January 16, 2025 • 28 mins
The spotlight in this episode is shining on Visier Total Rewards. This solution allows teams to analyze the full scope of their total rewards program: salaries, hourly pay, bonuses, share grants, and more – giving companies the visibility needed in order to control workforce costs, ensure compliance, and solve pay-related challenges.
Joining us on this episode to chat about Visier Total Rewards is general manager, Sean Luitjens.
Learn more about Visier Total Rewards.
Connect with Sean Luitjens on LinkedIn.
Think you'd be a great guest on the show? Apply here.
Want to learn more about our work at GrowthMode Marketing? Check out the website.
This podcast is brought to you by GrowthMode Marketing.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Deanna Shimota (00:05):
Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight Podcast.
I'm Deanna Shimota, CEOof GrowthMode Marketing.
The HR technology market is crowdedand we know it can be hard to find
the best software solutions for yourbusiness in the sea of sameness.
On this podcast, we shine a spotlighton some of the best up and coming
(00:25):
technology options out there.
Check it out if you are interestedin learning about new innovative
solutions available in the market.
And if you are with an HR tech companyand interested in being considered
for a guest spot, stay tuned fordetails at the end of the show.
Good day, listeners!
(00:47):
The spotlight in this episode isshining on Visier Total Rewards.
This solution allows teams to analyze thefull scope of their Total Rewards program.
Salaries, hourly pay, bonuses, sharegrants, and more, giving companies the
visibility needed to In order to controlworkforce costs, ensure compliance
(01:07):
and solve pay related challenges.
Here to chat about Visier Total Rewardsis general manager, Sean Lutyens.
Sean, it's so great tocatch up with you today.
Sean Luitjens (01:18):
Nice to catch up with you.
And obviously someone who writesEnglish better than me wrote that.
That's very well read.
And someone in marketingshould be very happy.
Deanna Shimota (01:28):
I can't take full credit for that.
Seeing as I took some of itoff the Visier website, right?
But thanks for joining me.
You and I have had a few chats and youhave a really interesting role in Visier.
Obviously Visier is a fairly good sizedcompany, but your team operates, you In a
different mode than a lot of the company,you're more entrepreneurial, right?
Sean Luitjens (01:52):
We are.
Visier as it's grown has what ourCEO calls a flywheel strategy.
And so they've got the core business.
And as they test out new businessesor incubate new businesses, or
as we should say, put them inGrowthMode, try to figure things out.
Yeah.
Which they put them off to the sideand what's called the flywheel.
(02:12):
And that flywheel basically isan experiment to see which part
of that business works well,do we get the messaging right?
What's our ICP?
And so you're not disruptingthe rest of the business as
you go and figure things out.
So in essence, it's like having astartup with one backer that's pretty,
pretty close to you and looking overyou, but so it's a little bit of
(02:33):
a tweener, but , basically it's astartup inside of a mature company.
Deanna Shimota (02:37):
Yeah, that's really cool.
So tell us a little bit about yourbackground in the HR tech space.
Sean Luitjens (02:42):
Oh man it's always a little worrisome because it
goes back to last millennium.
I've been around talent acquisitionexpatriation, compensation, benefits
with a number of players, almostalways some type of startup or fix
it and leave it type of situation.
I come from Dev.
So I've been on the dev sidealmost all around software.
(03:05):
The one thing I haven't done hasbeen a practitioner in house.
And I usually joke that I haven't donethat because that job looks like it sucks.
You have to work with people and doeverything else versus slinging code
and, helping build cool products,but that's the way we help them.
But Yeah been around, a lotof stuff since last millennium.
And then landed at Visier a yearand change ago as they wanted
(03:27):
to start up this flywheel.
Deanna Shimota (03:30):
So let's talk a bit about what Visier Total Rewards actually does.
Sean Luitjens (03:35):
Okay.
To start with Visier if you think aboutpeople analytics, putting all your data
in there and looking at it analyticallyacross the whole spectrum of what humans
do and how you operate your company
That's where Visier plays they usuallyhave the nine box or the four box
or whatever we call it, where thecool kids are in the top, right?
(03:56):
And the less cool kidsare in the bottom left.
Visier is always the top company therethe reason that's important is they've
grown to a lot of direct clients.
And then actually where Visieris embedded into partners, we
have over 70, 000 clients now.
Yeah.
What's really cool with that.
(04:16):
And the reason that's important besidessounding good for Visier is they started
looking at where, else can we use thisdata to help businesses drive decisions?
So if you think about havingall these analytics inside of a
company, that's great, but thenhow do I start to drive decisions?
And so one of the areas was in the totalreward space, specifically benchmarking,
(04:38):
because they sit on obviously 70,000 Companies worth the data millions
and millions of records of employeesand their compensation and where they
are in the structure as well as then.
What's the number 1 way to implementdecisions and drive people's behavior?
And that's with pay.
They wanted to start and do an experimentto start a flywheel around comp
(04:59):
benchmarking and compensation planningby which you run the merit cycle.
Yeah.
And doing it analytically driven.
And then the cool part would be blueskies, rainbows, and unicorns, right?
Being able to take and look at acomp planning cycle and say we had
a theory on what we wanted to do.
So a lot of people talking like themerit matrix I want to pay people who
(05:20):
are lower performers, less money, higherperformers, more money based on where
they are in the compensation range.
And we have a philosophy on howmuch spread we want to create there.
Were we right?
Yeah.
Like most companies don't look backand say, analytically we did it.
They're like, Oh, thank God we weredone with the comp planning process.
That sucks.
It's no fun.
(05:42):
And then they basically come backaround to it nine or 10 months later
to do it again, because it's painful.
We were looking at it atVisier saying can we do that?
And then can we go backand say what worked?
What didn't work?
Did people who were lowperformers, we gave them zero.
What happened?
The goal is usually youwant them to leave, right?
Or did they just becomecrappier performers?
(06:05):
What happened?
Did high performerspaid high in the range?
Did they do what we wanted them to do?
Or if we paid them less because they'rehigh in the range, did they leave?
Because we didn't want them to do that.
So really leveraging analyticsinto something that's actionable.
Which is a long winded answer.
