This week workforce.com released their annual ranking of the top paid HR executives among U.S. publicly traded companies. The ranking comes at an opportune time this year as the debate on salary caps and tax treatment for banking executives rages on in the wake of the financial crisis.
While rankings are certainly interesting they rarely uncover the depth of insight found through analytics. I have provided an alternative view of the same data to illustrate the point. From this visualization, we are now able to see the relationships and variability when viewing the components of compensation.
We can now make the following casual observations:
- Relative to the other components of compensation, salary is relatively clustered around $400,000
- The largest single compensation component was a non-equity incentive plan ($7,707,418)
- The greatest variability among all executives’ compensation lies in stock awards.
Further insights could be gained by analyzing the data by industry, employee size and annual revenue. In addition new metrics could be created to compare the ratio of short versus long term incentives. Utilizing advanced human capital analytic techniques could yield even greater insight.
While rankings are great fodder for debates and headlines, actionable intelligence always requires a bit more digging.
Tags: Analytics, executive compensation, visualization techniques
Great points in your analysis! Another exclusion to consider is those companies left out of the survey. For example, giants such as IBM, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, and General Motors are conspicuously absent. If the study were more comprehensive, the range would likely be much greater – and provide for even richer analysis.