Compensation Benefits

“I thought we were paying everybody well. And when I spoke with one of them, the problem that she had was that she needed money the next day, couldn't wait till the following Friday for payday, and it was already halfway...”

“But what companies usually neglect is their off-cycle increases. So basically, you know, how much money are you spending throughout the year... And you will learn that it's typically, it's like 50 to 75% of the cost you'...”

“People are saying, what are the benefits talking to me? What are they saying to me as an individual? Do they cover the stuff that I need?”

“I don't look at it that we're trying to disrupt anybody. I look at it as there's an opportunity that no one's really gone after the way that we want to, and we want to join and have Previ be as big of a benefit as health...”

“Previ is the easiest win an HR leader is going to get all year. Literally, we charge nothing to a company... and they can launch the benefit to their employees in minutes.”

“I framed the family support benefits as a strategic investment and not just an expense.”

“Market pricing simply helps define a reliable baseline. While it's a useful source of competitive pay data and decision-making, market pricing is descriptive, not prescriptive.”

“The answer to that question can easily be, what do you want the market survey to say?”

“But it is incorrect to believe the way to pay competitively is to pay at the middle of a pay range or at a calculated market value.”

“When the, when the numbers were coming in, instead of being solely focused on, let's say rebates, really kind of stripping that out of the equation and saying, If utilization changes, how does the cost change based on th...”

“We took a step back this year to look at different options so that people didn't have to overinsure themselves or underinsure themselves. They could find the right level for them and their families.”

“My passion is developing benefit strategies that attract and retain top talent while also enhancing the overall employee experience.”

“The goal should be to identify metrics that are meaningful, that are measurable, and also directly aligned with organizational goals.”

“Compensation is here. We're here to help you spend your money efficiently.”

“The business doesn't see this as a value add. The other piece would be not treating this as a living document.”

“I often say that even though compensation is not probably the only reason why we work, it's, you know, got to be right up there as a primary reason for most of us, even though we love what we do. I think unless we're in...”

“75% of individuals facing fertility challenges have said that it impacts their productivity at work.”

“It's evolved over the years, you know, the types of programs, et cetera, but it still boils down to 3 things, I think, and that's what is in those benefit programs and what's available to the employees. That's number 1....”

“ROI on benefits is very important, but at the same time, very challenging. You can implement something in 2025, you might not really see the results until 2027. And you might be impacting employees, and then 2 years from...”

“It's really looking at what's most impactful from a cost standpoint. Least impactful to the employee. You know, are there things that you can do in which it will create no noise or reduce the amount of noise that you're...”

“I think total rewards is not just a trendy renaming of benefits and compensation, which you'll see sometimes out there.”

“if you get it right, you know, you kind of, you take that off the table from an employee perspective. But if you get it wrong, it's like paramount. It's the one thing people focus attention on.”

“I think that constant kind of lowballing approach to compensation and benefits, I think, is completely the wrong approach... you may think, you know, by paying people more money, it's costing you. But in actuality, if yo...”

“I always joke that nobody actually ever plans on getting into benefits as a career.”

“I think any time in the benefits area that you can have a win-win is beneficial, and it doesn't happen often.”

“We don't call it that here, but that's essentially what it is. So our employees have no limit on the amount of vacation that they can take.”

“Really what differentiates all of our different companies is what we do beyond compensation. So do we offer various stock programs or equity awards? Do we offer different types of benefits or perks? So that's really what...”

“I like to think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't have the fundamental things met, you can build all these great programs that sit on top, but they're going to be worthless. You really have to meet those funda...”

“At the time, I was equally drawn to finance and HR, and I've always seen myself at the intersection of numbers and people. How powerful storytelling with numbers could be and That's what tugged me into a career in total...”

“I think this is the real hack to it, though, because it gives us a prioritization framework. What I mean by that is I can take even people with even performance and I can understand that somebody is low in market versus...”

“I feel like with some of the bigger benefit providers, it's it's what I would say, they have everything but the kitchen sink offerings. And so what I would find is a lot of times they would have, every one of my vendors...”

“We specifically had great response to the fact that we could help people reduce monthly costs with cell phone plans predominantly, or insurance plans.”

“What I'm finding, especially in my role here, is that taking a holistic total rewards approach when, when talking about employee motivation and retention is key.”

“You don't have to be a finance expert... Go into the chase, get a little bit more financial understanding of the company's financials.”

“Over 8 out of 10 employees that receive equity compensation say that equity compensation is the most effective way to keep them motivated and engaged in their role. So think about that. When do you get over 80% of employ...”

“I started in benefits administration by accident, kind of fresh out of college during the recession... I didn't know anything about health insurance except that I had it.”

“Over $700 billion is spent by employees— employers via their health care program across America, making sure their employees have access to care. And over 50% of America is represented by employer health care sponsored p...”

“Our benefits leaders, I often think that we— they go unnoticed in HR organizations. They are caught in the middle of the complexity of healthcare...”

“First bullet point I would say is build structure. Have something, have a program. Start with pay bands, tie them to benchmarking data., find a technology that can help you manage those things.”

“You need to subscribe to a compensation philosophy as a company and then live by it.”

“Don't let perfection get in the way of progress. Like you can make mistakes in building a compensation program for your company. You can always correct them too as well.”

“I think total rewards can be very strategic, but at least from my perspective, seeing the payroll side of it as well, it's really important for practitioners to understand the importance and just kind of get it right whe...”

