What I do
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What I do

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.

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Common challenges

ā€œWe want to show salary bands on job adverts but donā€™t know where to startā€

ā€œWeā€™re starting to hire in new locations and donā€™t know what to payā€

ā€œOur employees donā€™t think we pay fairly. I think we do!ā€

ā€œWeā€™ve signed up to a few salary providers and donā€™t know which one to useā€

ā€œWe donā€™t have a compensation philosophy and desperately need oneā€

ā€œThe 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.

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Guide Highlights

Step 1: Project set up & discovery

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  • 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

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  • If youā€™ve not signed up to any data sources, then weā€™ll walk through the options based on your roles and locations to find a source best for you. Itā€™s worth noting that Iā€™m data agnostic when it comes to salary benchmarking providers and Iā€™m not financially motivated to promote a particular source.
  • Itā€™s not all about salary benchmarking providers. Weā€™ll also look at other ways to crowdsource data to build a data set thatā€™s right for you.

Step 3 - Levelling and job family mapping

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In any salary benchmarking exercise you need to map employees to the right benchmarks in an objective manner. Weā€™ll use a ā€˜common languageā€™ of levels and job families to do this.

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  • Once we defined your job architecture, weā€™ll need to level all of the roles and employees in your organisation.
  • Weā€™ll use a levelling framework to do this. Iā€™ve collated the most common levelling frameworks here.

Step 4: Define your compensation philosophy and build your salary bands

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This is all about communicating the how and why your company pays the way it does, based on your companyā€™s culture, values, and financials.

Weā€™ll 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 (itā€™s 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 weā€™ll 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.

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Step 5: Analyse your market position

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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 itā€™s too late.
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  • 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

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Iā€™ll 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.

Weā€™ll make sure all your people managers are confident when it comes to talking about pay. Weā€™ll dive into answering the following questions + more:

  • ā€œI donā€™t feel Iā€™m being paid fairly and I would like a pay riseā€
  • ā€œWhy was Alice levelled as IC2 and I am IC1? We are doing the same workā€
  • ā€œHooli have approached me and offered me Ā£5,000 more than what Iā€™m earning hereā€
  • ā€œI have a candidate wanting a salary that exceeds what weā€™re paying our current team. Can we go outside of our current salary bands?ā€

Key deliverables

There are two core deliverables youā€™ll end up with at the end of the project.

1. Compensation Calculator

2. Compensation Philosophy

How I work

Iā€™m committed to practising what I preach, so hereā€™s what you can expect from working with me.

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Who

Youā€™ll be working with just me. Iā€™m purposely building a one person business.

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Where I work

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.

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A typical week during the project will look likeā€¦

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 Iā€™m super flexible with working hours. Typically Iā€™ll be online Mon-Fri, 8am-7pm UK time.

Costs

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Time

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, Iā€™ll be able to give you a more accurate number.

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Justly Materials

āœ…Ā Compensation calculator āœ…Ā Compensation philosophy āœ…Ā Levelling framework āœ…Ā 2 x Manager training decks āœ…Ā Comms materials āœ…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

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Redesigning or building you performance and progression processes

While progression and performance are intrinsically related to compensation, the scope of work will not involve re-designing or building these processes from scratch.

Weā€™ll discuss how pay is linked to them and make sure any work we do can be easily integrated with them in the future.

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Benchmarking variable pay

Weā€™ll 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.

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Anything to do with equity

Iā€™ve 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 Iā€™ll introduce you to the https://www.equitypeople.co/ who I partner with on these projects.

Frequently asked questions

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Do you offer discounts?
  • 15% discount is available for charities, non-profits and registered B Corps.
  • 15% discount for companies who use Charlie HR.
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Iā€™m not ready to commit to a big project. Can you still help me?
  • 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.
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Iā€™m not sure how transparent I want to be about pay. Should I still work with you?

Of course. While Iā€™m a huge advocate of pay transparency, I understand that itā€™s a journey and not one that can be rushed. Weā€™ll work together to get you moving in the right direction and donā€™t worry, we donā€™t have to put salary bands on job adverts if you donā€™t want to šŸ˜ƒ

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Do I own the compensation calculator and other materials?

Yes. All the materials shared with you are yours to edit and keep.

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Can you help me refresh my salary benchmarks?

Yes. I help clients refresh their benchmarks every 6-12 months i.e. during performance reviews or annual market movement assessments.

  1. Upgrade your Justly compensation calculator to the latest version.
  2. Migrate employee information from your existing calculator to the new one.
  3. Make any custom changes required based on previous work.
  4. Upload and refresh the external benchmarks.
  5. 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.

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Do you provide the external salary data?

No. Costs for salary data from providers such as Radford, Mercer, Figures, Pave etc are not included.

Weā€™ll talk about which data set is right for you during our initial calls, and if you need to purchase data then youā€™ll need to arrange this contract separately with the vendor.

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