I help organisations build trust through fair and transparent pay.
The challenge
Pay transparency fosters a workforce of loyal, engaged, and truly satisfied employees, however compensation is often shrouded in secrecy. A black box of subjective assessments and random figures that are difficult to verify which leads to one-off salary calculations, significant frustration, confusion, and ultimately, a lack of trust in the process.
āWe want to show salary bands on job adverts but donāt know where to startā
āWeāre starting to hire in new locations and donāt know what to payā
āOur employees donāt think we pay fairly. I think we do!ā
āWeāve signed up to a few salary providers and donāt know which one to useā
āWe donāt have a compensation philosophy and desperately need oneā
āThe finance team are struggling to accurately forecast the costs for future hiresā
The solution
I've streamlined the traditionally complex process of salary benchmarking into a comprehensive guide that has empowered over 70 organisations worldwide to establish clear salary bands, develop customised compensation philosophies, and conduct rigorous pay equity audits, empowering them to make pay transparency a reality.
Guide Highlights
Step 1: Project set up & discovery
- A review of any content that has been put together to date on compensation, including info performance management, career development and promotions.
- Run a 1hr session to deep dive into the content and discuss the next steps for the build.
- Define who will be involved in the project and the part they will play. We want to make sure the salary benchmarking exercise and the building of the compensation philosophy is inclusive.
Step 2 - Choose a relevant and reliable data source
- If youāve not signed up to any data sources, then weāll walk through the options based on your roles and locations to find a source best for you. Itās worth noting that Iām data agnostic when it comes to salary benchmarking providers and Iām not financially motivated to promote a particular source.
- Itās not all about salary benchmarking providers. Weāll also look at other ways to crowdsource data to build a data set thatās right for you.
Step 3 - Levelling and job family mapping
In any salary benchmarking exercise you need to map employees to the right benchmarks in an objective manner. Weāll use a ācommon languageā of levels and job families to do this.
- Once we defined your job architecture, weāll need to level all of the roles and employees in your organisation.
- Weāll use a levelling framework to do this. Iāve collated the most common levelling frameworks here.
Step 4: Define your compensation philosophy and build your salary bands
This is all about communicating the how and why your company pays the way it does, based on your companyās culture, values, and financials.
Weāll dive into:
- How location affects pay.
- Defining when pay reviews will happen and what the process will look like.
- Defining how transparent you wish to be based on a spectrum (itās not all about posting everyone's salaries online).
- How base pay compliments all of the other elements that make up your total reward offering (equity, benefits & perks, bonuses, intrinsic motivators etc).
Salary band creation
Once we have our data weāll create salary bands for each job family and role, defining the market rate, how wide they need to be and how much overlap you want (if any) between levels.
Step 5: Analyse your market position
The compensation calculator will allow you to:
- Uncover where pay inequities exist by level, dept., gender and race and therefore identify potential attrition risk before itās too late.
- Discover what it will cost to bring employees who are underpaid to your desired market percentile and create department budgets where required.
- Accurately forecast the costs for future hires.
Step 6: Educate & launch
Iāll work with you to define how to launch the comp philosophy and everything that goes with it, especially the tricky conversations that go hand in hand with introducing levels for the first time.
Weāll make sure all your people managers are confident when it comes to talking about pay. Weāll dive into answering the following questions + more:
- āI donāt feel Iām being paid fairly and I would like a pay riseā
- āWhy was Alice levelled as IC2 and I am IC1? We are doing the same workā
- āHooli have approached me and offered me Ā£5,000 more than what Iām earning hereā
- āI have a candidate wanting a salary that exceeds what weāre paying our current team. Can we go outside of our current salary bands?ā
Key deliverables
There are two core deliverables youāll end up with at the end of the project.
1. Compensation Calculator
2. Compensation Philosophy
How I work
Iām committed to practising what I preach, so hereās what you can expect from working with me.
Youāll be working with just me. Iām purposely building a one person business.
I'm based just outside of London in the UK, but my work spans the globe, collaborating with clients from Dubai to New Zealand to San Francisco. I'm generally available online Monday to Friday, 8 am to 7 pm UK time. However, I'm flexible and adapt my schedule to accommodate clients in different time zones.
A standing weekly 1hr call that we use to brainstorm on a particular topic.
Async catch ups over Slack or email.
2-3 hrs making customisations to the comp calculator or comp philosophy.
I work with clients all over the world, from New Zealand to San Francisco, so Iām super flexible with working hours. Typically Iāll be online Mon-Fri, 8am-7pm UK time.
Costs
I work on a day rate model, tracking time used so you can see exactly where I spend my time.
Days required can vary by organisational size and what is already in place. Once we speak, Iāll be able to give you a more accurate number.
ā Ā Compensation calculator ā Ā Compensation philosophy ā Ā Levelling framework ā Ā 2 x Manager training decks ā Ā Comms materials ā Ā Project plan and decisions
Project duration | 1-2 months (quickest project to date was 2 weeks) |
My time | 4-8 days |
Justly Materials | Ā£5,000 |
Total Cost (excl. VAT) | Ā£8,800 - Ā£12,600 |
Out of scope
While progression and performance are intrinsically related to compensation, the scope of work will not involve re-designing or building these processes from scratch.
Weāll discuss how pay is linked to them and make sure any work we do can be easily integrated with them in the future.
Weāll look at the numbers that come out of any external data source, however the calculator won't benchmark against against variable compensation.
Custom work can be quoted on this topic once the project has been kicked off.
Iāve learnt that every organisation approaches equity differently, which makes it incredibly difficult to build a one size fits all model for benchmark purposes. The data from the benchmarking providers can also be rather inconsistent.
If you wish to dive into equity then please let me know and Iāll introduce you to the https://www.equitypeople.co/ who I partner with on these projects.
Frequently asked questions
- 15% discount is available for charities, non-profits and registered B Corps.
- 15% discount for companies who use Charlie HR.
- Yes. Head over to my templates page and find one that helps you fit your immediate needs. We can then work on an hourly rate should you need support using a template.
Of course. While Iām a huge advocate of pay transparency, I understand that itās a journey and not one that can be rushed. Weāll work together to get you moving in the right direction and donāt worry, we donāt have to put salary bands on job adverts if you donāt want to š
Yes. All the materials shared with you are yours to edit and keep.
Yes. I help clients refresh their benchmarks every 6-12 months i.e. during performance reviews or annual market movement assessments.
- Upgrade your Justly compensation calculator to the latest version.
- Migrate employee information from your existing calculator to the new one.
- Make any custom changes required based on previous work.
- Upload and refresh the external benchmarks.
- Give you a quick demo of any new features.
Cost = Ā£1,250
This cost can vary depending on the number of salary benchmarking sources you wish to use and complexity of any custom work.
No. Costs for salary data from providers such as Radford, Mercer, Figures, Pave etc are not included.
Weāll talk about which data set is right for you during our initial calls, and if you need to purchase data then youāll need to arrange this contract separately with the vendor.