Smart Compensation

Learn about Visier's solution for compensation planning.

Smart Compensation is a data-driven solution that simplifies and streamlines the entire compensation management process. It handles everything from setting your budget to communicating pay changes to your employees. It's flexible enough to translate your organization's unique pay philosophies into simple, actionable steps.

Smart Compensation also empowers your managers, guiding them to make more informed decisions about promotions and pay. With a clear understanding of the data, they can effectively communicate pay decisions to their teams, helping employees feel valued and recognized. By allowing you to analyze pay decisions before they're finalized, Smart Compensation helps you proactively identify and address potential issues, such as pay equity discrepancies. This ensures your organization can make fair and balanced compensation decisions with confidence.

Delivered value

Smart Compensation automates and streamlines your entire compensation cycle, guiding you from one stage to the next with features designed for speed and efficiency. The value delivered from Smart Compensation is listed below.

Automate the compensation cycle: Smart Compensation includes progress tracking and multi-level collaboration, so various levels of your organization can review and adjust as the allocations flow up through the supervisory hierarchy.
Optimize your compensation budget: Smart Compensation helps you effectively manage your compensation budget from start to finish.
Provide smart merit recommendations: Smart Compensation gives you a great starting point for employee pay with its recommendation engine. This engine provides initial pay suggestions that align with your organization's pay philosophy. You can customize these recommendations, adjusting elements such as the size of a raise for a promotion or how your merit matrix is structured.
Have effective pay conversations: Smart Compensation prepares managers to have more effective pay conversations with their employees. By giving managers a single view of an employee's historic data from different sources, it helps them have meaningful discussions that motivate their team. It guides managers through their tasks with a simple, intuitive interface.
Address fairness and equity: Smart Compensation gives you the tools to analyze the impact of your compensation decisions on fairness, equity, and employee retention. This helps you apply your budget in the most effective way possible. This approach includes a powerful hypothesis analysis feature that lets you model what your organization's pay structure will look like with proposed changes, all in real-time. By seeing the potential outcomes before you finalize decisions and process payroll, you can proactively address any concerns.

Note: Smart Compensation does not perform pay equity regression testing typically done through a third party under legal privilege; although, it helps manage fairness and equity to reduce the need for this type of testing.
Create pay consistency to support pay transparency: Smart Compensation helps managers make more consistent pay decisions. It shows them the different factors that went into an employee's compensation, making it easier to explain decisions clearly. It also gives managers a complete view of an employee's pay and job history. This strengthens pay transparency and helps them understand the employee's expectations to have a more meaningful and productive discussion.

Supported pay philosophies

Smart Compensation helps you turn your organization's pay strategy into specific pay recommendations using pay philosophy elements. A pay philosophy documents the organization's position on employee compensation and reflects your organization's culture, values, and goals. It uses your loaded data to suggest pay recommendations. Without the necessary data, pay philosophy elements will not be available. For more information about how to set up a pay philosophy and the required data, see Set a Pay Philosophy.

The following table outlines the supported pay philosophy elements.

Pay Philosophy Element	Description
Merit	Use a merit matrix to determine pay recommendations. A merit matrix is a guideline that helps reward employees in a consistent way. It suggests merit adjustments for employees based on the attributes you use to build your matrix. If you choose to include proficiency as a factor, managers will need to complete a talent evaluation to help determine the recommended raise.
Promotions (Optional)	Define the increase that will be suggested for a promoted employee. The budget for promotional raises is calculated using the expected promotion rate. If this rate is not provided, a 10% benchmark is used by default.
Across-the-board	Apply a broad percentage increase to a population by location, ideal for cost-of-labor increases.
Remediation	Apply an increase to pay band minimum for all non-promoted employees whose base pay is less than the pay band minimum.
Bonus	Use a bonus matrix based on performance ratings to apply a broad percentage increase.
Long-term incentives (LTI)	Use a LTI matrix based on performance ratings or potential ratings to apply a broad percentage increase.

Core capabilities

Smart Compensation provides functional, talent assessment, and analytic capabilities. The following table summarizes each core capability.

Capability	Description
Functional	Smart Compensation allows you to run unlimited compensation cycles at the same time. It also provides smart recommendations for raises and organizes employees into task groups based on your organization's hierarchy. This structure helps create clear approval chains. Security and permissions are also designed around these hierarchies, which ensures that users only see the data necessary for their tasks. For example, a manager can see all relevant data for their direct reports, while a "manager of managers" can view data for everyone in their group. Support users can see relevant data about the population they’re assigned to support. Smart Compensation supports detailed permission definitions, which are modified to your requirements during onboarding so you can ensure that your users only see what they need to. For more information about the user roles and permissions, see Roles and Permissions.
Talent assessment	Smart Compensation helps you gather important data from your managers during a compensation cycle. Before they see any pay recommendations, managers are prompted to complete a talent assessment for their employees. The specific data collected depends on the pay philosophy you've chosen. You will need to select "proficiency" as a factor in your merit matrix so that managers can complete the talent assessment. This input is then used to help calculate the recommended pay raise.
Analytic	Smart Compensation helps HR Operations users and managers make better decisions by showing them key data and analysis at exactly the right time in the workflow.

Capability

Description

Functional

Smart Compensation allows you to run unlimited compensation cycles at the same time. It also provides smart recommendations for raises and organizes employees into task groups based on your organization's hierarchy. This structure helps create clear approval chains. Security and permissions are also designed around these hierarchies, which ensures that users only see the data necessary for their tasks.

For example, a manager can see all relevant data for their direct reports, while a "manager of managers" can view data for everyone in their group. Support users can see relevant data about the population they’re assigned to support. Smart Compensation supports detailed permission definitions, which are modified to your requirements during onboarding so you can ensure that your users only see what they need to. For more information about the user roles and permissions, see Roles and Permissions.

Talent assessment

Smart Compensation helps you gather important data from your managers during a compensation cycle. Before they see any pay recommendations, managers are prompted to complete a talent assessment for their employees. The specific data collected depends on the pay philosophy you've chosen. You will need to select "proficiency" as a factor in your merit matrix so that managers can complete the talent assessment. This input is then used to help calculate the recommended pay raise.

Analytic

Smart Compensation helps HR Operations users and managers make better decisions by showing them key data and analysis at exactly the right time in the workflow.

Data is required to enable these capabilities. For more information, see Smart Compensation Data Requirements.