Deanna Shimota (06:22):
No, that's really good, and I think you've touched on this a bit
already but let's dig a bit deeper intowhat are the big challenges or problems
that you see facing teams where totalrewards would be a great fit for them?
Sean Luitjens (06:38):
Yeah, so I think Kind of the soapbox I get on is get greedy now.
So in the past either the tools weren'tmature enough or the number one player
in comp planning with decisions is Excel.
And so depending on how adept you wereat pivot tables or VB script or how
great you were with Excel that droveyour compensation planning philosophy.
(07:00):
Because I had to send out spreadsheetsconcatenate spreadsheets back.
And then if I want to check thingslike pay equity did I make equitable
decisions when I gave managers discretion?
Did they the usual old school,did they give their old?
The guys they played golf with onthe weekend, more money than the
people who are actually affectingtheir business and high performers.
(07:21):
Can I make sure there's equity checks?
That was all really difficult to do.
And so I think the ability forcompanies to have a more well thought
out pay philosophy driven and tiedto the business performance, like
what's driving the business anduse their money for merit better.
The example I give isaccountants a lot of times.
(07:42):
So if I'm making widgets.
Instead of giving everybody in thecompany a 4 percent raise because
that's what we have, I might givethe accounting department a 2 percent
raise because I want to give inthe widgets a process manufacturing
or process engineers more money.
But at the same token, if I'm apublic accounting firm, accountants
are the lifeblood of my business.
(08:03):
I want to give them more money, right?
And someone else get less money.
And you have the ability tobifurcate all that spend out and be
much smarter with your spends now.
And that's really whatwe're helping companies do.
Anybody in the space.
There's a lot of players in the space.
Really trying to help companies maximizetheir spend because the merit budgets.
are tough, right?
If every year you have to spend4%, it's a it's an annual growth.
(08:27):
It's a compounded annualgrowth rate on your people.
And so how do you maximizethat spend equitably?
Deanna Shimota (08:34):
So it's really making companies more strategic
about how they pay people.
Sean Luitjens (08:38):
Yeah.
And I've joked with some of the compand the business owners, like in the
past, again you could fall back andsay we have to give everyone the same,
or we can't be too strategic and splitthem out and treat people differently
or departments differently or locationsdifferently because it's too hard.
And actually now it's not too hard.
Now you have to start thinkingstrategically or have the ability to
(08:59):
think strategically and say, how doI actually look at every business?
and tie them together.
And then analytically the business,the thing with people analytics
it may be a misconception is it'sjust the people data, but it's
also the data that goes with you.
And coming from development, I'll usestory points the way that developers
measure a lot of how much effort they do.
(09:21):
You could tie story points to it.
You could tie to compensation.
If you worked at a convenience store,number of gallons of gasoline, Revenue,
profit, number of bags of Cheetos lastquarter, if that was the special you
wanted to push, all that data can now beingested in from an analytic standpoint in
a company to say, how are we treating ourhigh performers and how do we drive the
(09:42):
business forward and what are the metricsthat help our business move forward?
And then, of course the flywheelis spun up around now that we
know all that stuff, how do we payaccordingly and reward accordingly?
Deanna Shimota (09:54):
Yeah, I can see where this type of information could be really
powerful and keeping your best peopleand the people that are most influential
on the success of the business, right?
Because so many companies,it is just here's the flat
4%, 3%, whatever they decide.
Here's the dollar amount we can invest,and it, doesn't seem like it often gets
(10:17):
divvied up in the way it should, becausesome people probably do deserve more,
or they're way behind pay, but they'reone of your top performers, right?
It's gotta be more than a,percentage that you look at.
Sean Luitjens (10:33):
I think you create that merit matrix, and I think managers,
two for companies because peopleforget like it's a very personal thing
doling this out at the end of the day.
So it's always nice on paper to saywe're going to pay high performers
high in the range, less than highperformers, low in the range.
And we're going to pay lowperformers wherever they are
in the range, less money.
(10:53):
That's all great on paper.
Yeah, that's fine.
But when you go to a high performer andyou're like, Hey, Deanna, you're amazing.
And I know we pay you great, butbecause we pay you great, doesn't
matter that you're amazing.
You're getting less money.
And with pay transparency, you're goingto have to be able to explain that.
And I think managers will like thatbecause right now there's a black
box that says You're going to be likethanks, but that was less than last year.
(11:17):
What the hell is that about?
And now you can say actually basedon where you are in the range,
the position, your score, the waythat your short term incentives
are built out, here's your number.
It's mathematic because at the otherend of the spectrum, you have this weird
stuff where if someone's not a one,they're a two and you're like, Deanna.
Hey.
Marginal year.
Like here's enough money to cover partof the Netflix increase next year.
(11:38):
That's a really hard discussion.
And then the human and humanresources is people forget you
got to then go back to work.
After I had that discussion withyou, I have to work with you again.
So it's not like I get to drop thatbomb and then see in 364 days, like I
got to start working with you the nextcouple of days so I think having that
explanation and validity behind how youdo it and making sure, I think people
(12:02):
want to know they're paid equitably.
So the other piece would be, hey, men andwomen, because gender is the big one right
now, is men and women work paid equitably.
We have a system that checks to makesure that people were doled out based on
performance and it's equal pay for equalwork, irregardless of all the reasons that
people have been paid unfairly before.
Deanna Shimota (12:22):
Oh my gosh, it's so fascinating, just this whole topic, right?
How would you say Total Rewards isdifferent from the other solutions
that are out there in the market?
Sean Luitjens (12:34):
we're addressing it from the analytics side.
The foundation of ourtool is all analytics.
We're trying to basically givethe administrators of the tool
all the analytics to basicallysplit that out inside of a
company and say, I want to give.
More money to accounting, less money toaccounting, more money to this region,
create a very intricate merit matrixif you wanted to, to the deciles, you
can go crazy on a merit matrix andthen somehow be able to translate that
(12:57):
compensation nerd dumb into lettingmanagers who have to do this once a
year, maybe twice a year who aren'tfrom compensation, be able to say, now
I need to give this out to my team.
This is the suggested allocation.
Here's some things I wantto make it different.
