In 2020, four Quintop consultants contributed to the compensation process of a financial services institution. The aim of the process is to determine the bonus amounts that need to be paid to employees.
Stakeholder involvement
The company operates on a global scale. Because of the diversity in laws and regulations within the various countries in which the company operates, HR data is processed and stored in distinct ways. As a result, the compensation process needs to be set up in a structured way, and accuracy and eye for detail are considered to be of upmost importance. Each country manages its own HR data set. Local HR managers should therefore be closely and actively involved in every part of the compensation process. To increase their involvement, the company team responsible for the compensation and our consultants (which were then part of the team) held training sessions to explain the goals and different phases of the whole process.
It’s all about data
Since the compensation process is largely manually, our consultants mainly focused on optimising data quality and executing data analyses. Local HR managers sent their data to the compensation team, which checked data accuracy and completeness. Based on the data that the compensation team received, proposals in regards to the total bonus amounts per business line were formulated and presented to the Management Board for their initial approval.
Quintop also contributed to the setup of the compensation section of the company’s HR system. All data that had been collected was stored here, via which it was made available to local HR managers. Our consultants took on various tasks: They coordinated data change requests sent in by the local HR managers, examined whether requests were valid, and served as a bridge between the business and the technical team that ensured data changes were reflected in the system. As a result, at the start of the compensation process the local HR managers were given insight into the bonus budget that was made available to them, with which they could consequently draft bonus proposals for their employees.
Evaluation and improvement of the process
After the compensation process came to an end, Quintop organised Lessons Learned sessions in which the whole process was evaluated. Based on these sessions, our consultants came up with specific improvement suggestions which the compensation team could put into practice right away. Some examples were the drafting of an escalation policy, internal and external communication improvements, and process simplification.
Quintop’s contribution was twofold: On the one hand, because of their project management experience, our consultants were able to support and add structure during the entire process; on the other hand, they could make some improvements and adjustments by analysing the compensation process with a fresh pair of eyes.
