A recent blog post by Mykkah Herner, a Compensation Consultant at PayScale, discusses managing employee pay with ranges. Specifically, she discusses the options for handling the outliers once all job benchmarking is complete.

“Employees Within Range
The best scenario is that your employees fall within range. When this happens, you still have a number of choices to make, but they tend to be among good options. Ideally, in a work culture that increasingly favors pay-for-performance options, your ongoing compensation management will account for both the market value of jobs and employee performance. What else does your company want to reward with its not-limitless compensation budget?
Employees Below the Range
When your employees fall below the range, or are what we call “green circled,” you have a number of options for managing their pay. Generally, green-circle employees are a challenge to manage because they have a high budgetary impact.”

The main takeaway from the blog post should be this: create a compensation policy that is fair and consistent and apply it to all in the organization.