Reporting Employees:
Data is reported for full-time local staff only. Such employees (typically, but not always, local nationals) are employed under local employment terms and conditions; they are generally paid in local currency and are covered by a local benefit plan. Expatriates, consultants, contractors and part-time employees are excluded. Survey participants have matched jobs and reported employees according to the Survey Job Matching Guidelines and Job Descriptions. In general, employees at the Vice President (or equivalent) level and above are matched to Executive jobs; Management jobs include employees at the Director, Manager, or Supervisor level who manage people or functions; Professional Individual Contributor jobs typically correspond to Exempt non-management jobs in the US and generally require a university degree; and Support Individual Contributor jobs typically correspond to Nonexempt jobs in the US and do not usually require a university degree. For roll-up jobs, those identified as “technical” generally require a degree in engineering or computer science, while “non-technical” jobs do not.
Effective Date:
- The Radford Global Compensation Database is a rolling database. Companies submit data during the year after completing their annual pay administration cycle. For the various compensation data elements, the effective date is as below.
- Base salary data reflects the rate in effect as of the data submission date, typically timed to reflect the company’s most recent pay actions.
- Car allowances and other regular cash allowances reflect annualized payments being made to the employee for the company’s current fiscal year.
- Target incentives reflect the company’s expected current fiscal year incentive to be paid if eligible employees meet all performance objectives. Actual incentives reflect the award paid for the last complete fiscal year.
- Stock option, restricted stock and performance share guidelines reflect the practices in place for reported jobs at the time of data submission. Stock option, restricted stock, performance share and cash LTI actual grants reflect options, restricted stock, performance shares or cash LTI granted to the employee during the 12 months prior to the date of the company’s survey input.
Countries and Currencies:
Refer to the website for available countries. Data is published in local currency.
Averages:
Unless otherwise noted, "averages" reflect the employee weighted average amounts (sum of amounts divided by number of employees for which an amount was reported for the particular data element).
Data Sufficiency
The number of employees included in the sample for each data element and the number of companies reporting such employees are limited to support data confidentiality.
- A list of ten companies is required to request a Custom Report on the Radford Network. In a multi-country Custom Report request, at least ten companies must have operations in a country for that country to be included in the results. Requests for multiple Custom Reports must contain sufficiently different companies or underlying data updates from a sufficient number of companies to ensure that no results are identifiable to specific participants. At least three changes are required for a select list to be considered different.
- Breakouts within a country are available for selection in the Data Generator where at least ten companies are in the data sample.
- At least five companies and five employees must be reported in fixed compensation in order for a survey job to appear in a Custom Report or in the Data Generator. Within a job, at least five companies and five employees must be reported for each compensation data element to appear.
- If two, three or four companies report data for a compensation element in a reported job, the company and employee count will appear, but no other data will be presented.
- If one company is reported, the number of employees also does not appear.
Data Dominance
- If any company in a sample accounts for more than 25 percent of the employees (in the fixed compensation data element) for a survey job, that company’s number of employees will be reduced for all calculations in the job so that the number of employees from each company does not exceed 25 percent of the total employees reported to the job. After determining the number of incumbents that can be retained from the dominant company(ies), we count out from the median value (alternating higher and lower) to that figure and then discard those records outside that limit. This ensures that data trimming supports retention of median values in every sample of company data in survey results.
- To further protect data confidentiality, if one company provides more than 25 percent of the incumbents used to compute any other data element, the calculated percentile values above the 75th and below the 25th are suppressed.
Percentiles
- The spreadsheet version of the report presents the default selection of the 90th, 75th, 60th, 50th, 25th and 10th percentiles; Custom Reports may use other values.
- Each percentile value reflects the percentage of responses that fall below the indicated percentile. For example, the 50th percentile (or median) is the middle value in the sorted array. Half the responses are above the median value; half the responses are below the median value. In another example, sixty percent of salaries are lower than the salary reported as the 60th percentile.
- A sample of twenty or more employees is required to present all the percentiles (90th through 10th). If the sample size is fewer than twenty, the percentiles above the 75th and below the 25th are suppressed.