The example I use there is I don't thinkthere should be a lot of discretion
personally with managers, but some, so ifyou and I both are very good employees,
(13:23):
I'm going to give myself credit here.
I'm, sure you're great.
I'm great Deanna.
And you and I are the same and we'resimilar, but the manager decides that,
Hey, Deanna is much more of a team player.
Sean is a pain to work with.
And so I want to shift some money around,give them a little bit of discretion.
But one of the quotes I really likedfrom someone was unbridled management
(13:46):
discretion is the enemy of pay equity.
And so you've got to balancediscretion with that, but you want
to make that easy for the term.
And so we've come at it fromthe UX standpoint for managers.
Yeah.
And employees first and say the managerexperience of being able to give the
money out, understand where it's at andthe manager of managers experience, being
(14:06):
able to look at my teams that's first andforemost, and it's analytically driven.
That's about as muchsales as I'll probably do.
Deanna Shimota (14:16):
I know Total Rewards within Visiers is relatively new in the
grand scheme of the company as a whole.
What type of impact have youseen organizations have as you're
implementing this and working with them?
Sean Luitjens (14:29):
A couple of things.
So Visiers had TotalRewards for a long time.
They've had a suite in there, so youcould do budgeted comp versus actual comp.
You could do some things.
The Total Rewards business is anexpansion of that to push that into
the merit or comp planning cycle.
The annual pay increasecycle or semi annual.
So the impact we've seen is a company'sbeing able to make that a little
(14:53):
smoother, be able to , have a payphilosophy where they want to be.
And I guess getting away from Visier,I would say what it's allowing and
forcing back to the prior point iscompanies being able to say, where
do I want to be and then do I havethe data, put that data in, and then
I can use the tooling to get there.
(15:14):
I usually quote becauseobviously I'm a little bit of
a hippie, so really well read.
I'm going to quote CheshireCat from Alice in Wonderland.
If you don't know where you'regoing, all roads will lead you there.
And so again, what's really coolis seeing companies that had a
fairly simplistic compensationplanning philosophy be able to create
(15:35):
something really intricate to reallydrive and tie it to the business
with all the business analytics,and then be able to have managers.
Use the tool in a much fastermethod and communicate with what's
given to them inside the toolsand pay letters that reflect what
would happen in the discussion.
And so creating a holistic process that'sanalytic driven, it's cool to see not
(15:58):
to nerd out from a comp standpoint andactually allowing some of the compensation
and companies that are dealing withcompensation, live out their dreams.
We'll call it Hey, I've always wantedto be able to have a more complex
thing that aligns to the business, butit was too freaking hard with Excel.
And now we can do that.
Deanna Shimota (16:19):
So what type of companies would you say are the
perfect fit for this solution?
Sean Luitjens (16:25):
We, struggle a little bit with the company size,
but I'd say 500 employees or more.
And it's based on complexity.
If you have to send out a bunch ofspreadsheets, there's issues with security
and there's issues with some other things.
But to be fair Microsoft Excel isstill the Leading compensation planning
(16:45):
software provider because the priceis right for Excel and Google docs.
It's hard to beat free.
And at some point if I've got few enoughspreadsheets, I don't have huge spans
of control inside of a small, mid sizedcompany to make these analytic decisions,
I can look at it on one big monitorand, see if there's equity it's there.
(17:08):
But if you're complex, you're distributedand you start to get to that size
where, I really want to create a payphilosophy that's differentiated.
It's equitable for equal pay in theright bands across multiple locations or
countries, geographies, different roles.
I want to make sure that's doneequitably and I want to have managers
of managers and be able to roll thatup and administrator money down.
(17:30):
That's where you startto see the complexity.
Come from there.
And that includes companies who wantto do base pay, short term incentives,
long term incentives anything youwould do in your kind of annual cycle
whatever your, rewards program entails.
Deanna Shimota (17:45):
Sure.
So what would you say is the biggesthesitation or obstacle that you see
companies have as they're thinkingabout a solution like total rewards?
Sean Luitjens (17:55):
I think for professionals, it's what's your return on investment.
And this will soundhorrible in, some ways.
Comp professionals have beenremarkably creative in solving
these problems by throwing theirefforts, their skills at Excel.
If you ever want to figure out somethingin Excel, call someone in compensation,
(18:17):
it's amazing their Excel skills.
And then the amount of time that they'llput in to work around these things.
So the time savings piecedoesn't always fly for ROI.
And you probably know this too.
If they're in compensation, they'relike, Hey, you chose compensation.
Or compensation chose you, whatever caseit may be, however you got to your career.
(18:38):
And so during the comp cycle yougive up three weekends of your life.
That's just part of being in this role.
So the ROI, that's been thehardest thing is companies saying
I want to get out of Excel's free.
So you have to somehow go up tothe head of HR to the CFO and
say, I want to buy software.
(18:59):
And if it's just to make mylife easier, that's not it.
I think it's where youhit on a little bit earlier.
I want to retain my people.
I want to reward the bestpeople with the best.
I want to make sure we'reequitably doing this.
The thing with merit matrices is ithelps solve pay equity over time.
Because if you've underpaid womenover time, they're lower in the range.
People lower in the range of more funds,you can do pay equity, set asides,
(19:21):
you can do set asides for departments.
You can handle all thesecomplexities to make sure that
we're treating the best people.
The best the people in the middleand our underperformers aren't
taking money away from other places.
You can start to look at thingslike actual versus budgeted.
Did the good people leave?
Was our thesis right when webasically created a pay philosophy
(19:43):
and between that and the securityissues and allowing managers to do
this in a way that's simpler andthey can understand that's where I
think you have to hang your head on.
And I would say there's our solutionor anybody else's if you're looking at
technology like this, that saves you time.
I think you've got to tieit to business results.
Otherwise, it sounds awful,but, CFO doesn't give a shit if
(20:06):
you're in comp and you have tospend three weekends doing this.
So it's how can I reallyhelp the business?
And the CFO, the way you hitthem is Hey, you're giving me 4%.
I can make that 4percent go a lot further.
I can make sure that we don't haveretention issues, the high performer
stay that costs us this much money.
(20:27):
To train or get people up tospeed, linking all that stuff
together is really important.
