E-PAY
IRS publishes analysis of internet salaries
Despite a growing demand for high-quality, timely data on the reward packages received by those working in the UK’s burgeoning internet industry, information remains sparse. To fill this gap, researchers at Industrial Relations Services have scanned recent salary surveys and browsed the internet to uncover some of the detail about compensation and benefits among web-related occupations and e-commerce ventures in the UK.
New sources of data on e-pay rates
IRS looked at a batch of long-running surveys in the IT and computing sectors which have, for the first time this year, analysed pay rates for internet and web-related positions. Among the job titles covered are web master, web developer, web designer and content manager.
Dot-com business chiefs earn less
According to the IRS analysis of the available salary data, e-commerce ventures may actually be paying their executives lower basic salaries than their counterparts in more traditional companies.
Internet companies offer equity to all staff
While it is an area renowned for a paucity of information, the commonly-held view is that these online businesses do much to nurture the financial side of their relationships with employees by promising staff a direct stake in the business. Today’s dot-coms are said to offer all recruits potentially lucrative shares or options formerly reserved for the management elite.
From the tranche of data analysed by IRS, the most obvious conclusion to emerge is that the dot-coms do, indeed, offer equity to employees across the whole organisation, rather than just executive grades.
Bonus payments are not all the rage
Internet-style reward packages in the pure web businesses are less likely to include bonus payments, according to the IRS review of the literature.
Words of wisdom
IRS on incentives and equity arrangements
"Employees in internet companies are less likely to receive bonuses than those in traditional businesses, but equity is becoming an increasingly important part of the compensation package. E-business employees are also more likely to be offered participation in [long-term] incentive schemes than employees as a whole. With basic salaries healthy, but not huge, internet employees seem to be placing their risk in the future value of their share options."
Want to know more?
Title: "Reward in the new economy", Pay and Benefits Bulletin 503, September 2000.
Methodology: the four-page IRS report draws on salary information from the recruitment web site www.jobserve.com together with surveys published by:
| Arthur Andersen | |
| Computer Economics | |
| Hay Management Consultants | |
| National Computing Centre | |
| Salary Survey Publications | |
| SCA Consulting |
Availability: contact the subscriptions department at Industrial Relations Services in London, tel: 020 7354 5858, or for editorial enquiries email the editor jeremy.baugh@irseclipse.co.uk
Web: for details of all IRS publications and conferences, jump to . . . www.irseclipse.co.uk