Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight Podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new innovative solutions available in the market.
And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot, stay tuned for details at the end of the show. Good day, listeners! The spotlight in this episode is shining on Visier Total Rewards. This solution allows teams to analyze the full scope of their Total Rewards program. Salaries, hourly pay, bonuses, share grants, and more, giving companies the visibility needed to In order to control workforce costs, ensure compliance and solve pay related challenges.
Here to chat about Visier Total Rewards is general manager, Sean Lutyens. Sean, it's so great to catch up with you today.
Nice to catch up with you. And obviously someone who writes English better than me wrote that. That's very well read. And someone in marketing should be very happy.
I can't take full credit for that. Seeing as I took some of it off the Visier website, right? But thanks for joining me. You and I have had a few chats and you have a really interesting role in Visier. Obviously Visier is a fairly good sized company, but your team operates, you In a different mode than a lot of the company, you're more entrepreneurial, right?
We are. Visier as it's grown has what our CEO calls a flywheel strategy. And so they've got the core business. And as they test out new businesses or incubate new businesses, or as we should say, put them in GrowthMode, try to figure things out. Yeah. Which they put them off to the side and what's called the flywheel. And that flywheel basically is an experiment to see which part of that business works well, do we get the messaging right? What's our ICP?
And so you're not disrupting the rest of the business as you go and figure things out. So in essence, it's like having a startup with one backer that's pretty, pretty close to you and looking over you, but so it's a little bit of a tweener, but basically it's a startup inside of a mature company.
Yeah, that's really cool. So tell us a little bit about your background in the HR tech space.
Oh man it's always a little worrisome because it goes back to last millennium. I've been around talent acquisition expatriation, compensation, benefits with a number of players, almost always some type of startup or fix it and leave it type of situation. I come from Dev. So I've been on the dev side almost all around software. The one thing I haven't done has been a practitioner in house. And I usually joke that I haven't done that because that job looks like it sucks.
You have to work with people and do everything else versus slinging code and, helping build cool products, but that's the way we help them. But Yeah been around, a lot of stuff since last millennium. And then landed at Visier a year and change ago as they wanted to start up this flywheel.
So let's talk a bit about what Visier Total Rewards actually does.
Okay. To start with Visier if you think about people analytics, putting all your data in there and looking at it analytically across the whole spectrum of what humans do and how you operate your company That's where Visier plays they usually have the nine box or the four box or whatever we call it, where the cool kids are in the top, right? And the less cool kids are in the bottom left.
Visier is always the top company there the reason that's important is they've grown to a lot of direct clients. And then actually where Visier is embedded into partners, we have over 70, 000 clients now. Yeah. What's really cool with that. And the reason that's important besides sounding good for Visier is they started looking at where, else can we use this data to help businesses drive decisions?
So if you think about having all these analytics inside of a company, that's great, but then how do I start to drive decisions? And so one of the areas was in the total reward space, specifically benchmarking, because they sit on obviously 70, 000 Companies worth the data millions and millions of records of employees and their compensation and where they are in the structure as well as then. What's the number 1 way to implement decisions and drive people's behavior? And that's with pay.
They wanted to start and do an experiment to start a flywheel around comp benchmarking and compensation planning by which you run the merit cycle. Yeah. And doing it analytically driven. And then the cool part would be blue skies, rainbows, and unicorns, right? Being able to take and look at a comp planning cycle and say we had a theory on what we wanted to do.
So a lot of people talking like the merit matrix I want to pay people who are lower performers, less money, higher performers, more money based on where they are in the compensation range. And we have a philosophy on how much spread we want to create there. Were we right? Yeah. Like most companies don't look back and say, analytically we did it. They're like, Oh, thank God we were done with the comp planning process. That sucks. It's no fun.
And then they basically come back around to it nine or 10 months later to do it again, because it's painful. We were looking at it at Visier saying can we do that? And then can we go back and say what worked? What didn't work? Did people who were low performers, we gave them zero. What happened? The goal is usually you want them to leave, right? Or did they just become crappier performers? What happened? Did high performers paid high in the range? Did they do what we wanted them to do?
