Compensation Planning: The Modern Toolkit **

Compensation professionals and organizations need to keep pace, meet new challenges, and motivate and retain employees. Organizations need to be able to get in front of trends and changes and be the employer people want to join. That means new best practices that personalize compensation planning, lean on data, run the best analytics, but are focused on people — making it easy to plan, decide, respond, and communicate.

To execute best compensation planning’s best practices today, look for a digital platform that includes seven key capabilities:

1	Personalization – Use a digital platform to provide the broadest context, gain a company-wide view on a functional level, and drill down and tailor an individual’s compensation composition.
2	Data Integration – Make sure your compensation planning software is linked to ERP, HCM and other data — such as performance results and market benchmarking, freeing teams of the potential risks of a spreadsheet approach and eliminating the need to repeatedly input the same data. It should be configurable so it can be adapted to your existing processes, and easily integrated into the organization’s environment and policies across the globe.
3	Automation – No question, this is a must-have today. Automation doesn’t just guide the whole process it connects the dots — from budgeting to guidelines to manager input on individual employees, it creates cohesion across the whole organization when it comes to compensation. Automation supports a better sense of overall investments and equity, cross currencies and locations, and conveys how one compensation change can impact the whole array.
4	Analytics – Data-driven insights are critical for budgeting and cash flow, as well as supporting whole-organization decision-making and transparency. They can be harnessed to utilize both internal and external pay/performance benchmarks. Organizations need to become more agile and make decisions based on a real-time single source of truth.

5	Speed and ease – Harness the power — and simplicity — of an intuitive platform that is easy to integrate with your HR data, quick to deploy, and can configure access to users as specified. It should be able to provide managers with the reports and data they need to inform their one-on-ones with employees.
6	Flexibility – Personalization and flexibility go hand in hand. An agile and flexible platform enables managers to take compensation planning to the next level, transcending the merit matrix. It gives managers the means to apply additional types of compensation, such as spot bonuses for a great job – a responsive way to spark engagement and help employees feel valued.
7	Power – A robust, digital compensation planning platform that is cloud-based, runs as a SaaS, and is designed with security in mind is a tremendous ally for an organization. By boosting collaboration, allowing for flexible decision-making, and replacing the siloed confines of spreadsheets, complicated administration, and oversimplified formulas, it allows Compensation teams and managers to be strategic, and focus on what they need to focus on: people.