CUSTOMER STORY
Inari Automated Their Merit Cycle and Empowered Managers To Make Data-Driven Pay Decisions with Visier’s Smart Compensation
Inari is the SEEDesign™ company, using new breeding technology to push the boundaries of what is possible by designing nature-positive seeds for a more sustainable global food system.
INDUSTRY
Technology/Agriculture
HEADQUARTERS
Cambridge, MA
EMPLOYEES
320 employees
42 users of Smart Compensation
VISIER PEOPLE® SOLUTIONS:
- Smart Compensation
- Visier People® Benchmarks
- Visier People® Standardized Occupations
- Visier People® Talent Essentials
- Visier People® Talent Acquisition
With Visier’s Smart Compensation solution, Inari has:
Empowered managers to make better compensation decisions
With Smart Compensation, managers can access real-time employee insights and recommendations based on accurate data.
Automated and guided the compensation process
By removing manual versioning from the equation, leaders can now own their part in the compensation process, reducing errors and streamlining the workflow.
Reduced merit cycle planning to 10 minutes
By removing cumbersome spreadsheet-based processes and enabling managers with pay philosophy guidelines for making informed comp decisions, the time needed to prepare for a merit cycle reduced drastically.
THE CHALLENGE
A lack of full visibility into compensation data inhibited decision-making
Before implementing Smart Compensation, Inari was juggling multiple versions of spreadsheets and performance evaluations on tight timelines—taking a data-informed approach to compensation seemed a far-off reality.
“Prior to implementing Smart Compensation, HR was simply receiving names that managers wanted to put forward for a promotion or a market adjustment, and then managers were approving HR’s recommended pay increase—there was no data-driven approach that enabled managers to make decisions with information all in one location,” explains Suzanne Wagner, Talent and Culture manager.
The team often had to cobble information from multiple sources which proved inconvenient and caused privacy and security concerns.
“Now managers have access to meaningful information, including the employee’s prior year’s ratings, rewards given, contextual comparisons in groups, which is all exposed with Smart Compensation.”
Mark Berry, Chief People Officer
"Smart Compensation is the most powerful compensation tool on the market.”
Mark Berry, Chief People Officer
THE SOLUTION
An automated merit system with a streamlined and guided approach for managers
Inari quickly realized it needed to find a new process. The team needed an automated way to facilitate promotions and ensure proper allocation of base pay and bonuses. The organization also wanted to support a future shift in pay philosophy from ad hoc to pay-for-performance.
Inari discovered Visier was releasing a new compensation product called Smart Compensation and agreed to be an early adopter and partner in the development of the tool.
Chief People Officer, Mark Berry, said, “We were grateful to have the chance to be a part of the early introduction of Smart Compensation. We’ve been able to influence the development of the product heavily. We love being part of the process and having our needs quickly addressed, and seeing features being built based on our input. From the beginning, I had full confidence that Visier would get us where we needed to be.”
THE OUTCOME
Greater manager accountability for pay decisions
With Smart Compensation enabled, Inari no longer deals with versioning, integration issues, and the manual process of compiling multiple spreadsheets. Managers can immediately see how much money is spent and ascertain whether it’s going to the right areas of the business. The team has real-time visibility into decisions being made for each employee.
“The first thing we noticed with Smart Compensation was the user experience—it was intuitive for managers. It did not require a lot of training. From the admin side, it easy to set up and manage and with everything lined up in order the steps are simple to follow,” explained Inari’s HR Operations Manager, Vladimir Solano. He continued, “For example, when you first open your cycle, you can select the type of budgets you’ll be using, whether the cycle involves promotions, LTI, or bonuses.”
Overall, Smart Compensation facilitates better collaboration between HR and managers. And having an impact analysis at the fingertips of managers ensures better-informed decisions.
Additionally, the tool has fostered greater integrity, accountability and transparency with Finance. Now, the Finance team can access compensation data directly without relying on HR to pass files over.
"Managers experienced a smooth transition going from spreadsheets to Smart Compensation, and liked having the full view of their team. Also, it allows the next level manager, with one click of a button, to view who's being promoted and which employees are recommended to receive adjustments."
Suzanne Wagner, Talent and Culture Manager
“With Smart Compensation, we were able to set up the mid-year cycle planning for promotions and adjustments within 10 minutes, so we’ve realized a huge time and efficiency savings. Smart Compensation is much safer than using spreadsheets as it applies consistent custom formulas, such as for LTI.”
Vladimir Solano, HR Operations Manager
WHAT’S NEXT?
Increasing level of merit sophistication
Looking to the future, Inari plans to continue using Smart Compensation to improve and upgrade its compensation process. Inari will soon use the BambooHR connector to automate the data upload before the comp cycle begins and export data back following the completion of the comp process. This will reduce errors and cut down on manual tasks.
Additionally, Inari plans to shift to a pay-for-performance pay philosophy, the implementation of which Smart Compensation will make easier with the built-in pay philosophy. And, Inari is transitioning to new processes that will provide more in-depth analysis for managers including showing where employees fall within the new pay band after promotions.
Visier solutions used by Inari
Smart Compensation
Identify the attributes that produce long-term, high performing employees and make better hiring decisions faster.
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Visier People® Benchmarks
Compare your performance to benchmark datasets from 20,000+ organizations, so you can make informed business decisions with impactful HR metrics.
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Visier People® Standardized Occupations
Match your organization’s jobs using job titles and any other fields that add details to jobs to a standardized list of job names and hierarchies.
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Visier People® Talent Essentials
Identify the attributes that produce long-term, high performing employees and make better hiring decisions faster.
Learn more
Visier People® Talent Acquisition
Connect recruiting data with employee outcomes so you can refine and define recruitment processes, programs, and results.
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Visier People® Talent Expert
Identify the attributes that produce long-term, high performing employees and make better hiring decisions faster.
Learn more
About Visier
Visier’s purpose is to reveal the human truth about your workforce and contribute to a better future. Visier was founded to focus on what matters to business people: answering the right questions, even the ones a person might not know to ask. Questions that shape business strategy provide the impetus for taking action, and drive better business results. Visier delivers fast, clear people insight by using all the available people data—regardless of source. With best-practice expertise built in, decision makers can confidently take action. Thanks to our amazing customers, Visier is the market leader in Workforce Analytics with more than 15,000 customers in 75 countries around the world.
For more information, visit visier.com