And that's the holistic peopleanalytics view of looking at
everything, not in a silo.,
but holistically.
Deanna Shimota (20:39):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Because the reality isthere's ripple effects, right?
To being more strategic about your compand suddenly, like the turnover rate
for your best performing employees.
It's lower, they're staying longer.
They're getting promoted to biggerpositions because they're happy.
Sean Luitjens (21:01):
Yeah.
And I tell you from an HR standpoint, getgreedy with what you're trying to measure.
I used to get greedy a lot.
The example I'll use ishow is talent acquisition?
It's not even a total rewards thing.
How are they measured?
Talent acquisition is usuallymeasured on time to fill a
number of requisitions filled.
Is that really great foryour long term business?
If you think about how Iwant to measure a recruiter.
(21:24):
over a period of time, an internalrecruiter or a recruiting partner.
If you have a third partyfirm, how long did they stay?
How much revenue did they drive?
What was turnover of those people?
6, 12, 18, 36 months down theroad did they get promoted?
That's all on the table now.
So really start thinkinglike what are the drivers?
(21:45):
And in the past, it wouldhave been unrealistic, right?
like, how do I find that data?
How do I pull it from an HRS?
How do I analyze all that data, thoseanalytics and where they came from?
No way, in Excel from fouror five different systems.
But now there are systems that youcan look at your people analytics and
The real premise of people analyticsplatforms is the ability to pull in
(22:08):
data from multiple sources, normalizeit and allow you to ask crazy complex
questions and get an answer back thatyou're like, Oh my gosh, actually from
this recruiter, the average length of 10years, so they fill less recs per year.
So you might think, Oh, they're areally crappy recruiter, but actually
when they fill recs, like they stay.
Deanna Shimota (22:29):
That's a really good example to demonstrate that it's more
than just the numbers you can easily find.
Sean Luitjens (22:36):
Yeah.
And again, I don't think itwas ever anyone's intention to
hide behind the numbers.
I'm sure somebody was . I'm a little bitof a hippie finding the good in everybody.
I think to your point, it was like,Those were the numbers I could get.
I was in control of talent acquisition.
I could tell how long ittook me to fill a job.
I could tell how manyrecs I did every year.
Then I had to go find from multipleHRAS systems the system of record, the
(22:59):
payroll record, the business systemsrecords and pull all that data 10
years ago 15 years ago, no chance.
And now, actually, sure.
Not a problem.
You get a platform that normalizes it all.
You can ask those questionsand be like, actually.
This is the new metric for us to beat.
It's not time to fill.
You might actually find out anytime that we filled a rec in
(23:19):
under 20 days, they never stayed.
Like we got in a hurryand we just couldn't fill.
So actually we need to have a, processand it takes us this period of time,
they stay in their great employees.
Again, you have to have the analyticsto be able to look at that though.
Deanna Shimota (23:34):
Yeah, most definitely.
So what is the future visionfor Visier Total Rewards?
Sean Luitjens (23:42):
It's hard to do in a graphic, but if you think
about all these siloed processesinside of compensation technology.
In my little world where you've gotdata and you organize the data and
you create grades and you do payand then all these little processes
almost making them all integrated.
And it's all an ongoing process.
That's analytically driven.
(24:02):
The world's changing so fast right now.
If you think about , when I got out ofschool, people say to jobs 15 years,
then it was 7 years and now it's 3years and you can't act at the same
speed that you had before and if youthink about even just pay cycles, like
our pay cycles, doing one pay cyclea year, then might be what you want.
(24:23):
But if you want to do twoor four, you can do that.
Because if you think about someone whoused to work somewhere seven years,
they would get seven increases, right?
Yeah, someone's only workingsomewhere three years now, you only
get three times to make it correct.
So you've just got tobe able to go faster.
And I think for us, the vision is Canwe allow you both the administration
and the managers and the employeesto make analytical decisions based
(24:45):
on align to the business and do thatreally quickly and timely with not a
lot of lift making the data side easy.
So I know it's a little bit , blue skies,rainbows, unicorns, but I think we're
getting pretty close to that pot of goldat the end of giving them that and again,
so jokingly I've said, I think now.
(25:06):
Companies in HR need to figure out like,how creative can I be with my program?
What is really driving our businessand get greedy and look for tools
that can actually deliver that.
Deanna Shimota (25:18):
Yeah.
So what final thoughts do youwant to leave our audience with?
Sean Luitjens (25:23):
The thing I usually leave people with is there's a
lot of great technology out there
that, you can go at.
And there's several differentproviders even in our space
alone, there's several places.
So really take a step back and figureout what's driving your business.
From the human standpoint, thepeople side, what are the things
(25:45):
you would like to measure?
What are the goals you need?
What people, things have to happenfor your business to be successful.
And then back into what datado I need to figure that out?
Because all of the tools are toolpeople, analytics do you have the data?
Where does the data have to come from?
And then go pick your tool, which Iknow pains me to say sometimes Deanna,
because I'm on the software side.
(26:07):
So when I tell you the third thing youshould do is look at software, it's
a little bit painful, but I actuallythink figure out where you want to be
first, because there's a lot of peopletelling you what you think you should be.
But every business is unique.
What drives that business?
The data you need, and then go findthe tool that can deliver on the,
things you want with the data you have.
Deanna Shimota (26:27):
That is great advice.
So where can our listeners go tolearn more about Visier Total Rewards?
Sean Luitjens (26:33):
So you just head to Visier, V I S I E R.
com.
You can tool around the solutions, you cantool around wherever and, figure it out.
And I'm always happy to chat.
Obviously, I get a littlefired up about this stuff.
I'm always happy to chatwith people where they're at.
I think It's amazing to me howdifferent everybody's program is because
(26:54):
everybody's different is differentand everybody's business is different.
Their philosophy is different.
Their analytics and theirtotal rewards requirements are
different for each business.
Deanna Shimota (27:05):
Great.
I will be sure to include thelink in the show notes so our
listeners can check it out.
And last but not least, thanks so much forjoining me on the HR Tech Spotlight, Sean.
Sean Luitjens (27:16):
Yeah, this was great.
Thanks for having me.
