The transparency landscape continues to evolve, but one thing is clear: transparency about rewards and talent management is core to a successful employee experience.
Companies are developing and executing transparency strategies to ensure they are able to:
- Build scalable and sustainable systems of rewards and talent management
- Demonstrate how they value their employees
- Clearly articulate the work and skills that drive business results.
Leaders in Rewards and Talent Management know the employee experience is critical to resiliency and sustainable long-term growth in the midst of market volatility, both economic and political. Companies that successfully and sustainably attract, retain, and engage employees are able to pivot to new markets and products, weather challenging market conditions, and achieve business goals.
Transparency shines a spotlight on the employee experience. This is your time: it is both a great opportunity and a challenge for Rewards and Talent Management practitioners to elevate the criticality of your work and its impact on the business. With so many stakeholders involved — executives, shareholders, legal, employees — many of you are seeking trusted partners who can help you execute and scale.
Since Syndio works with many of the world’s industry leaders, we wanted to share three strategies that have been successful for building the business case for the investments you need ti win in the transparency era.
1. Think bigger than compliance.
Getting compliance right is foundational, but it’s not the whole story.
🛑 With all of the new and emerging pay reporting and transparency laws around the world, some companies start with partners who are more compliance-focused. These partners can end up in the weeds of addressing narrow interpretations of legislative requirements, typically through a mix of a little SaaS and a lot of consulting or advisory support. Solutions from partners who constantly discuss “audits” and “pay equity remediation” are limited in scope and don’t scale, as they can’t effectively integrate compliance efforts into your overall Reward and Talent Management strategy.
🟢 Compliance should be the foundation of a much bigger strategy to attract, retain, and engage employees through workplace equity, consistency, and transparency. To get the most value out of your investment, you need partners who are accustomed to meeting the challenges of changing compliance requirements, can offer configurable solutions tailored to your organization’s unique workplace equity landscape, and can help you build comprehensive, scalable systems that address both current and future needs. For example, Syndio’s Global Pay Reporting solution helps leading companies scale compliance quickly and sustainably so they can spend more time on the bigger picture.
With the Syndio platform, our customers are able to:
- ✅ Integrate with different HRIS and provide different ways to bring in the different data sets needed.
- ✅ Easily organize data to isolate and merge employee populations as needed.
- ✅ Handle the variety of ways employees need to be analyzed as details of legislation like the EU Pay Transparency Directive emerge (whether it’s elements of compensation and benefits, groups of employees, or explanations of rewards differences).
- ✅ Conduct intersectional budgeting and scenario modeling for adjustments in connection with annual, semi-annual or quarterly planning.
- ✅ Meet current reporting requirements and configure to meet emerging requirements.
- ✅ Support communications campaigns and disclosures.
…I could go on, but you get the idea: configurability and expertise that go beyond rigid compliance-focused approaches frees you up to focus on your larger transparency strategy. This means you can focus your efforts on how to best integrate compliance activities in your day-to-day work and contextualize pay disclosures within your global Total Rewards philosophies for manager and employee education and communications.
2. Think bigger than pay.
When we think about transparency, we’re often focused on “pay.” Base salary is what often comes to mind first, then other cash (e.g. incentives, sign-on and retention bonuses, spot awards) and equity. However, It’s critical to analyze all forms of discretionary pay to prepare for transparency.
🛑 Some solutions zero in on pay and narrow interpretations of legal requirements, with a focus on audits and pay adjustments. That’s a huge miss. Making pay adjustments without understanding what led to the need for them in the first place becomes an exercise in futility: you correct one employee’s pay only to have another employee’s pay in need of correcting. You’re not solving for the cause. Additionally, with transparency, employees see not just their own pay but other people’s pay. They have greater visibility to who is getting rewarded and promoted.
🟢 You have to address the disconnects between your Rewards and Talent Management intentions and your actions in practice. That’s why, for example, Syndio’s customers use both PayEQ® and OppEQ® in Syndio’s platform to analyze pay, performance, promotions, and more. They’re able to analyze all forms of pay and diagnostic elements (e.g., compa ratio, percent of bonus target) for inequities and inconsistencies. They conduct performance management and potential program analysis to unpack patterns in business units, functions and job families. They analyze promotions and transfers to uncover advancement pathways and conduct workforce forecasting. Conducting these analyses empowers them to ensure fair and consistent people decisions and outcomes around the employee lifecycle.
There’s a reason Syndio works with so many industry leaders across retail, insurance, airlines, asset management, defense contracting, and professional and financial services: our customers know that pay is a symptom of talent management. They need a partner who has the depth and breadth of expertise across both Rewards and Talent Management to win. Analyzing Rewards and Talent Management data is the only way to have the full picture of the employee experience and provides the best path to sustainable change.
3. Think bigger than today.
The transparency era is fundamentally changing Human Resources. Wise employers are transitioning to ongoing processes for monitoring and managing people decisions to ensure they’re fair and consistent.
🛑 Many partners focus on automating the transactional aspects of Human Resources: the audit-and-correct treadmill, compliance, and pay equity audits. However, companies may find that these partners lack the expertise and experience to provide guidance on how to use software effectively, or that the software either isn’t robust enough to handle complex scenarios or large volumes of data, solves for only a narrow set of calculation scenarios, or requires a heavy dose of consulting services, all of which make it unscalable.
🟢 Change is challenging, but worth it — so companies need strategic partners to help guide their transparency journey. Syndio provides both robust software analytics and strategic advice to help companies scale sustainable new processes for fair and consistent people decisions. Our customers are rewarded with both better Rewards and Talent Management processes and great business results — including reduced costs, reduced time to fill jobs, and higher acceptance rates.
For example, Syndio’s Pay Finder™is a key component of our customers’ enterprise transparency strategies, putting the right data in the right folks’ hands at the right time. Pay Finder helps them collaborate cross-functionally for more streamlined decision-making. Customers also use it to educate and communicate why they pay what they pay and to operationalize fair and consistent people decisions.
HR transformation requires change management: that’s why Syndio also provides in-depth training and education to empower HR teams to scale the process of change. In addition to our robust bench of thought leaders, we provide a team of experts to help implement new processes and provide on-demand support, reference materials, courses, webinars, and more.
You can’t outsource or automate your way through the transparency era: you need the perfect blend of software and partnership so you can build the team and the systems you need to achieve success sustainably. Leading companies know they have to become their own experts and scale that expertise across all people decisions.
Are you ready to win?
The transparency era is changing everything about Human Resources — and Rewards and Talent Management is at the heart of it. This is your time, and it can be challenging. But with the right strategic partners and the right transparency strategy, you can weather the challenge of change, and I’m betting it will yield great rewards for you, for your companies, and for your employees.
Are you ready to win? Take Syndio’s Transparency Assessment at the link below to see where you stand and what you need to do to help your company succeed at transparency. Syndio is here to help!
The information provided herein does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice. All information, content, and materials are provided for general informational purposes only. The links to third-party or government websites are offered for the convenience of the reader; Syndio is not responsible for the contents on linked pages.