Or if we paid them less because they're high in the range, did they leave? Because we didn't want them to do that. So really leveraging analytics into something that's actionable. Which is a long winded answer.
No, that's really good, and I think you've touched on this a bit already but let's dig a bit deeper into what are the big challenges or problems that you see facing teams where total rewards would be a great fit for them?
Yeah, so I think Kind of the soapbox I get on is get greedy now. So in the past either the tools weren't mature enough or the number one player in comp planning with decisions is Excel. And so depending on how adept you were at pivot tables or VB script or how great you were with Excel that drove your compensation planning philosophy. Because I had to send out spreadsheets concatenate spreadsheets back.
And then if I want to check things like pay equity did I make equitable decisions when I gave managers discretion? Did they the usual old school, did they give their old? The guys they played golf with on the weekend, more money than the people who are actually affecting their business and high performers. Can I make sure there's equity checks? That was all really difficult to do.
And so I think the ability for companies to have a more well thought out pay philosophy driven and tied to the business performance, like what's driving the business and use their money for merit better. The example I give is accountants a lot of times. So if I'm making widgets.
Instead of giving everybody in the company a 4 percent raise because that's what we have, I might give the accounting department a 2 percent raise because I want to give in the widgets a process manufacturing or process engineers more money. But at the same token, if I'm a public accounting firm, accountants are the lifeblood of my business. I want to give them more money, right? And someone else get less money.
And you have the ability to bifurcate all that spend out and be much smarter with your spends now. And that's really what we're helping companies do. Anybody in the space. There's a lot of players in the space. Really trying to help companies maximize their spend because the merit budgets. are tough, right? If every year you have to spend 4%, it's a it's an annual growth. It's a compounded annual growth rate on your people. And so how do you maximize that spend equitably?
So it's really making companies more strategic about how they pay people.
Yeah. And I've joked with some of the comp and the business owners, like in the past, again you could fall back and say we have to give everyone the same, or we can't be too strategic and split them out and treat people differently or departments differently or locations differently because it's too hard. And actually now it's not too hard. Now you have to start thinking strategically or have the ability to think strategically and say, how do I actually look at every business?
and tie them together. And then analytically the business, the thing with people analytics it may be a misconception is it's just the people data, but it's also the data that goes with you. And coming from development, I'll use story points the way that developers measure a lot of how much effort they do. You could tie story points to it. You could tie to compensation.
If you worked at a convenience store, number of gallons of gasoline, Revenue, profit, number of bags of Cheetos last quarter, if that was the special you wanted to push, all that data can now be ingested in from an analytic standpoint in a company to say, how are we treating our high performers and how do we drive the business forward and what are the metrics that help our business move forward?
And then, of course the flywheel is spun up around now that we know all that stuff, how do we pay accordingly and reward accordingly?
Yeah, I can see where this type of information could be really powerful and keeping your best people and the people that are most influential on the success of the business, right? Because so many companies, it is just here's the flat 4%, 3%, whatever they decide. Here's the dollar amount we can invest, and it, doesn't seem like it often gets divvied up in the way it should, because some people probably do deserve more, or they're way behind pay, but they're one of your top performers, right?
It's gotta be more than a, percentage that you look at.
I think you create that merit matrix, and I think managers, two for companies because people forget like it's a very personal thing doling this out at the end of the day. So it's always nice on paper to say we're going to pay high performers high in the range, less than high performers, low in the range. And we're going to pay low performers wherever they are in the range, less money. That's all great on paper. Yeah, that's fine.
But when you go to a high performer and you're like, Hey, Deanna, you're amazing. And I know we pay you great, but because we pay you great, doesn't matter that you're amazing. You're getting less money. And with pay transparency, you're going to have to be able to explain that. And I think managers will like that because right now there's a black box that says You're going to be like thanks, but that was less than last year. What the hell is that about?