Deanna Shimota (27:24):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech
Spotlight Podcast, where we showcasesome of the best up and coming HR
technology options in the market.
If you are an HR tech company leaderwho would like to be considered for
a guest spot on this program, pleasecontact me via growthmodemarketing.
com or reach out to me,Deanna Shimoda on LinkedIn.
(27:47):
And if you found this show informative,subscribe, connect with us on
social media and leave a review.
This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off.
Thanks for listening.
We hope you'll tune in again next time.
Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight Podcast.
I'm Deanna Shimota, CEOof GrowthMode Marketing.
The HR technology market is crowdedand we know it can be hard to find
the best software solutions for yourbusiness in the sea of sameness.
On this podcast, we shine a spotlighton some of the best up and coming
(00:25):
technology options out there.
Check it out if you are interestedin learning about new innovative
solutions available in the market.
And if you are with an HR tech companyand interested in being considered
for a guest spot, stay tuned fordetails at the end of the show.
Good day, listeners!
(00:47):
The spotlight in this episode isshining on Visier Total Rewards.
This solution allows teams to analyze thefull scope of their Total Rewards program.
Salaries, hourly pay, bonuses, sharegrants, and more, giving companies the
visibility needed to In order to controlworkforce costs, ensure compliance
(01:07):
and solve pay related challenges.
Here to chat about Visier Total Rewardsis general manager, Sean Lutyens.
Sean, it's so great tocatch up with you today.
Sean Luitjens (01:18):
Nice to catch up with you.
And obviously someone who writesEnglish better than me wrote that.
That's very well read.
And someone in marketingshould be very happy.
Deanna Shimota (01:28):
I can't take full credit for that.
Seeing as I took some of itoff the Visier website, right?
But thanks for joining me.
You and I have had a few chats and youhave a really interesting role in Visier.
Obviously Visier is a fairly good sizedcompany, but your team operates, you In a
different mode than a lot of the company,you're more entrepreneurial, right?
Sean Luitjens (01:52):
We are.
Visier as it's grown has what ourCEO calls a flywheel strategy.
And so they've got the core business.
And as they test out new businessesor incubate new businesses, or
as we should say, put them inGrowthMode, try to figure things out.
Yeah.
Which they put them off to the sideand what's called the flywheel.
(02:12):
And that flywheel basically isan experiment to see which part
of that business works well,do we get the messaging right?
What's our ICP?
And so you're not disruptingthe rest of the business as
you go and figure things out.
So in essence, it's like having astartup with one backer that's pretty,
pretty close to you and looking overyou, but so it's a little bit of
(02:33):
a tweener, but , basically it's astartup inside of a mature company.
Deanna Shimota (02:37):
Yeah, that's really cool.
So tell us a little bit about yourbackground in the HR tech space.
Sean Luitjens (02:42):
Oh man it's always a little worrisome because it
goes back to last millennium.
I've been around talent acquisitionexpatriation, compensation, benefits
with a number of players, almostalways some type of startup or fix
it and leave it type of situation.
I come from Dev.
So I've been on the dev sidealmost all around software.
(03:05):
The one thing I haven't done hasbeen a practitioner in house.
And I usually joke that I haven't donethat because that job looks like it sucks.
You have to work with people and doeverything else versus slinging code
and, helping build cool products,but that's the way we help them.
But Yeah been around, a lotof stuff since last millennium.
And then landed at Visier a yearand change ago as they wanted
(03:27):
to start up this flywheel.
Deanna Shimota (03:30):
So let's talk a bit about what Visier Total Rewards actually does.
Sean Luitjens (03:35):
Okay.
To start with Visier if you think aboutpeople analytics, putting all your data
in there and looking at it analyticallyacross the whole spectrum of what humans
do and how you operate your company
That's where Visier plays they usuallyhave the nine box or the four box
or whatever we call it, where thecool kids are in the top, right?
(03:56):
And the less cool kidsare in the bottom left.
Visier is always the top company therethe reason that's important is they've
grown to a lot of direct clients.
And then actually where Visieris embedded into partners, we
have over 70, 000 clients now.
Yeah.
What's really cool with that.
(04:16):
And the reason that's important besidessounding good for Visier is they started
looking at where, else can we use thisdata to help businesses drive decisions?
So if you think about havingall these analytics inside of a
company, that's great, but thenhow do I start to drive decisions?
And so one of the areas was in the totalreward space, specifically benchmarking,
(04:38):
because they sit on obviously 70,000 Companies worth the data millions
and millions of records of employeesand their compensation and where they
are in the structure as well as then.
What's the number 1 way to implementdecisions and drive people's behavior?
And that's with pay.
They wanted to start and do an experimentto start a flywheel around comp
(04:59):
benchmarking and compensation planningby which you run the merit cycle.
Yeah.
And doing it analytically driven.
And then the cool part would be blueskies, rainbows, and unicorns, right?
Being able to take and look at acomp planning cycle and say we had
a theory on what we wanted to do.
So a lot of people talking like themerit matrix I want to pay people who
(05:20):
are lower performers, less money, higherperformers, more money based on where
they are in the compensation range.
And we have a philosophy on howmuch spread we want to create there.
Were we right?
Yeah.
Like most companies don't look backand say, analytically we did it.
They're like, Oh, thank God we weredone with the comp planning process.
That sucks.
It's no fun.
(05:42):
And then they basically come backaround to it nine or 10 months later
to do it again, because it's painful.
We were looking at it atVisier saying can we do that?
And then can we go backand say what worked?
What didn't work?
Did people who were lowperformers, we gave them zero.
What happened?
The goal is usually youwant them to leave, right?
Or did they just becomecrappier performers?
(06:05):
What happened?
Did high performerspaid high in the range?
Did they do what we wanted them to do?
Or if we paid them less because they'rehigh in the range, did they leave?
Because we didn't want them to do that.
So really leveraging analyticsinto something that's actionable.
Which is a long winded answer.
Deanna Shimota (06:22):
No, that's really good, and I think you've touched on this a bit
already but let's dig a bit deeper intowhat are the big challenges or problems
that you see facing teams where totalrewards would be a great fit for them?
Sean Luitjens (06:38):
Yeah, so I think Kind of the soapbox I get on is get greedy now.
