97 Payscale’s Latest Innovations and Compensation Management Trends

[00:00:00] The market is telling us they don't want technology that just helps them complete their compensation processes anymore. They want our help in surfacing ways that they can take action and raise potential areas that need attention within their compensation process. And this is why we're arming our

[00:00:16] users with insights that not only power more accurate pay decisions, but also drive potential cost savings and consistency in implementing their pay practices across the board. Hello everybody and welcome to Comp and Coffee. Are you ready to dive into the dynamic world

[00:00:48] of compensation management? Join us on a journey where we unravel the latest trends, tackle burning questions and explore innovative strategies that are shaping the future of compensation all with a cup of coffee in your hand. I'm your Comp and Coffee podcast custodian

[00:01:03] Ruth Thomas, and in each episode we'll bring you in cycle discussions and expert insights to keep you informed and empowered in the ever evolving landscape of reward and compensation. So whether you're a seasoned comp pro or new to the trade, our podcast is your go-to resource

[00:01:21] for staying ahead of the curve. So grab your favorite beverage, coffee or not, tune in and let's get started. So welcome to this episode. Let me tell you what we're going to be covering today. At the end of Q1, we shared with you how PayScale is innovating

[00:01:39] our solutions in response to market demands and key compensation trends. It was the first time we had done that. We know many of you who listen into this show are our valued customers. So we thought you would find it interesting to find out more detail about

[00:01:53] how our products and data offerings are advancing. And if you're not a PayScale customer, we thought you'd find that information interesting too. And we hope in doing so, we give you an idea about some of the innovations that we are driving in the compensation industry

[00:02:07] today. So we're now at the end of Q2, quite to be that independence break next week as we're recording this episode. And we wanted to bring you up to date on the latest developments. So joining me again, I have Brooke Grimes, who's our Senior Director of Product Marketing

[00:02:24] and Brittany Innes, who's our Senior Director in Product Management. I'd first want to say hi and maybe tell us about what you're planning to do on your independence break. Hi my name is Brooke Grimes. I'm our Senior Director of Product Marketing and on our independence

[00:02:39] break, I am headed to the beaches of South Carolina with my family. Very nice. And Brittany, do you want to say hello? Hello, thanks Ruth. My name is Brittany Innes. I'm the Senior Director of Product Management

[00:02:52] here at PayScale. I'm really looking forward to independence break. I've got three kids out of school for the summer. We're looking forward to spending some time at the beaches in Massachusetts. Very nice. Do you have the weather to enjoy the beaches?

[00:03:04] So far so good. Yeah, it's looking like it's going to be a good forecast. Yes, absolutely. I will be spending time at the Henley Rowing Regatta for a couple of the days next week. I'll be working for some of the other days because obviously everyone

[00:03:19] around me isn't celebrating Independence Day here in London. But I am celebrating some American friends who are rowing in cruise on Tuesday. So I'm going to support them on Tuesday and I'll support my daughter on Friday. So looking forward to that time out.

[00:03:34] Okay, so let's get started. We discussed in our last launch episode that PayScale focuses on releasing new features quarterly around themes. But what are our themes for this sale or this quarter? Yes, you're exactly right. So as PayScale is releasing updates every two to three weeks,

[00:03:55] we want to make sure at the end of the day that those updates culminate in solving big problems for our clients with the updates that we're making. And so this summer, our clients are going to see big improvements in three key areas. The first one is surfacing insights.

[00:04:10] The market is telling us they don't want technology that just helps them complete their compensation processes anymore. They want our help in surfacing ways that they can take action and raise potential areas that need attention within their compensation process. And this is why we're arming our

[00:04:26] users with insights that not only power more accurate pay decisions, but also drive potential cost savings and consistency in implementing their pay practices across the board. Our second theme is growing data every day. We know that compensation data is not valuable

[00:04:42] unless it's relevant to each and every one of our users. And our users want quality data representing their specific industry, jobs, and locations. And that's why we never let our data sit stagnant and we're constantly growing our data. And when it comes to growth,

[00:04:58] we never rest. And last but certainly not least is user-led feedback. From our thousands of users, we're always speaking to them and learning about areas of improvement that can make their day-to-day experience better within the product. And this is why with each release,

[00:05:12] we address feedback directly from our users to improve their experience within pay scale. Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say is that, as I mentioned above, we want to make sure that the functionality

[00:05:29] makes its way into our products, but that users understand that. And so we are constantly putting that functionality in front of our users and the next opportunity for that will be our Pay Scale Innovation Unleashed webinar filming on July 23rd.

