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Coursera

Performance-Based Pay and Incentive Plan Design

via Coursera

Overview

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This course helps you understand how employers connect pay to employee performance. You’ll learn the differences between base pay, bonuses, commissions, and other incentives, along with how each can influence employee choices and results. You’ll explore what motivates people at work and how to choose incentives for individuals, teams, and entire organizations. You’ll also learn how employers adapt pay for different jobs, career stages, and work settings, including unionized, remote, and international workplaces. Practical examples will help you judge whether a pay program is working by looking at costs, turnover, productivity, employee feedback, and fairness. You’ll also examine executive pay and the responsibilities organizations have when setting and explaining it. Whether you’re new to HR or want to better understand performance-based pay, this course will help you choose appropriate rewards, avoid common problems, and recommend improvements. You’ll finish with a clearer sense of how to create pay programs that encourage the right results while remaining fair, practical, and sustainable.

Syllabus

  • Designing Pay and Incentives for Performance
    • Compensation choices shape employee motivation, behavior, and organizational results. In this module, you’ll distinguish base pay, variable pay, and incentive compensation; apply reinforcement and expectancy theories; compare individual, team, and organization-wide incentive plans; and connect rewards to meaningful performance measures. By the end, you’ll be able to evaluate incentive options and design performance-based compensation strategies that are aligned, fair, simple, and sustainable.
  • Selecting and Assessing Compensation Approaches
    • Compensation decisions must account for different roles, employee groups, work arrangements, and legal requirements while remaining fair and financially responsible. In this module, you’ll compare approaches across job functions, career stages, employee classifications, and international, unionized, and remote workforces. You’ll also use organizational, workforce, and employee feedback measures to assess results. By the end, you’ll be able to recommend and improve compensation approaches for diverse workforce needs.
  • Evaluating Executive Pay and Improving Compensation Programs
    • Executive compensation and changing workforce expectations create important financial, ethical, and organizational decisions. In this module, you’ll examine executive pay components and the governance, compliance, transparency, and ethical considerations that shape them. You’ll also analyze trends in pay transparency, pay equity, skills-based compensation, and technology. By the end, you’ll be able to evaluate compensation practices and recommend evidence-based improvements that can be implemented and monitored over time.
  • Making Strategic Compensation Decisions
    • Compensation decisions rarely involve a single goal or workforce need. In this final module, you’ll bring together pay design, motivation, performance measures, employee classification, workforce differences, executive compensation, governance, and emerging trends. You’ll apply evidence and professional judgment to realistic organizational challenges, weigh fairness, compliance, cost, and strategic alignment, and develop compensation recommendations that can be communicated, implemented, monitored, and improved over time.

Taught by

Christina Chung

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