The median 10,000-person company spends roughly ~$2 billion every year on its people (including both cash and equity). That is bigger than the GDP of 20 nations. No pressure.
So, how large should the total rewards or compensation team be in light of the sheer magnitude of money on the line?
Let’s take a look at some benchmarks from 6,567 integrated customers in Pave’s dataset, honing in on employees with “total rewards”, “compensation”, or “benefits” in their job title.
Total Rewards Leadership Benchmarks
The first question we can dive into is how common it is to have a total rewards manager or leader (level M3 or higher) by company stage—shown on the two charts below.
It’s fairly uncommon to have a leadership role for total rewards or compensation at a small organization. Only 3% of companies with 200 or fewer employees have a total rewards manager or leader on staff. However, this jumps to 81% at companies with 500-1,000 employees, and 97% of companies with teams of 3,000+ employ a total rewards leader.
Size of Total Rewards Teams
How large are total rewards teams by stage at the 25th to 75th percentile? We can slice this in a couple of ways. First, let’s look at the number of employees on the total rewards team by company size.
These teams tend to be lean—between 0-6 employees at most small to mid-sized companies. But the size of a total rewards team skyrockets at organizations with 3,000+ employees, with a median of 16 team members and 22 at the 75th percentile.
Size of Total Rewards Team by Company Stage
Another way to view this data is to put in terms of full-time employees (FTEs) per total rewards team member to give us a ratio.
So, for organizations with 1–200 employees, there are 62–160 FTEs per total rewards team member. At large companies with 3,000+ employees, we find 275–547 FTEs per total rewards team member.
In short, the median FTE per total rewards team member ratio somewhat stabilizes at ~300–400 once a company hits ~500 FTEs.
FTEs per Total Rewards Team Member by Company Stage
How does your company compare to the market benchmarks?
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Matt Schulman is CEO and founder of Pave, the complete platform for Total Rewards professionals. Prior to Pave, he was a software engineer at Facebook focusing on user-centric mobile experiences. A self-proclaimed "comp nerd," Matt is known for sharing data-driven thought leadership around all things compensation and personal finance.
