2/25/2010

We had the opportunity to have a guest lecturer in class on Thursday. Jeff Weber is in Human Resources at ancestry.com. He talked about legal requirements and current trends of compensation. I learned about the Fair Labor Standards Act and how many companies are not in compliance with this act. Jeff talked about how investment is an investment. Every company needs to sit down and make-up their philosophy and decide base pay. Companies have gone to flexible salaries and market. Each area at ancestry.com gets a little different pay. Why? Because it cost more to live in San Fransisco for example than Salt Lake City. Jeff said that variable compensation programs vary from base pay by 3 to 20 percent. If company performs well then board members like to pay out. He talked about some long-term incentives that companies do help employees stay at their company. An example of a long-term incentive is stock options, but sometimes options go under water and they have lost their value. Jeff said they best way to decrease turnover is most affected by career development. And he brought donuts for the class heck yeah! He told us about how their company feeds their employees and they tried taking away donuts and their employees got pretty mad at him.