Regular compensation reviews help ensure your salaries are fair, consistent and aligned with the market. They enable you to eliminate internal inequities, reward deserving employees and put your compensation philosophy into action.
But if you’ve ever been part of an organisation-wide compensation review, you’ll know… they can also be a bit of a nightmare. In this article, we’ll discuss seven ways Figures can make the process (much) easier for you and your team.
The (many) problem(s) with traditional compensation reviews
The traditional way to run a compensation review is with an Excel spreadsheet. Or, to be more accurate, multiple spreadsheets. These must be split up, distributed to various stakeholders, and then painstakingly stitched back together at the end of the process.
If you’ve run this type of compensation review before, you probably don’t need us to tell you that it can be a stressful and frustrating experience for all involved. Because, while Excel is a powerful program in its way, it can also be unwieldy and difficult to use — especially once your headcount surpasses a certain number.
More importantly, Excel relies heavily on manual data entry, meaning there’s a huge potential for human error. If you’re not careful, one misplaced decimal or mistaken copy and paste could throw off your entire review.
But that’s enough about that. We’ve already talked in detail on this blog about the various reasons why Excel isn’t an ideal tool for compensation reviews. Today, we want to share some of the many ways that using Figures can result in a smooth and easy review process for your team.
What is Figures?
If you’re new around here, an introduction is in order. We’re Figures, an all-in-one compensation management platform encompassing a suite of different tools for effective, efficient and compliant compensation.
Last year, we launched our Compensation Review module, a new feature designed to give HR teams an alternative to clunky Excel sheets. But that’s not all we do — our platform also includes tools for:
- Salary benchmarking: We give our clients access to the real-time, accurate market data they need to make fair, data-driven decisions. You can use Figures to keep track of fast-changing markets, ensuring your pay is always fair and competitive.
- Salary bands: Our software makes it a breeze to create salary bands for every role and location within your organisation. This both keeps things fair and consistent internally and streamlines recruitment and salary negotiations by ensuring everyone knows where they stand.
- Pay transparency: We help businesses build strong compensation foundations, preparing them for compliance with the EU Pay Transparency Directive. With every decision recorded in real time, our tools help companies maintain audit-ready records while ensuring pay is both transparent and fair.
7 Ways Figures Can Improve the Compensation Review Process
Listen: we’re not saying it’s impossible to run a successful compensation review on Excel. It’s been the tool of choice for a long time, after all. And, as HR and compensation professionals, we’ve all grappled with our fair share of spreadsheets.
But at Figures, we’re all about working smarter, not harder. Using our platform to run compensation reviews can make the process smoother, more streamlined and less stressful for you and your team. Read on for seven ways Figures improves the compensation review process.
1. No more spreadsheet chaos
First and foremost, using Figures to manage your compensation review process means you can say goodbye to spreadsheet madness. Instead of compiling all of your data in a complex Excel sheet, you’ll start by creating a campaign and tailoring it with your own start and end date, budget, eligibility criteria and more.
Then, you’ll simply invite collaborators to join Figures. They’ll be able to view their pending reviews in a central dashboard and provide input directly within the platform. That’s right: no more awkward splitting and recombining of spreadsheets. Hallelujah!
As our customer Swan said: "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."
2. Easy collaboration with secure access controls
The compensation review process might require input from a number of different stakeholders, including team leaders, managers, HR, compensation and finance. But the fact is, most spreadsheet software simply isn’t set up for effective collaboration.
Using Figures, you can bring all of the relevant people into a secure, dedicated space to track and contribute to pay revisions. Admins can grant custom access based on each person’s role, ensuring information is shared on a need-to-know basis.
Once you set up validation processes, each stakeholder will be able to view and manage their pending reviews in one location, and HR will be able to track progress for each employee from a central dashboard. That means no more keeping track of who you’re still waiting on — Figures takes care of it all for you.
3. Built-in benchmarking with real-time market data
For most organisations, making market adjustments is a big part of the salary review process. This allows you to react to market changes, bringing your compensation back in line with your chosen positioning. In short, it’s the only way to ensure your salaries are really as fair and competitive as you think they are.
But there’s a problem: traditionally, benchmarking relies on data supplied by big consulting firms like Radford or Mercer. Not only is this data expensive to access, but it also comes in the form of yet another large and complex spreadsheet — which is the last thing you need.
With Figures, real-time, accurate market data is built right in. The software will even give you recommendations for salary increases based on benchmarking, salary positioning and performance data
Our customers say it best: "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."
4. Automatic, easy record-keeping
If there’s one thing spreadsheets can’t do, it’s provide the context behind a decision. When you use Figures for your compensation reviews, every decision will be recorded in real time, and admins will be able to view a full history of suggestions, validations and pending requests for each employee.
In short, Figures helps you build an accurate, audit-ready digital paper trail of every decision you make. This both builds accountability and ensures you’re ready to justify every decision if required by future pay transparency legislation. It also helps new managers and HR team members understand the context and backstory behind each person’s pay, which can help them to make fairer decisions.
5. No more chasing managers up for input
For HR teams, one of the most time-consuming (and frustrating) parts of the compensation review process is the constant need to send out reminders to managers and other collaborators to provide their input.
Delays can happen for all sorts of reasons — managers tend to be pretty busy, after all. But too much waiting around can cause a knock-on effect that could end up derailing the whole process.
Figures helps you avoid this scenario without adding extra work for your HR team, by allowing you to set up automated email reminders for managers who haven’t yet completed their reviews. As well as saving time for HR, this can also be valuable to busy managers, who’ll receive timely reminders with a handy link to provide their input.
6. Integrated performance review data
In many organisations, performance data has a direct impact on compensation reviews. This makes sense: rewarding those employees who have gone above and beyond over the year is only logical. But for the HR professionals running the compensation review, it means one thing: more work.
That’s because managing performance rating typically means exporting data from whatever performance management software you’re using and then adding yet another column to your ever-growing spreadsheet.
Not with Figures: when you use our platform for compensation reviews, performance data is built right in. You can use Figures to balance this data against other factors, such as market benchmarking rates, internal policies and inflation.
7. Visuals, analytics and recommendations
With new pay transparency legislation just around the corner, employers need to be certain that their pay decisions are 100% fair and justifiable. But a lot of different factors go into those decisions, and balancing them all against each other is a lot of work.
Figures makes this process much easier on your team by providing data-backed insights, visuals and recommendations based on both internal and external data sources. These make it easy to understand the ins and outs of your compensation review at a glance, giving you more confidence in every decision.
Plus, Figures provides you with analytics about the compensation review process itself, including insights about your budget, median increases, increases per quartile and more. This acts as a useful starting point to help you improve your process for next time.
See Figures in action
Here’s the long and short of it: Figures can make compensation reviews easier, more streamlined and less stressful for your team.
Teams can collaborate seamlessly, and automated processes ensure everything happens when it should — with no manual follow-up from HR. Depending on the size and structure of your organisation, this could quite literally save you weeks of admin time.
But don’t take our word for it. The proof is in the pudding, and the best way to understand the benefits Figures could bring to your organisation is to see it in action. Interested? Sign up for a free demo to get started.
