Compensation is one of the most consistent pain points for businesses today. Employees struggle to understand their compensation; managers struggle to make and communicate compensation decisions; and the People team is left with a mess of spreadsheets and manual effort to try to make it all work. 

Getting compensation right is both a huge pain and extremely important. The consequences of getting it wrong are real: retention, hiring, your team’s morale, and the reputation of your company are all on the line.

At Aeqium, we’ve wrestled with these problems ourselves and heard from dozens of executives and People leaders. We’re putting that hard earned experience into a platform that automates compensation processes and enables data-driven decision making.

We think a platform like ours can ultimately make the setup of a best-in-class compensation system automatic, but until then, learning best practices is one of the most common challenges we’ve seen in building a compensation program. That’s why we’re focusing on sharing information from our experiences as well.

Compensation processes are often run behind closed doors and practices are kept secret, so too many teams end up reinventing the wheel or not even realizing when they’re heading for trouble. We’re building a comprehensive guide on how to compensate your team, with playbooks to help you design a system that works for you. 

There are dozens of important details that go into an effective compensation program:

• How should you structure your compensation plan? Should you have bonuses? How large should bonuses be? How often should you pay them out? 
• You’ve got benchmark data, but what do you do with it? What percentile of market rate should you target? Who should you even benchmark against? 
• How will you grant equity? How will you add equity refreshers – what happens if someone stays past their initial equity grant? What happens if your stock takes off? What happens if it drops in value? 
• How should you pay remote employees vs. employees in major markets? How should this evolve as your stance on remote evolves?

In this blog, we’ll cover these and many more topics to provide a library of tips and techniques for setting up a great compensation plan. Sign up below to stay in touch as we write new content.