Benchmark your salaries to stand firm in challenging times

The challenges the retention of valuable employees and the attraction of quality talent come with can be mitigated by salary benchmarking. By adopting the practice, companies can offer accurate compensation packages, which is essential for business operations, especially when unprecedented challenges strike our corporate environment.

Businesses often consider salary benchmarking as a non-essential practice. However, through the activity, a company can gain pivotal insight into how its salary packages compare to competitors. Understanding the competitiveness of your wages has never been more important than today when economic challenges are creating uncertainties in the markets.

If your benchmarking shows that you are paying in the lower quartile, and your turnover rate causes concern, you may be losing your best employees because you are underpaying them. Offering salaries that are stuck in the lower end of the market makes it challenging to fill open positions, too.

It is not easy to set remuneration packages that are real to the market. Wages—beyond politics and religion—often remain undiscussed. From an early age, we are told not to speak about earnings, as people may fear social repercussions (as some would argue: you are worth what you make). This imprinting can distort salary conversations, given they take place.

Staying Competitive

Salary benchmarking is a practice that supports business competitiveness: Knowing what the market pays helps with budgeting for realistic expectations. But how can you learn about a figure that often goes undiscussed?

Malta’s salary information comes in many forms: print publications, books, annual reports, online periodicals and even leaflets. However, tracing information back to their source is often difficult as these publications only offer a top-level overview. Business leaders with a sharp eye may find the opacity of such reports troubling.

The most common questions that arise when looking into publicly available salary information are:

• What type of companies provided the data?
• How accurate were they when delivering it?
• How are the positions classified within that particular company?
• How up-to-date are the figures?

Another critical point with periodical salary reports is that by the time of publication—because of a lengthy editorial process—the labour market may have changed to paying different wages.

Live Salary Data

Salariesinmalta.com is a tool that aims to bring transparency and certainty to a field that is traditionally based on hearsay. Our database carries over 13,500 verified salary observations (data points) collected from 291 companies supporting 200 live job positions. Companies providing data must update their remuneration packages yearly, ensuring that the database remains updated.

We carry out a specific rigour in our methodology. We match data (provided by companies and individuals) to our standardised roles—for instance, a front office administrator and receptionist will both classify as a receptionist—and we confirm the classification of the roles with the providing business for validation purposes.

After validation, the data goes live and companies taking part receive access to all the anonymised salary points presented in aggregate form in our system. Organisations having access to the system can also filter by industry, to better understand the competition within a particular sector.

As businesses who take part need to update their salary data on a yearly basis (with our team double-checking the data), all information in our system is live, up-to-date and reflects the Maltese market.

Free Participation

We give access to the database to companies who participate; we never sell data. The community—i.e. the participating companies—provides real power to the tool: The more businesses contribute to the database, the bigger the data pool is.

If you are benchmarking your salaries for a receptionist role, for instance, and you are comparing to 200 other salary data points, you can make sure you have a good understanding of wages in the Maltese labour market.

Benchmarking salaries is even more useful when you can delve deeper into the data. Our platform allows users to filter data by industry. We also provide salary data by age, gender, company size and working hours. Get a better understanding of the market by running in-depth research that can serve as a solid background for reports (just like our Gender Pay Gap Report 2020).

Register with our free plan and gain insight into salaries in Malta.