So in the past either the tools weren'tmature enough or the number one player
in comp planning with decisions is Excel.
And so depending on how adept you wereat pivot tables or VB script or how
great you were with Excel that droveyour compensation planning philosophy.
(07:00):
Because I had to send out spreadsheetsconcatenate spreadsheets back.
And then if I want to check thingslike pay equity did I make equitable
decisions when I gave managers discretion?
Did they the usual old school,did they give their old?
The guys they played golf with onthe weekend, more money than the
people who are actually affectingtheir business and high performers.
(07:21):
Can I make sure there's equity checks?
That was all really difficult to do.
And so I think the ability forcompanies to have a more well thought
out pay philosophy driven and tiedto the business performance, like
what's driving the business anduse their money for merit better.
The example I give isaccountants a lot of times.
(07:42):
So if I'm making widgets.
Instead of giving everybody in thecompany a 4 percent raise because
that's what we have, I might givethe accounting department a 2 percent
raise because I want to give inthe widgets a process manufacturing
or process engineers more money.
But at the same token, if I'm apublic accounting firm, accountants
are the lifeblood of my business.
(08:03):
I want to give them more money, right?
And someone else get less money.
And you have the ability tobifurcate all that spend out and be
much smarter with your spends now.
And that's really whatwe're helping companies do.
Anybody in the space.
There's a lot of players in the space.
Really trying to help companies maximizetheir spend because the merit budgets.
are tough, right?
If every year you have to spend4%, it's a it's an annual growth.
(08:27):
It's a compounded annualgrowth rate on your people.
And so how do you maximizethat spend equitably?
Deanna Shimota (08:34):
So it's really making companies more strategic
about how they pay people.
Sean Luitjens (08:38):
Yeah.
And I've joked with some of the compand the business owners, like in the
past, again you could fall back andsay we have to give everyone the same,
or we can't be too strategic and splitthem out and treat people differently
or departments differently or locationsdifferently because it's too hard.
And actually now it's not too hard.
Now you have to start thinkingstrategically or have the ability to
(08:59):
think strategically and say, how doI actually look at every business?
and tie them together.
And then analytically the business,the thing with people analytics
it may be a misconception is it'sjust the people data, but it's
also the data that goes with you.
And coming from development, I'll usestory points the way that developers
measure a lot of how much effort they do.
(09:21):
You could tie story points to it.
You could tie to compensation.
If you worked at a convenience store,number of gallons of gasoline, Revenue,
profit, number of bags of Cheetos lastquarter, if that was the special you
wanted to push, all that data can now beingested in from an analytic standpoint in
a company to say, how are we treating ourhigh performers and how do we drive the
(09:42):
business forward and what are the metricsthat help our business move forward?
And then, of course the flywheelis spun up around now that we
know all that stuff, how do we payaccordingly and reward accordingly?
Deanna Shimota (09:54):
Yeah, I can see where this type of information could be really
powerful and keeping your best peopleand the people that are most influential
on the success of the business, right?
Because so many companies,it is just here's the flat
4%, 3%, whatever they decide.
Here's the dollar amount we can invest,and it, doesn't seem like it often gets
(10:17):
divvied up in the way it should, becausesome people probably do deserve more,
or they're way behind pay, but they'reone of your top performers, right?
It's gotta be more than a,percentage that you look at.
Sean Luitjens (10:33):
I think you create that merit matrix, and I think managers,
two for companies because peopleforget like it's a very personal thing
doling this out at the end of the day.
So it's always nice on paper to saywe're going to pay high performers
high in the range, less than highperformers, low in the range.
And we're going to pay lowperformers wherever they are
in the range, less money.
(10:53):
That's all great on paper.
Yeah, that's fine.
But when you go to a high performer andyou're like, Hey, Deanna, you're amazing.
And I know we pay you great, butbecause we pay you great, doesn't
matter that you're amazing.
You're getting less money.
And with pay transparency, you're goingto have to be able to explain that.
And I think managers will like thatbecause right now there's a black
box that says You're going to be likethanks, but that was less than last year.
(11:17):
What the hell is that about?
And now you can say actually basedon where you are in the range,
the position, your score, the waythat your short term incentives
are built out, here's your number.
It's mathematic because at the otherend of the spectrum, you have this weird
stuff where if someone's not a one,they're a two and you're like, Deanna.
Hey.
Marginal year.
Like here's enough money to cover partof the Netflix increase next year.
(11:38):
That's a really hard discussion.
And then the human and humanresources is people forget you
got to then go back to work.
After I had that discussion withyou, I have to work with you again.
So it's not like I get to drop thatbomb and then see in 364 days, like I
got to start working with you the nextcouple of days so I think having that
explanation and validity behind how youdo it and making sure, I think people
(12:02):
want to know they're paid equitably.
So the other piece would be, hey, men andwomen, because gender is the big one right
now, is men and women work paid equitably.
We have a system that checks to makesure that people were doled out based on
performance and it's equal pay for equalwork, irregardless of all the reasons that
people have been paid unfairly before.
Deanna Shimota (12:22):
Oh my gosh, it's so fascinating, just this whole topic, right?
How would you say Total Rewards isdifferent from the other solutions
that are out there in the market?
Sean Luitjens (12:34):
we're addressing it from the analytics side.
The foundation of ourtool is all analytics.
We're trying to basically givethe administrators of the tool
all the analytics to basicallysplit that out inside of a
company and say, I want to give.
More money to accounting, less money toaccounting, more money to this region,
create a very intricate merit matrixif you wanted to, to the deciles, you
can go crazy on a merit matrix andthen somehow be able to translate that
(12:57):
compensation nerd dumb into lettingmanagers who have to do this once a
year, maybe twice a year who aren'tfrom compensation, be able to say, now
I need to give this out to my team.
This is the suggested allocation.
Here's some things I wantto make it different.
The example I use there is I don't thinkthere should be a lot of discretion
personally with managers, but some, so ifyou and I both are very good employees,
(13:23):
I'm going to give myself credit here.
I'm, sure you're great.
I'm great Deanna.
And you and I are the same and we'resimilar, but the manager decides that,
Hey, Deanna is much more of a team player.
