How Swan uses the Salary Review module to save time and improve efficiency

Before / After: What Impact?

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Implementing a tool to manage our salary reviews forced us to structure our campaign much more precisely. The need to configure the tool required us to ask and answer many more questions to be able to provide the right guidelines to our managers.

As a result, we sent our managers a summary document in advance, outlining definitions, key concepts, and clarifying the expected guidelines for the campaign even before it was launched.

On the HR side, we also had to be much more thorough in preparing the salary grids that we would make available to our managers, which led us to conduct a comprehensive review of all our grids.

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Once the campaign was launched, we observed two main outcomes:

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First, using a tool made the validation process extremely smooth. Salary increase proposals moved from one level of management to another seamlessly, following Swan’s organizational chart. Previously, we conducted our campaigns mainly with our highest level of management—our team leadership. Having a tool allowed us to include all managers, even frontline managers or those overseeing only one or two people, in the proposals, discussions, and decisions regarding salary increases.

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The second major impact of using a robust tool was that the HR team could focus on the important issues rather than wasting time on tooling problems, malfunctioning spreadsheets, manual adjustments, or budget recalculations. The tool enabled us to focus entirely on discussions with our managers: all our valuable time was spent having in-depth conversations about compensation issues. We truly felt that salary increase decisions were made with a qualitative approach, thanks to the time saved by avoiding technical difficulties.

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Internal Adoption and Manager Engagement

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We were aware that this represented a significant change for Swan’s managers—some had never participated in a salary review campaign, while others had never managed a company-wide salary increase campaign with an allocated budget. We prepared the campaign with one or two training and kick-off sessions.

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Throughout the campaign, HR maintained strong engagement with managers through a predefined schedule of meetings. Every Monday morning, we also communicated company-wide updates on the progress of our salary review campaign.

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Finally, at the closing stage, when managers had to relay salary increase decisions to their teams, we scheduled a communication preparation session. During this session, we would also share the macro results of our campaign with managers.

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Key Features That Make a Difference

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For a company like ours, which structures its workforce by job family, then by level of expertise or impact within a job—alongside salary grids—it was essential that our tool reflected this structure when managing salary reviews.

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The Figures salary review tool allows us to simultaneously benchmark our salaries against our internal grids while also positioning roles that lack salary grids—such as new roles or job families without established benchmarks—relative to the market.

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Advice for Those Still Hesitating

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For us, the tool enables a shift from discretionary salary decisions, which are less data-driven, to a more objective and consistent approach across the company.

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Both for the HR team and for managers, using a tool saves significant time. And that time saved can be reinvested in deeper discussions about each salary increase decision.

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Salary Transparency and Future of Compensation

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For us, using this tool is a crucial step toward salary transparency, as we envision it at Swan. For the first time, we were able to easily base our salary increase decisions on a very clear visualization of our employees' positions within our salary grids.

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We completed the campaign with 100% of our employees positioned within their internal salary bands, along with salary grids that were adjusted and reviewed against the market.

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