And now you can say actually based on where you are in the range, the position, your score, the way that your short term incentives are built out, here's your number. It's mathematic because at the other end of the spectrum, you have this weird stuff where if someone's not a one, they're a two and you're like, Deanna. Hey. Marginal year. Like here's enough money to cover part of the Netflix increase next year. That's a really hard discussion.
And then the human and human resources is people forget you got to then go back to work. After I had that discussion with you, I have to work with you again. So it's not like I get to drop that bomb and then see in 364 days, like I got to start working with you the next couple of days so I think having that explanation and validity behind how you do it and making sure, I think people want to know they're paid equitably.
So the other piece would be, hey, men and women, because gender is the big one right now, is men and women work paid equitably. We have a system that checks to make sure that people were doled out based on performance and it's equal pay for equal work, irregardless of all the reasons that people have been paid unfairly before.
Oh my gosh, it's so fascinating, just this whole topic, right? How would you say Total Rewards is different from the other solutions that are out there in the market?
we're addressing it from the analytics side. The foundation of our tool is all analytics. We're trying to basically give the administrators of the tool all the analytics to basically split that out inside of a company and say, I want to give.
More money to accounting, less money to accounting, more money to this region, create a very intricate merit matrix if you wanted to, to the deciles, you can go crazy on a merit matrix and then somehow be able to translate that compensation nerd dumb into letting managers who have to do this once a year, maybe twice a year who aren't from compensation, be able to say, now I need to give this out to my team. This is the suggested allocation. Here's some things I want to make it different.
The example I use there is I don't think there should be a lot of discretion personally with managers, but some, so if you and I both are very good employees, I'm going to give myself credit here. I'm, sure you're great. I'm great Deanna. And you and I are the same and we're similar, but the manager decides that, Hey, Deanna is much more of a team player. Sean is a pain to work with. And so I want to shift some money around, give them a little bit of discretion.
But one of the quotes I really liked from someone was unbridled management discretion is the enemy of pay equity. And so you've got to balance discretion with that, but you want to make that easy for the term. And so we've come at it from the UX standpoint for managers.
Yeah. And employees first and say the manager experience of being able to give the money out, understand where it's at and the manager of managers experience, being able to look at my teams that's first and foremost, and it's analytically driven. That's about as much sales as I'll probably do.
I know Total Rewards within Visiers is relatively new in the grand scheme of the company as a whole. What type of impact have you seen organizations have as you're implementing this and working with them?
A couple of things. So Visiers had Total Rewards for a long time. They've had a suite in there, so you could do budgeted comp versus actual comp. You could do some things. The Total Rewards business is an expansion of that to push that into the merit or comp planning cycle. The annual pay increase cycle or semi annual. So the impact we've seen is a company's being able to make that a little smoother, be able to have a pay philosophy where they want to be.
And I guess getting away from Visier, I would say what it's allowing and forcing back to the prior point is companies being able to say, where do I want to be and then do I have the data, put that data in, and then I can use the tooling to get there. I usually quote because obviously I'm a little bit of a hippie, so really well read. I'm going to quote Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. If you don't know where you're going, all roads will lead you there.
And so again, what's really cool is seeing companies that had a fairly simplistic compensation planning philosophy be able to create something really intricate to really drive and tie it to the business with all the business analytics, and then be able to have managers. Use the tool in a much faster method and communicate with what's given to them inside the tools and pay letters that reflect what would happen in the discussion.
And so creating a holistic process that's analytic driven, it's cool to see not to nerd out from a comp standpoint and actually allowing some of the compensation and companies that are dealing with compensation, live out their dreams. We'll call it Hey, I've always wanted to be able to have a more complex thing that aligns to the business, but it was too freaking hard with Excel. And now we can do that.
So what type of companies would you say are the perfect fit for this solution?
We, struggle a little bit with the company size, but I'd say 500 employees or more. And it's based on complexity. If you have to send out a bunch of spreadsheets, there's issues with security and there's issues with some other things. But to be fair Microsoft Excel is still the Leading compensation planning software provider because the price is right for Excel and Google docs. It's hard to beat free.
