Exempt Pay Flat, But Some Execs Clean Up in ’07

Calibrating the Pay Scale: With Labor Day behind us, research on 2008 pay trends  is already appearing. According to Hewitt Associates, a Lincolnshire, Illinois-based HR consulting firm, base salaries for exempt employees at U.S.-based companies will nudge upward by about 3.8 percent, virtually the same as this year (3.7 percent). Companies interested in retaining their top performers, however, are expected to rely more greatly on variable pay to augment base rates. Hewitt says that could boost actual pay raises more than 12 percent. As a percentage of payrolls in 2007, variable pay was 11.6 percent. In other research, Watson Wyatt Data Services says total cash compensation for surveyed executives grew 9.3 percent this year. Yet some top executives received compensation packages that exceeded that average by as much as 25 percent. In particular, decision-makers who engineered mergers or acquisitions were rewarded with average increases approaching 21 percent.