[00:05:44] And will have customers, will they get invited to attend that webinar if you're a customer? Yeah. So all customers should receive an email on July 9th or 10th inviting them to that webinar.

[00:05:58] Okay. So one of the things I've been observing is that with the revolution, sorry, of pay transparency legislation, we've definitely been seeing an increase in pay practices that were probably previously only completed by mature compensation teams. And we saw that

[00:06:13] very much in our compensation best practice survey data this year. So a definite, a big uptick in the number of organizations with a compensation philosophy, implementing a consistent pay strategy and having job architecture. So I think we saw 57% of orgs now have some

[00:06:31] form of job architecture in place and 20% of organizations are working on them. And that's something I know, Brittany, you've been thinking about. Can you tell us a little more about how we plan to support organizations in that journey?

[00:06:45] Yeah, for sure. I mean, you mentioned it, Ruth, but we've seen a significant increase over the past five years or so of organizations really of all sizes using job families and levels to respond to really both pay transparency and pay equity needs within their orgs. And

[00:07:02] job architecture really does make that easier to implement, really making consistent pay practices across even large or small organizations a lot easier just simply to kind of manage and sustain. And this summer we did launch job family management. And that is a new feature

[00:07:19] where users now have the centralized view of their job families in their levels within the pay factors platform so that they can really get a bird's eye view into where jobs within their organizations are falling, how they're being classified. And you can even

[00:07:35] bulk price using that job family management area as well. So that way you can tie survey data consistently when you are pricing the niche or emerging job families using, say, global grade codes from your survey vendors. So really, really exciting stuff happening

[00:07:53] there to really try to help our customers make better use of the job architecture that they have in hand or develop one if that's the stage of the journey that they're on. And what's even better is that for those, especially for those 20% of organizations

[00:08:09] who are looking to embark on developing job families, job levels and families, our professional services team is also evolving as well and is here to help them. Our experience and expertise team will help them build and maintain job families within pay factors and can also lend

[00:08:26] a hand in helping implement best practices on how to manage those job families long term with efficiency and provide basic career ladder recommendations as well. Great. That sounds like a great new offering and I'm really excited that we're starting

[00:08:39] to offer those features to our customers. So Brittany, what other insights? We talked about surfacing insights as one of the key themes for this release. What other insights are we looking to surface for our users? Yeah. You know, we know the majority of organizations

[00:08:54] are using maybe two out of four sources of data, if not more. And at least 49% of organizations are getting their data from salary survey publishers. And while salary surveys are a trusted source of data, of course, the process of participating in surveys can still be really

[00:09:11] cumbersome. So this is why we've been really excited to get some feedback from our customers and start developing one of the features that we are launching here soon, which we think is really going to be revolutionizing the survey participation process. So a brand new

[00:09:28] interface within PayFactors specifically to manage that process. And users will have a clear step-by-step process for participating in each one of the surveys that they are subscribing to while also allowing users to really save those final matches that they are making during

[00:09:46] participation and better leverage them in the fall when it is time to consume that new survey data, as well as participate the following year, just really making it, making that process more sustainable year over year. But I would say also, not only is that participation process going

[00:10:03] to be easier, but this interface was intentionally designed to clearly show survey utilization as well so that we can help our customers maximize their investment, the usually sizable investment that they're making in compensation data. So we've seen a lot of the world really tightening

[00:10:20] their purse strings. And we think that this has the potential to bring some real cost savings to our users. And our services team is here to help too. They're here to help price jobs,

[00:10:31] to help you execute on market prices, market matches as well for those who need an additional helping hand. And one of the new expansions that we are making within our services team this year

[00:10:43] is now we're able to help with international surveys as well, which is something we haven't been able to necessarily support before, which we're really excited about and that our clients have really asked for, especially those that are operating in multiple countries around the world.