“I did take it upon myself to call the insurance company. We got on a call with the insurance company, the doctor, the pharmacy conference call. And I think it's just so important to go the extra mile and make sure that t...”

“My advice is to listen to your people, understand what is important to them, conduct surveys, hold town hall meetings, be present in situations to build connections and relationships, understand the organizational strate...”

“Rather than doing, uh, what other resorts are doing, I looked at other successful companies and, you know, they're paying market rate for compensation, they're offering competitive benefits, and, you know, doing all of t...”

“in our '24-'25 season, we increased that entry-level wage from $15 to $20 an hour, and then overall revamped our perk program. So I think that's gonna be the thing that's gonna have to happen is companies are gonna have...”

“If you ask my employees, they would all just say, believe me, if I could, I think we would pay everybody more. What I do is to think about it through the lens of we need our employees to maximize the offer, to maximize s...”

“One of those is around student loan assistance. So we actually have a program that we're starting in 2025 whereby if you have student loan debt and you're one of our employees, which we know more than half of our employe...”

“I generally treat each region as a separate entity. So my US community will have different needs and wants than my UK team.”

“So we believe that equity truly means that employees have access to the support that they need at the different stages of their life.”

“The standard in the industry right now for the US is about 12 weeks paid family leave. We do 16 weeks paid family leave for primary caregivers and 12 weeks paid family leave for secondary caregivers, and that's at 100%.”

“Being able to offer benefits that go beyond the traditional benefits, such as perks and discounts, et cetera, things like that is definitely something we lean into and need to lean into more.”

“It's never one size fits all. That is so understanding that it's not just the here's the benefit, let's drop it in. We did our part. Every employee has this many sessions. It's really thinking about holistic care. And so...”

“You have to have a thoughtful approach to both of these topics. So when we talk about pay equity and pay transparency, both of these are relatively new in the compensation field, but maintaining pay equity, I think, real...”

“Benefits are very expensive for organizations, but organizations are, have different age groups. There's older folks, younger folks who are gonna have different needs. For benefits and different rewards based on their ag...”

“It is so critical that your EVP and the total rewards package is unique to your organization and to your employees. And as organizations change over time, it really is important to update both of those things on a regula...”

“I love to nerd out on compensation. It's my favorite discipline within people and HR. I think when you think about compensation, you, it has to be rooted in the strategy of the business first.”

“You have to decide for your own organization where you are, what your internal challenges are, how you're growing, your whole strategy to determine what level of pay transparency is palpable for the organization. And how...”

“So I'm going to argue all day long that you want to pay your best performers the most.”

“acknowledge that any change to those benefits is not minor, is not just math, is not just a change in a policy, but it changes the employees' lives and their family lives. So I think the advice I would give is, is give i...”

“You build what you budget, and having really great relationships with your finance leaders is incredibly important in HR.”

“you don't have to pay the most money, and you're always going to have competition for that. But your compensation programs have to be compelling enough that people understand them and it's hitting them at the right times...”

“I think it's really easy for companies to jump right to the tactical. What am I going to pay them? What are the benefits going to be? And of course, those things are important and you have to do those. But I think a mist...”

“But I think what you want to do is think about who you want to be as an employer and how you want to take care of people and come up with— what we do is we have guiding principles around all of our benefits, all where we...”

“If you go to a flexible vacation program, not an unlimited, then you never have to do that again. You, HR, the administration, goes away, right? Because it's unlimited. It also takes care of a lot of the restrictions on...”

“I would actually say total rewards professionals, because I think a lot of times TR is an under-resourced team... You need somebody that understands the how and the why of how you pay people and how you reward people.”

“It's not only about the idea of pay and benefits, which I think is kind of an archaic way of thinking about things, but it's about really taking a look at the full basket of value that we can go and create for people as...”

“We're very transparent against— with compensation, even in jurisdictions that don't require comp transparency, we do it across the board. And it's critically important for us to make sure that we're hitting that right to...”

“you actually have to look at the long term of what you're doing.”

“We will pay you to quit. So we will pay you to quit right now. I had never done that before. I had no idea whether or not it would work.”

“One interesting part of this model is that compensation is not one of those 5 components, but it's presented more as engagement hygiene, meaning that fair competitive pay, of course it's important, but you're not going t...”

“To potentially have the opportunity to participate in a stock purchase program really made it real for our employees, at least to have the option to consider. So we undertook a really good, a strong communication program...”

“for a flat structure, I don't want to necessarily create elevated titles that are meaningless to people. I don't want to overinflate titles or overpay for salary. But what I can do is look at the people periodically that...”

“the captive plan, health plan is a hybrid plan, which is a combination of a self-insured plan, but it also gives you the flexibility to bring in a TPA, have a rented network.”

“Young people tend to be healthy. They tend to not worry about needing to go to the doctor all the time... but they all want to go to therapy. It's one of the top things that young candidates and young employees ask us ab...”

“I am a big defender of flex benefits. So what we do in some countries that we give a certain amount in a flex benefits platform and then the person can invest that money or can use that money wherever they want. Because...”

“I'm learning very quickly that what's important to employees, let's say, in San Francisco are very different than what's important to my employees and my current organization... So I think it's understanding that just be...”

“If somebody's performing and maybe they've taken on more responsibility, we like to give more frequent pay increases.”

“what you're really looking to reward, or what I'm looking to reward when I think about compensation systems specifically, is the impact that you have on the business.”