, but not today, thanks. Compensation is to employee relations what service levels are to IT/Business relations. Just as the only uptime business users find truly satisfactory is Always, the only compensation employees will ever find truly satisfactory is More.

It’s the American way.

This is as good as it gets: Compensation that is fair, easy to understand, consistent with your priorities, and not a performance disincentive. To achieve this, build it from four building blocks: The base (what you pay for showing up), promotions, variable compensation, and spot bonuses. Each has a different role to play:

Base: For each employee there’s a theoretically perfect base. That’s the magic number where the employee has no economic incentive to leave and you don’t have an economic incentive to find a replacement.

Earth being a stochastic realm, the “perfect” theoretical wage is more of a blur than a point, but that’s okay. Replace “no economic incentive” with “more inconvenient than it’s worth” and you’re close enough.

The base has nothing to do with performance or value, only the labor market. Adjust each position’s range every year according to what the market dictates. Adjust each employee’s position within that range, based on increased knowledge, ability and skills.

Promotions: When an employee demonstrates the ability to perform a more demanding job, someone else will pay them to do so. It’s time for a promotion — a different role, which means a different range, and a different position in the range. Fail to promote and you’re no longer near the theoretically perfect base rate.

Variable compensation: This is the magic buzzword for the annual bonus. It’s called “variable” compensation because it varies each year depending on how each individual employee performed that year.

Variable compensation is a good news/better news situation. The good news: You can make variable compensation enough to be meaningful — something you can’t do with wage adjustments.

When you recognize performance by giving an employee a raise, you might manage a 7% increase for a top performer. For a $75,000-a-year employee, that means $40 a week more cash than average workers get who receive the standard 3% inflationary increase. Big deal.

That’s how it looks to the employee. This one raise will cost the company $25,000, (assuming the employee stays ten years and discounting the cash flows) whether or not the employee continues to be a top performer.

Instead of a raise, give your top performer the same 3% inflationary wage increase you give everyone else … and a $20,000 bonus. Even after taxes that translates to something like $12,000 in cash. That’s serious money to most employees (the good news), and it saves the company $5,000 (the better news).

Spot bonuses: If an employee goes above and beyond, it’s an event, and it deserves recognition. Write a check, and do it right away. Reserve spot bonuses for exceptional contributions, not merely for successes. Otherwise they’ll become entitlements — ignored when they happen, resented when they don’t.

Fair compensation isn’t all that hard to do. In principle. The details — figuring out the market range for each position, and where to place each employee in that range — are where it’s hard.

But of course, the details are always what’s hard.

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