[00:10:58] Great. So that sounds exciting as well. Lots of evolutions there for payback this summer. And the other thing, Brooke, that you talked about at the beginning was growing our data. So can you talk about how that's going and what progress have we seen since we met with

[00:11:13] you last quarter? Yes, absolutely. So last time we talked on the podcast, we announced a new feature called Peer Auto Match, where we leverage AI to help users automatically match their jobs with confidence within our peer dataset. And this feature has been widely adopted and has allowed

[00:11:34] us to significantly grow our peer dataset, including 100 million, sorry, not 100, 1 million new employees and 700 new organizations within peers. And with that growth of new employees, that's 13% growth in just the last three months. And this new feature will only allow us to see

[00:11:53] greater growth as time goes on, which is amazing. And then with our HR market analysis, which is our largest and most broadly used set of data, these market pricings are built from PayScale's own HR reported survey data sources, historical third-party survey trends, and our compensation

[00:12:13] data experts analysis of the market. We're continuing to use HRMA with new jobs each quarter. So we've actually added 417 jobs for our customers as well within that dataset, which is about a 5%

[00:12:28] growth quarter over quarter. Great. Well, that's good to see that level of growth. And I think one thing we're really keen on here at PayScale is being transparent about our data sources. And

[00:12:41] we're keen to share with you what we're trying to do from a strategy perspective, how we're leveraging AI and then how that's impacting our data sources to benefit you. Now we haven't talked a

[00:12:52] whole lot yet about the evolutions in MarketPay and that product line, Brittany. Do you want to dive into some of the user-driven enhancements that we've seen for users there? Absolutely. Yeah. Our MarketPay users are some of our most tenured users and they do provide some really amazing

[00:13:08] feedback to us. And recently, MarketPay users have been telling us at the start of this year that more efficient workflows are one of the ways that we can best support them going into the future. So we've got a number of different enhancements along those lines. Again, coming

[00:13:24] directly from the models of our customers who know the product best and know how it can best support them into the future. So if you're not familiar, we do have our PayScale compensation survey, which is a participation-based survey specifically for MarketPay customers. And we are

[00:13:41] currently in the process of testing and validating adding peer data into that PayScale compensation survey. So I think that this has the potential really to be a major value add to our MarketPay

[00:13:55] customers in that we know that peer data is dynamic. We know that the breadth and depth of that data has been really meaningful to PayFactors customers. So we wanted to really introduce that to MarketPay customers in a way that wouldn't cause any additional friction, right? Let's put

[00:14:12] that in a workload that they are currently accustomed to without putting any additional onus on them to gather and collect that data. So we're really excited. And we will, of course, keep you posted on the Comp and Coffee podcast as to delivery timing on that addition to the

[00:14:30] PayScale compensation survey with peer data. Our workloads have also been really hard at work, making some improvements to the pricing workflows themselves. So we have a new update coming this summer, which is going to allow MarketPay customers to price multiple jobs in one single

[00:14:49] workflow. So really helpful for customers who are ad hoc pricing groups of jobs throughout the year and really want to be able to identify those jobs, identify the right survey data without any repetitive motions within the product. So very excited about that usability and just

[00:15:06] workflow improvement. We also have some updates coming to structure modeling. So structure modeling, of course, is one of the, I think, most impactful features in MarketPay today. And some of the

[00:15:18] feedback that we had received from customers is that we could do a little bit more to help them better understand potential budget impacts in context of pay structure updates by putting that data, making it really easy to access within that structure modeling workflow so that they can

[00:15:35] reference previously published range data alongside the proposals that they are making to their business in terms of those range changes. We've also got some great quality of life updates coming again to the pricing workflows where we are expanding the filters

[00:15:53] that are available. So if you're thinking about all that survey data that you have, we know our customers have quite a bit of it. It can sometimes be daunting to sift through all of the data that

[00:16:03] you have at your fingertips. And what we identified recently was that our customers really benefit from added filters for things like job family or job levels so they can really narrow in on the precise data that they have previously aligned to their own job families and levels by

[00:16:21] marrying that up with the job families and levels that have been published by our friends at this in the survey publisher world. So really excited about that. Again, just making the process more efficient for those customers. And I will end this by saying we restarted this piece of

[00:16:38] the conversation by talking about the great feedback that we get from our MarketPay customers. But we have a very exciting update that actually just went live two nights ago. So at the time of

[00:16:49] filming this, this went out two nights ago. Really exciting. We have added on a new feedback tool for our customers to use and that will first be available in the MarketPay tool, WordMarketPay customers. But essentially what this tool is letting you do is submit your feedback to

[00:17:07] the product team. So by telling us, hey, here's an emerging problem that I'm identifying in my organization. You can put that out into our compensation community and others who are using the MarketPay products can chime in and sort of weigh in and tell us as the product team

[00:17:24] how important that would also be to you if we could solve that problem on your behalf. So really, I think a nice way to be able to summarize, collect, and essentially vote and

[00:17:35] democratize the way that feedback makes its way back into the products that you all know and love. So that's a very exciting update. We're looking forward to seeing over the next couple of weeks

[00:17:47] what feedback comes in after the initial launch. But again, just a great way to engage with our customers and make sure that we are making your voices heard and echoing that message throughout the pay scale business.