Sean is a pain to work with.
And so I want to shift some money around,give them a little bit of discretion.
But one of the quotes I really likedfrom someone was unbridled management
(13:46):
discretion is the enemy of pay equity.
And so you've got to balancediscretion with that, but you want
to make that easy for the term.
And so we've come at it fromthe UX standpoint for managers.
Yeah.
And employees first and say the managerexperience of being able to give the
money out, understand where it's at andthe manager of managers experience, being
(14:06):
able to look at my teams that's first andforemost, and it's analytically driven.
That's about as muchsales as I'll probably do.
Deanna Shimota (14:16):
I know Total Rewards within Visiers is relatively new in the
grand scheme of the company as a whole.
What type of impact have youseen organizations have as you're
implementing this and working with them?
Sean Luitjens (14:29):
A couple of things.
So Visiers had TotalRewards for a long time.
They've had a suite in there, so youcould do budgeted comp versus actual comp.
You could do some things.
The Total Rewards business is anexpansion of that to push that into
the merit or comp planning cycle.
The annual pay increasecycle or semi annual.
So the impact we've seen is a company'sbeing able to make that a little
(14:53):
smoother, be able to , have a payphilosophy where they want to be.
And I guess getting away from Visier,I would say what it's allowing and
forcing back to the prior point iscompanies being able to say, where
do I want to be and then do I havethe data, put that data in, and then
I can use the tooling to get there.
(15:14):
I usually quote becauseobviously I'm a little bit of
a hippie, so really well read.
I'm going to quote CheshireCat from Alice in Wonderland.
If you don't know where you'regoing, all roads will lead you there.
And so again, what's really coolis seeing companies that had a
fairly simplistic compensationplanning philosophy be able to create
(15:35):
something really intricate to reallydrive and tie it to the business
with all the business analytics,and then be able to have managers.
Use the tool in a much fastermethod and communicate with what's
given to them inside the toolsand pay letters that reflect what
would happen in the discussion.
And so creating a holistic process that'sanalytic driven, it's cool to see not
(15:58):
to nerd out from a comp standpoint andactually allowing some of the compensation
and companies that are dealing withcompensation, live out their dreams.
We'll call it Hey, I've always wantedto be able to have a more complex
thing that aligns to the business, butit was too freaking hard with Excel.
And now we can do that.
Deanna Shimota (16:19):
So what type of companies would you say are the
perfect fit for this solution?
Sean Luitjens (16:25):
We, struggle a little bit with the company size,
but I'd say 500 employees or more.
And it's based on complexity.
If you have to send out a bunch ofspreadsheets, there's issues with security
and there's issues with some other things.
But to be fair Microsoft Excel isstill the Leading compensation planning
(16:45):
software provider because the priceis right for Excel and Google docs.
It's hard to beat free.
And at some point if I've got few enoughspreadsheets, I don't have huge spans
of control inside of a small, mid sizedcompany to make these analytic decisions,
I can look at it on one big monitorand, see if there's equity it's there.
(17:08):
But if you're complex, you're distributedand you start to get to that size
where, I really want to create a payphilosophy that's differentiated.
It's equitable for equal pay in theright bands across multiple locations or
countries, geographies, different roles.
I want to make sure that's doneequitably and I want to have managers
of managers and be able to roll thatup and administrator money down.
(17:30):
That's where you startto see the complexity.
Come from there.
And that includes companies who wantto do base pay, short term incentives,
long term incentives anything youwould do in your kind of annual cycle
whatever your, rewards program entails.
Deanna Shimota (17:45):
Sure.
So what would you say is the biggesthesitation or obstacle that you see
companies have as they're thinkingabout a solution like total rewards?
Sean Luitjens (17:55):
I think for professionals, it's what's your return on investment.
And this will soundhorrible in, some ways.
Comp professionals have beenremarkably creative in solving
these problems by throwing theirefforts, their skills at Excel.
If you ever want to figure out somethingin Excel, call someone in compensation,
(18:17):
it's amazing their Excel skills.
And then the amount of time that they'llput in to work around these things.
So the time savings piecedoesn't always fly for ROI.
And you probably know this too.
If they're in compensation, they'relike, Hey, you chose compensation.
Or compensation chose you, whatever caseit may be, however you got to your career.
(18:38):
And so during the comp cycle yougive up three weekends of your life.
That's just part of being in this role.
So the ROI, that's been thehardest thing is companies saying
I want to get out of Excel's free.
So you have to somehow go up tothe head of HR to the CFO and
say, I want to buy software.
(18:59):
And if it's just to make mylife easier, that's not it.
I think it's where youhit on a little bit earlier.
I want to retain my people.
I want to reward the bestpeople with the best.
I want to make sure we'reequitably doing this.
The thing with merit matrices is ithelps solve pay equity over time.
Because if you've underpaid womenover time, they're lower in the range.
People lower in the range of more funds,you can do pay equity, set asides,
(19:21):
you can do set asides for departments.
You can handle all thesecomplexities to make sure that
we're treating the best people.
The best the people in the middleand our underperformers aren't
taking money away from other places.
You can start to look at thingslike actual versus budgeted.
Did the good people leave?
Was our thesis right when webasically created a pay philosophy
(19:43):
and between that and the securityissues and allowing managers to do
this in a way that's simpler andthey can understand that's where I
think you have to hang your head on.
And I would say there's our solutionor anybody else's if you're looking at
technology like this, that saves you time.
I think you've got to tieit to business results.
Otherwise, it sounds awful,but, CFO doesn't give a shit if
(20:06):
you're in comp and you have tospend three weekends doing this.
So it's how can I reallyhelp the business?
And the CFO, the way you hitthem is Hey, you're giving me 4%.
I can make that 4percent go a lot further.
I can make sure that we don't haveretention issues, the high performer
stay that costs us this much money.
(20:27):
To train or get people up tospeed, linking all that stuff
together is really important.
And that's the holistic peopleanalytics view of looking at
everything, not in a silo.,
but holistically.
Deanna Shimota (20:39):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Because the reality isthere's ripple effects, right?
To being more strategic about your compand suddenly, like the turnover rate
for your best performing employees.
It's lower, they're staying longer.
