Fair pay isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s smart business.
In today’s workplace, pay equity isn’t optional. Employees expect it, regulators demand it, and businesses that ignore it risk losing talent and trust.
But here’s the hard truth: ensuring fair pay across roles, departments, and geographies is nearly impossible with spreadsheets alone. That’s why more companies are turning to pay equity software—a powerful solution that brings structure, scale, and visibility to one of the most critical parts of your compensation strategy.
Ground your merit cycles with market data, salary ranges and SAAS decision tools to build trust with your employees.
In a rapidly evolving labor market, the definition of “total rewards” is expanding beyond traditional compensation models. Today, companies striving to attract and retain top talent are increasingly offering comprehensive benefits packages that address not only financial health but also physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
David Weinrot hosts a lively discussion with Marla Hunter and Mike Kohn on the benefits of accurately communicating total rewards to your employees.
Discover how OpenComp's compensation management solution improves merit cycles by providing market data, performance-based recommendations, and seamless approval flows for better pay decisions.
Discover how compensation management software simplifies benchmarking, pay band management, and workflow automation. Learn about top comp tools like OpenComp and their HR system integrations.
Despite the headlines about layoffs, companies are still in competition for talent. Only now they have a tighter rein on spending. At the center of this is compensation, a company’s biggest expense and one of the top reasons candidates decide whether to accept an offer.
To help companies with these priorities, we’re sharing how to prevent the top compensation mistakes in five stages of the employee journey:
In this article, we’re exploring mistakes and solutions in the merit cycle stage.
Many business leaders know this stat: Women make 82 cents to every dollar earned by men. But most business leaders can’t tell you what the gender wage gap looks like at their own companies.
Pay equity analyses can change that. By conducting a pay audit, leaders can identify potential inequities, and not just gaps in earnings between men and women. These analyses reveal the differences in pay between workers of different ethnicities, age, experience, level, department, and more — all in the name of pay equity.
When employers find and fix pay gaps, they enjoy several benefits. They create a workplace culture based on fairness. They cultivate trust with their employees. And they develop a strong employer brand candidates can’t ignore.
Tangible, documented business outcomes bolster these benefits. Companies that commit to internal equity:
At a recent Equity Matters Chat, a monthly discussion about all things pay equity, OpenComp Senior Compensation Consultant Kayla Reineke laid out the five essential steps of a pay audit. The event was hosted by the OPEN Imperative (Organizations for Pay Equity Now), a coalition of businesses committed to ending gender pay disparities in their organizations.
Whether you have ten employees, 50, or more, it’s essential to ensure you have access to reliable compensation data that helps you attract and retain the best talent. However, given the complexity of pay data analysis, it can be difficult to tell if you’re getting your data from the best source and if the data is the right match for the roles in your organization.
Nowadays, many compensation surveys and websites claim to offer accurate and reliable compensation benchmarks, so it’s essential to know what to look for and the pitfalls to avoid. When you do, you can obtain best-fit compensation data that can help you make better employee pay decisions and keep your business moving forward.
Whether employees talk among themselves about pay or approach managers directly to ask about their comp, it’s natural for them to seek transparency in how they are paid. But these days, pay transparency isn’t just about meeting employee needs for clarity. Pay transparency is also increasingly becoming mandated at the state level. Moreover, your company’s investors and other critical stakeholders may be interested in how you communicate your comp practices to candidates and employees.
This post will explore why pay transparency matters for your company and the key benefits you can expect from incorporating it into your comp program.
When managing a high-growth or recently funded organization, deciding how to pay your people can sometimes feel like navigating uncharted waters. Although you have the benefit of experience, you have been growing so fast that you may not have had the chance to establish a consistent approach to compensation.
Without clarity around how you pay relative to the market and decide on compensation, you might make costly mistakes, making it harder to find and keep great people. Conversely, when you take the time to develop a strong compensation strategy for your organization, you have the potential to attract and retain the talent you need for growth.
Ready to write your organization’s compensation philosophy?
If you have a firm understanding of what a compensation philosophy is and why it’s important, you’ve completed market analysis and compensation benchmarking, and worked your way through the 4 strategic pillars of compensation philosophy, it's time to put your data and strategy together.
Here are some tips for assembling and writing your compensation philosophy and how to share it with your organization.
Below is a comprehensive list of common compensation terminology, plus a few key terms specific to OpenComp’s technology to help you expertly navigate our content and offerings.
Build a compensation philosophy that supports your fast-growing organization by addressing these key areas.
When you’re new to compensation, a compensation philosophy can seem abstract and theoretical. Maybe even optional. But in reality, a philosophy is the foundation of a strong compensation program and it can be the key to making employees feel informed and valued.
A compensation philosophy is a plan for how your company will pay and reward its employees based on its financials, values, and goals. That’s a lot to cover, but with the right strategy, you can build a philosophy that supports the needs of your business today and moves you toward your vision for its future.
In this article, we’ll review the four pillars, or key areas, you should address to create a compensation philosophy that’s right for your business:
It’s a timeless question for candidates, but how would your employees answer, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” If most don’t have a clear answer based on your organization’s policies and procedures, you have a career pathway problem. And likely, a retention problem as well.
Lack of job clarity, which can make employees feel like they have no opportunities for advancement, is the reason 63% of people say they quit in 2021, according Pew. It’s a persistent issue. The 2022 Career Optimism Index finds that 43% of workers don’t see a clear path to advancing their careers in their current roles.
On top of that, a lack of role clarity is one of the top 5 reasons for employee burnout, says Gallup. And employees who experience burnout are:
While job clarity is important year-round, it’s especially critical in Q1, a season commonly associated with high attrition.
If your company’s career paths have you worried about losing top talent, it’s not too late. Sixty-nine percent of employees say they would stay at their job if things could change.
In this article, you’ll learn best practices for creating well-defined and equitable career pathways that motivate employees to grow and stay. When you’re done here, check out how merit cycles and pay transparency can also boost retention.
If you’re like most HR leaders today, one of your key priorities is the retention of top talent. But how do you keep these highly sought-after employees feeling valued and motivated? One impactful way is to double down on something you’re probably already managing: merit cycles.
This doesn’t mean supersizing merit increases. Instead, leveraging merit cycles to boost retention and pay equity is about creating a data-driven, consistent, and transparent process that rewards fairly and motivates employees to keep growing at your company. Before we get into how to do this, let’s review the basics.
Salary ranges are a powerful way for modern companies to address some of the biggest internal and social challenges on the path to IPO and/or continued hyper-growth.
Well-constructed pay ranges help employers convince top talent to accept offers and keep rockstar employees longer – while managing burn and equity dilution. Salary ranges can also help companies answer the growing demand for pay equity and transparency from workers, corporate boards, and state legislators.
What exactly are pay ranges? Salary bands, aka salary bands, set the boundaries for salaries for roles or groups of roles. They’re not arbitrary numbers that bookend a target. Like most things comp related, building pay ranges that are right for your organization requires reliable data, strategy, and foresight.
In this article, we’ll review the things to consider – and avoid – for salary ranges that support your business today and its vision for the future.
