HR professionals should raise salaries into the low $60,000s when reclassifying exempt roles to avoid wage compression. If you can't bump a $55,000 employee to $58,000, reclassify them as non-exempt instead. Raising one person's pay forces adjustments across the team to keep gaps intact.
And so when I'm running reports to determine who inside the organization could potentially be impacted, I also wanna make sure I'm bumping that salary or annual compensation range up a little bit into the low 60s because what I don't want is wage compression. So if I look at, if I'm gonna reclassify my employees who are close to, you know, maybe they're $55,000 and I can't afford to get 'em to $58,000, I'm gonna reclassify 'em as non-exempt. Or the opposite would be maybe I'm gonna bump them up to the $58,000 plus, Well, what if I had somebody else at $60,000 and there was a nice little wage gap there because of the duties and the responsibilities? And now I've bumped somebody's salary up to get very close and I've created what's called wage compression. And now I have to look at the impact on that other teammate and do I need to also bump their salary up? So there's a lot of implication when we start to analyze the numbers about what changes we should make as an organization.