[00:18:01] Right, well that sounds good. Is there a similar way that pay factors customers can get the same feedback? Absolutely, yes. So we actually have a tool for feedback in the PayFactors product as well. It is the same tooling system that we are currently using in MarketPay today,

[00:18:19] just sort of an older version of it. Payfactors customers can expect the launch of a new feedback processing tool over the next couple of quarters. So more information again, we can certainly share that on a later comp and copy episode and we can provide all the details there.

[00:18:38] But yes, there is your ideas tile in PayFactors today if you'd like to share your perspective as a PayFactors user. Well great, I think you're highlighting really just how seriously we take feedback from

[00:18:51] customers. So if you are listening here and you are either a PayFactors or MarketPay customer or on any of our products and solutions, do let us know what you think would help make your work easier and we definitely take those suggestions seriously.

[00:19:06] So that's a good wrap up product innovations, thank you Brooke and Brittany. But what else has been going on? What other things have we been focusing on at pay scale, Brooke, in this quarter?

[00:19:16] Yeah, so there's two other amazing tools and resources we have for our customers. So one of the areas we've really been focusing on this year is providing education for our customers that help

[00:19:27] them not only advance the way they're using our tools to be successful, but also advancing from just understanding the compensation landscape better and understanding best practices better. And so we have our last quarter we announced our new PayScale certifications program.

[00:19:44] And this quarter we launched our new compensation fundamentals certification. And so that is available to our users now. And then the other piece of information that we have available to our customers is a brand new top performers report that we released in May,

[00:20:02] where we looked into the best practices of organizations that exceeded their revenue goals in 2023 to see what the rest of the industry could learn from them. And Ruth, I know

[00:20:12] you were deeply involved in this report and have a lot of key takeaways that I know you took from that report. Yeah, this was one of the teams that reported to me did this report. It was a great

[00:20:23] idea from the team actually. We've been getting lots of requests in from customers, from prospects, people that we interact through our co-leadership saying, you know, how can I build my business case to implement job architecture, to introduce new surveys, to introduce technology to the business?

[00:20:42] And so we wanted to, we thought, why don't we look at what those companies that exceeded their revenue goals, as you said, Brooke, in 2023, see what they're doing that's different and actually

[00:20:52] kind of be able to draw a line between, you know, exceeding your revenue and what are the best compensation practices. So I'll just call out two or three or four data points. The first is that they're more likely to prioritize investment in HR and including modernizing HR software,

[00:21:09] which could use Russ here at Payscale. Top performers are also more likely to embrace paid transparency and share pay ranges even when they're not required to by law. Top performers are more likely to always give accessible information to employees about the why behind

[00:21:26] their pay. So they're making sure they're communicating to employees. And top performers are also more likely to say it's important for them to invest beyond traditional surveys. So it's a short white paper, I think it's about eight pages long, but you can find it at Payscale.com

[00:21:42] underneath our research and insights section. You can grab a copy of that report. And if you're in that kind of summer mode where you're building a business justification to your execs about changes that you want to make happen this year, then you'll find some really great data points

[00:21:58] in there. Okay. So Brooke, anything you want to close us out on? I just wanted to remind everybody we talked about at the start of the recording here today, but the Payfactor Innovation Unleashed

[00:22:10] webinar will be on July 23rd. So be on the lookout for invitations coming into your inbox in the next couple of weeks. And we're really excited to see you all there. Thank you. Well,

[00:22:22] thank you very much, Brittany. Thank you, Brooke, for joining me. We'll see you in another quarter's time then, I hope. And let me know how you enjoyed this episode, listeners. You can

[00:22:32] let us know at copy at Payscale.com and we look forward to seeing you on our next episode. Thank you very much.