They're getting promoted to biggerpositions because they're happy.
Sean Luitjens (21:01):
Yeah.
And I tell you from an HR standpoint, getgreedy with what you're trying to measure.
I used to get greedy a lot.
The example I'll use ishow is talent acquisition?
It's not even a total rewards thing.
How are they measured?
Talent acquisition is usuallymeasured on time to fill a
number of requisitions filled.
Is that really great foryour long term business?
If you think about how Iwant to measure a recruiter.
(21:24):
over a period of time, an internalrecruiter or a recruiting partner.
If you have a third partyfirm, how long did they stay?
How much revenue did they drive?
What was turnover of those people?
6, 12, 18, 36 months down theroad did they get promoted?
That's all on the table now.
So really start thinkinglike what are the drivers?
(21:45):
And in the past, it wouldhave been unrealistic, right?
like, how do I find that data?
How do I pull it from an HRS?
How do I analyze all that data, thoseanalytics and where they came from?
No way, in Excel from fouror five different systems.
But now there are systems that youcan look at your people analytics and
The real premise of people analyticsplatforms is the ability to pull in
(22:08):
data from multiple sources, normalizeit and allow you to ask crazy complex
questions and get an answer back thatyou're like, Oh my gosh, actually from
this recruiter, the average length of 10years, so they fill less recs per year.
So you might think, Oh, they're areally crappy recruiter, but actually
when they fill recs, like they stay.
Deanna Shimota (22:29):
That's a really good example to demonstrate that it's more
than just the numbers you can easily find.
Sean Luitjens (22:36):
Yeah.
And again, I don't think itwas ever anyone's intention to
hide behind the numbers.
I'm sure somebody was . I'm a little bitof a hippie finding the good in everybody.
I think to your point, it was like,Those were the numbers I could get.
I was in control of talent acquisition.
I could tell how long ittook me to fill a job.
I could tell how manyrecs I did every year.
Then I had to go find from multipleHRAS systems the system of record, the
(22:59):
payroll record, the business systemsrecords and pull all that data 10
years ago 15 years ago, no chance.
And now, actually, sure.
Not a problem.
You get a platform that normalizes it all.
You can ask those questionsand be like, actually.
This is the new metric for us to beat.
It's not time to fill.
You might actually find out anytime that we filled a rec in
(23:19):
under 20 days, they never stayed.
Like we got in a hurryand we just couldn't fill.
So actually we need to have a, processand it takes us this period of time,
they stay in their great employees.
Again, you have to have the analyticsto be able to look at that though.
Deanna Shimota (23:34):
Yeah, most definitely.
So what is the future visionfor Visier Total Rewards?
Sean Luitjens (23:42):
It's hard to do in a graphic, but if you think
about all these siloed processesinside of compensation technology.
In my little world where you've gotdata and you organize the data and
you create grades and you do payand then all these little processes
almost making them all integrated.
And it's all an ongoing process.
That's analytically driven.
(24:02):
The world's changing so fast right now.
If you think about , when I got out ofschool, people say to jobs 15 years,
then it was 7 years and now it's 3years and you can't act at the same
speed that you had before and if youthink about even just pay cycles, like
our pay cycles, doing one pay cyclea year, then might be what you want.
(24:23):
But if you want to do twoor four, you can do that.
Because if you think about someone whoused to work somewhere seven years,
they would get seven increases, right?
Yeah, someone's only workingsomewhere three years now, you only
get three times to make it correct.
So you've just got tobe able to go faster.
And I think for us, the vision is Canwe allow you both the administration
and the managers and the employeesto make analytical decisions based
(24:45):
on align to the business and do thatreally quickly and timely with not a
lot of lift making the data side easy.
So I know it's a little bit , blue skies,rainbows, unicorns, but I think we're
getting pretty close to that pot of goldat the end of giving them that and again,
so jokingly I've said, I think now.
(25:06):
Companies in HR need to figure out like,how creative can I be with my program?
What is really driving our businessand get greedy and look for tools
that can actually deliver that.
Deanna Shimota (25:18):
Yeah.
So what final thoughts do youwant to leave our audience with?
Sean Luitjens (25:23):
The thing I usually leave people with is there's a
lot of great technology out there
that, you can go at.
And there's several differentproviders even in our space
alone, there's several places.
So really take a step back and figureout what's driving your business.
From the human standpoint, thepeople side, what are the things
(25:45):
you would like to measure?
What are the goals you need?
What people, things have to happenfor your business to be successful.
And then back into what datado I need to figure that out?
Because all of the tools are toolpeople, analytics do you have the data?
Where does the data have to come from?
And then go pick your tool, which Iknow pains me to say sometimes Deanna,
because I'm on the software side.
(26:07):
So when I tell you the third thing youshould do is look at software, it's
a little bit painful, but I actuallythink figure out where you want to be
first, because there's a lot of peopletelling you what you think you should be.
But every business is unique.
What drives that business?
The data you need, and then go findthe tool that can deliver on the,
things you want with the data you have.
Deanna Shimota (26:27):
That is great advice.
So where can our listeners go tolearn more about Visier Total Rewards?
Sean Luitjens (26:33):
So you just head to Visier, V I S I E R.
com.
You can tool around the solutions, you cantool around wherever and, figure it out.
And I'm always happy to chat.
Obviously, I get a littlefired up about this stuff.
I'm always happy to chatwith people where they're at.
I think It's amazing to me howdifferent everybody's program is because
(26:54):
everybody's different is differentand everybody's business is different.
Their philosophy is different.
Their analytics and theirtotal rewards requirements are
different for each business.
Deanna Shimota (27:05):
Great.
I will be sure to include thelink in the show notes so our
listeners can check it out.
And last but not least, thanks so much forjoining me on the HR Tech Spotlight, Sean.
Sean Luitjens (27:16):
Yeah, this was great.
Thanks for having me.
Deanna Shimota (27:24):
Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech
Spotlight Podcast, where we showcasesome of the best up and coming HR
technology options in the market.
If you are an HR tech company leaderwho would like to be considered for
a guest spot on this program, pleasecontact me via growthmodemarketing.
com or reach out to me,Deanna Shimoda on LinkedIn.
(27:47):
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