And at some point if I've got few enough spreadsheets, I don't have huge spans of control inside of a small, mid sized company to make these analytic decisions, I can look at it on one big monitor and, see if there's equity it's there. But if you're complex, you're distributed and you start to get to that size where, I really want to create a pay philosophy that's differentiated. It's equitable for equal pay in the right bands across multiple locations or countries, geographies, different roles.
I want to make sure that's done equitably and I want to have managers of managers and be able to roll that up and administrator money down. That's where you start to see the complexity. Come from there. And that includes companies who want to do base pay, short term incentives, long term incentives anything you would do in your kind of annual cycle whatever your, rewards program entails.
Sure. So what would you say is the biggest hesitation or obstacle that you see companies have as they're thinking about a solution like total rewards?
I think for professionals, it's what's your return on investment. And this will sound horrible in, some ways. Comp professionals have been remarkably creative in solving these problems by throwing their efforts, their skills at Excel. If you ever want to figure out something in Excel, call someone in compensation, it's amazing their Excel skills. And then the amount of time that they'll put in to work around these things. So the time savings piece doesn't always fly for ROI.
And you probably know this too. If they're in compensation, they're like, Hey, you chose compensation. Or compensation chose you, whatever case it may be, however you got to your career. And so during the comp cycle you give up three weekends of your life. That's just part of being in this role. So the ROI, that's been the hardest thing is companies saying I want to get out of Excel's free. So you have to somehow go up to the head of HR to the CFO and say, I want to buy software.
And if it's just to make my life easier, that's not it. I think it's where you hit on a little bit earlier. I want to retain my people. I want to reward the best people with the best. I want to make sure we're equitably doing this. The thing with merit matrices is it helps solve pay equity over time. Because if you've underpaid women over time, they're lower in the range. People lower in the range of more funds, you can do pay equity, set asides, you can do set asides for departments.
You can handle all these complexities to make sure that we're treating the best people. The best the people in the middle and our underperformers aren't taking money away from other places. You can start to look at things like actual versus budgeted. Did the good people leave?
Was our thesis right when we basically created a pay philosophy and between that and the security issues and allowing managers to do this in a way that's simpler and they can understand that's where I think you have to hang your head on. And I would say there's our solution or anybody else's if you're looking at technology like this, that saves you time. I think you've got to tie it to business results.
Otherwise, it sounds awful, but, CFO doesn't give a shit if you're in comp and you have to spend three weekends doing this. So it's how can I really help the business? And the CFO, the way you hit them is Hey, you're giving me 4%. I can make that 4 percent go a lot further. I can make sure that we don't have retention issues, the high performer stay that costs us this much money. To train or get people up to speed, linking all that stuff together is really important.
And that's the holistic people analytics view of looking at everything, not in a silo., but holistically.
Yeah, that makes sense. Because the reality is there's ripple effects, right? To being more strategic about your comp and suddenly, like the turnover rate for your best performing employees. It's lower, they're staying longer. They're getting promoted to bigger positions because they're happy.
Yeah. And I tell you from an HR standpoint, get greedy with what you're trying to measure. I used to get greedy a lot. The example I'll use is how is talent acquisition? It's not even a total rewards thing. How are they measured? Talent acquisition is usually measured on time to fill a number of requisitions filled. Is that really great for your long term business? If you think about how I want to measure a recruiter. over a period of time, an internal recruiter or a recruiting partner.
If you have a third party firm, how long did they stay? How much revenue did they drive? What was turnover of those people? 6, 12, 18, 36 months down the road did they get promoted? That's all on the table now. So really start thinking like what are the drivers? And in the past, it would have been unrealistic, right? like, how do I find that data? How do I pull it from an HRS? How do I analyze all that data, those analytics and where they came from?
No way, in Excel from four or five different systems. But now there are systems that you can look at your people analytics and The real premise of people analytics platforms is the ability to pull in data from multiple sources, normalize it and allow you to ask crazy complex questions and get an answer back that you're like, Oh my gosh, actually from this recruiter, the average length of 10 years, so they fill less recs per year.
