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ELMO Software

How ELMO Software leverages remuneration tools to automate and streamline, creating time efficiencies and better visibility.

The challenges

Lengthy remuneration process requiring 2-3 months of work

Multiple versions of spreadsheets made it prone to errors and difficult to keep track of progress

Lack of visibility over the budgets for each decision-maker led to frustrations and bottlenecks

Unable to forecast the impact of remuneration decisions on the business’s gender pay gap

“The absence of clear visibility often led to delays, created unnecessary bottlenecks, and an overly time-consuming process”
Ryan Adams
People Advisor and Systems Lead at ELMO Software
Managing the annual remuneration review process is no small feat for any business.

It can often be a long, meticulous procedure, fraught with concerns about precise allocations and fairness. Between the finance team, HR team and managers, there are multiple stakeholders, tight deadlines, and no room for error.

All in all, it can be an intense time. What’s more, most HR and finance teams are also managing their usual workloads on top of the rem review. And as the business gets bigger, it only becomes more challenging.

We know this because, with a team of nearly 400 employees distributed across Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, we shared these challenges too.

Before implementing our own technology solution, we relied on spreadsheets and extensive collaboration between finance and people managers. Like many businesses, we sought comfort in our tried and trusted methods.

Ryan Adams, ELMO’s People Advisor and Systems Lead, explains: “We’d have multiple spreadsheet versions circulating among finance teams, department heads, and managers. The absence of clear visibility often led to delays, created unnecessary bottlenecks, and an overly time-consuming process.”

Another key challenge was the lack of visibility of the business’s gender pay gap during the rem review – an almost impossible addition to the review process for someone using spreadsheets.

In the past, our team had been unable to predict how the proposed salary reviews would affect the business’s gender pay gap. They couldn’t tell whether the proposed salary increases would help to reduce the pay gap or exacerbate existing inequalities.

The solution

Our HR team ditched the spreadsheets in favour of ELMO Remuneration, our best-in-class solution that helps users to manage their pay review process with ease.

ELMO Remuneration equips managers with intuitive tools, aiding them in making informed and consistent decisions over salary, bonuses, and total remuneration. Plus, our new pre-built Gender Pay Gap Report helps users to analyse their gender pay gaps across base and total remuneration, as well as bonuses and incentives.

Stacey Hill, ELMO’s Lead Product Manager and Remuneration Expert, says pay review time is ideal for exposing and rectifying recruitment-created pay disparities.

She says: “We’ve aligned our gender reporting functionality with Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) measurements, empowering our customers to understand results and achievements early on.”

Stacey also stressed the importance of pre-emptive actions. The pre-built report identifies 10-15 groups where action would have the most impact on the business’s overall gender pay gap.

Before the review began, our team held a workshop with the department heads who would be using the tool to understand its functionality and answer any questions. While the tool is user-friendly, this base knowledge helped to set them up for success when the review began.

The benefits

Cuts the length of the remuneration review process in half

Provides accurate data for managers to work from including compa-ratio and budget allocation

Better visibility of the entire process led to better communication and trust between stakeholders

Ability to see WGEA reporting data before, during, and after review process

The technology gave us the ability to have more of a voice around the topic of the gender pay gap
Ryan Adams
People Advisor and Systems Lead at ELMO Software
People Advisor and Systems Lead at ELMO Software

For HR professionals like Ryan, the visibility over the pay gap and the depth of the data in particular has been invaluable.

“It enabled us to talk to our Chief People Experience Officer and the other Executives about where we’re at with our gender pay gap and the movement we’ve achieved this year,” he says.

“The technology gave us the ability to have more of a voice around the topic of the gender pay gap.”

This is particularly important given the legislation change in Australia that means from early next year, businesses with 100 or more employees will have their gender pay gap published online.

Now is the time for organisations to get on the front foot with a detailed gender pay gap audit to truly understand their pay gap data and what’s driving the inequality.

“Being able to run the report quickly and easily allows admins to calculate their gap before, during, and after the review,” Stacey says. “ As a result, we saw a reduction in the gender pay gap this year which is fantastic.”

Time efficiencies and better visibility

Our experience showed that an effective solution like ELMO Remuneration can halve the duration of the review process. The length of ELMO’s rem review went from 2-3 months to just five weeks.

Beyond the countless hours in saved time, the visibility for our HR team proved immensely valuable.

“The solution offers an easy-to-monitor progression dashboard so we can see which step each Head of Department is at at any given time,” Ryan explains.

“For users, they can see their budget, expenditure, remaining funds, performance review ratings, and compa-ratio data (where an employee sits compared to the market rate).”

Instead of creating bottlenecks and frustrations between stakeholders, using the Rem tool brought the team together in a collaborative, transparent process.

The technology also offered a level of impartiality to the review. The business’ remuneration rules and framework are applied to every employee through the technology, rather than by an individual who could be prone to bias.

Automated communication

The laborious process of distributing salary and bonus information to every employee can be resource-intensive.

That’s why one of the most popular features of ELMO Remuneration is its automatic letter generation tool. It allows users to generate the letters in bulk, while still being able to customise the contents based on certain factors.

“Everybody has different components that go into their overall package, different bonuses and increases, whether they receive KiwiSaver or Superannuation,” Ryan says.

“But the way the system managed that process was seamless. You set it up once and it pulls in the relevant fields that you need for each letter.”

For our team, ELMO Remuneration became a conduit for more than just efficient remuneration reviews. It helped us with the essential ingredients for any rem review – communication, process rigor and accurate information.

The benefits certainly outweighed the understandable hesitation our teams may have felt before putting their trust in a new way of doing things. It halved the length of the review, offered greater visibility, and automated our letter generation. But importantly, it also enabled our gender pay gap understanding during every stage of the review.

To find out how ELMO Remuneration could help transform your review process, visit the product page or book a demo to speak to one of our friendly consultants.

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