If you know deep in your heart that it’s time to move to a cloud-based compensation planning system, that’s good. Want to get started?
You’ve probably seen the handwriting on the wall already and in fact, you’re most likely there, intellectually anyway. Most of us really would like to bail on our spreadsheets, expensive legacy home-grown, or on-premise systems and can imagine how that can work for other HR functions. But not compensation, right? Hmmm.
Step 1: Test your assumptions about what can’t and can be done
You have to move off the dime before you can motivate others. If you’re like most companies, you’ve built in some pretty special (aka crazy custom) calculations and processes with the good intentions of tailoring your comp plans to the special needs of your company. While you’re not completely trapped in “this is the way we’ve always done it,” you fear that a cloud-based system will never deliver exactly the same functionality and depth of features compared to what you have today.
That may be true, but at what cost? Are the benefits you experience in line with the effort you’re putting out to maintain your system? Most recent cloud-migrants will tell you that they didn’t lose significant functionality in the transition and that there definitely are ways to preserve the most important “unique” elements of your comp design.
Step 2: Motivate yourself and others by doing your homework
At the risk of temporarily drowning yourself and your team in your sorrows, begin an assessment of what you have today. Using criteria appropriate for your organization, put together a grid that will help you analyze your current systems and components at a very high level: their advantages, disadvantages, what you’d change, what you’d want in a new cloud-based system. Pull together a few forward-thinking team members or department staff, buy some junk food, book a conference room, set aside three hours and find a facilitator to help you brainstorm. The first few boxes might look something like this:
Step 3: Widen the conversation.
Once you’ve completed this high-level analysis (sketch, really) of your current state and future needs/wishes, you’ll be able to talk with others about it. While, yes, I’m limiting this blog to compensation-related issues, the reality today is that most organizations recognize that they need a comp system as part of a suite. The days are gone where stand-alone applications are all that popular (for good reason,) particularly stand-alone compensation applications.
So begin your discussions with other business, technology and people experts in your organization to develop awareness and get the ball rolling to seriously looking at cloud-based options. It can happen faster than you think.
Who knew you’d be a comp hero and a bandleader?