So you might think, Oh, they're a really crappy recruiter, but actually when they fill recs, like they stay.
That's a really good example to demonstrate that it's more than just the numbers you can easily find.
Yeah. And again, I don't think it was ever anyone's intention to hide behind the numbers. I'm sure somebody was I'm a little bit of a hippie finding the good in everybody. I think to your point, it was like, Those were the numbers I could get. I was in control of talent acquisition. I could tell how long it took me to fill a job. I could tell how many recs I did every year.
Then I had to go find from multiple HRAS systems the system of record, the payroll record, the business systems records and pull all that data 10 years ago 15 years ago, no chance. And now, actually, sure. Not a problem. You get a platform that normalizes it all. You can ask those questions and be like, actually. This is the new metric for us to beat. It's not time to fill. You might actually find out any time that we filled a rec in under 20 days, they never stayed.
Like we got in a hurry and we just couldn't fill. So actually we need to have a, process and it takes us this period of time, they stay in their great employees. Again, you have to have the analytics to be able to look at that though.
Yeah, most definitely. So what is the future vision for Visier Total Rewards?
It's hard to do in a graphic, but if you think about all these siloed processes inside of compensation technology. In my little world where you've got data and you organize the data and you create grades and you do pay and then all these little processes almost making them all integrated. And it's all an ongoing process. That's analytically driven. The world's changing so fast right now.
If you think about when I got out of school, people say to jobs 15 years, then it was 7 years and now it's 3 years and you can't act at the same speed that you had before and if you think about even just pay cycles, like our pay cycles, doing one pay cycle a year, then might be what you want. But if you want to do two or four, you can do that. Because if you think about someone who used to work somewhere seven years, they would get seven increases, right?
Yeah, someone's only working somewhere three years now, you only get three times to make it correct. So you've just got to be able to go faster. And I think for us, the vision is Can we allow you both the administration and the managers and the employees to make analytical decisions based on align to the business and do that really quickly and timely with not a lot of lift making the data side easy.
So I know it's a little bit blue skies, rainbows, unicorns, but I think we're getting pretty close to that pot of gold at the end of giving them that and again, so jokingly I've said, I think now. Companies in HR need to figure out like, how creative can I be with my program? What is really driving our business and get greedy and look for tools that can actually deliver that.
Yeah. So what final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
The thing I usually leave people with is there's a lot of great technology out there that, you can go at. And there's several different providers even in our space alone, there's several places. So really take a step back and figure out what's driving your business. From the human standpoint, the people side, what are the things you would like to measure? What are the goals you need? What people, things have to happen for your business to be successful.
And then back into what data do I need to figure that out? Because all of the tools are tool people, analytics do you have the data? Where does the data have to come from? And then go pick your tool, which I know pains me to say sometimes Deanna, because I'm on the software side.
So when I tell you the third thing you should do is look at software, it's a little bit painful, but I actually think figure out where you want to be first, because there's a lot of people telling you what you think you should be. But every business is unique. What drives that business? The data you need, and then go find the tool that can deliver on the, things you want with the data you have.
That is great advice. So where can our listeners go to learn more about Visier Total Rewards?
So you just head to Visier, V I S I E R. com. You can tool around the solutions, you can tool around wherever and, figure it out. And I'm always happy to chat. Obviously, I get a little fired up about this stuff. I'm always happy to chat with people where they're at. I think It's amazing to me how different everybody's program is because everybody's different is different and everybody's business is different. Their philosophy is different.
Their analytics and their total rewards requirements are different for each business.
Great. I will be sure to include the link in the show notes so our listeners can check it out. And last but not least, thanks so much for joining me on the HR Tech Spotlight, Sean.
Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight Podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via growthmodemarketing. com or reach out to me, Deanna Shimoda on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe, connect with us on social media and leave a review.
This is Deanna with Growth Mode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.