How Zip Streamlined Compensation Reviews with ChartHop

Discover how ChartHop helped Zip:

• Save weeks administering a complete compensation cycle by automating key processes like approvals and letter creation
• Introduce a system where team leaders can easily make updates to compensation and see changes reflected in real time
• Make it easy for leaders and the People team alike to see how compensation increases track toward overall budget and how factors like performance rating impact compensation

Zip Co is a digital financial services company, offering innovative, people-centered products that bring customers and merchants together by offering access to fair, transparent, and flexible credit.Recently, the Zip team decided their annual compensation cycle needed an upgrade and they set out to bring the same goals of fairness and transparency to the process.

Better Collaboration + Automated Workflows = An Error-Free Comp Cycle

As Zip continued to grow, they were looking for more enterprise-level solutions to support business operations like annual compensation reviews, according to Emma Leipold, Senior Manager, Global Mobility and Total Reward at Zip.

Specifically, they identified opportunities to further improve real-time collaboration between managers and to make the process of creating compensation letters for each employee more efficient. Overall, Emma says the legacy process for the team was cumbersome, and they knew there had to be a better way.

“We were looking for something that could streamline the process into one platform and reduce how many people needed to work on the compensation cycle,” she explains.

Zip found everything they were looking for in ChartHop. Emma says: “We liked that we could easily tack ChartHop on to our existing tech stack and the way that we could control who had access. It just seemed like a flexible solution that we could build out in the way that we wanted to use it.”

ChartHop’s automation capabilities around reviews and compensation outcome letters were especially helpful for Zip.

“We liked the way we could customize the family tree so that we could select who the reviewers would be. And it’s very easy to see (in ChartHop) how that escalates up from one manager to the CEO for final sign off. That’s something you can’t automate outside of a system like ChartHop,” Emma explains.

She continues that her team collaborated closely with ChartHop to build out a fully automated compensation letter template to account for nearly 30 different potential messaging iterations. For example, the wording in this template is personalized based on a range of possible factors like an employee’s performance rating, location and local currency, and notice period changes. This automation has delivered several days worth of time savings for the Zip team.

More Context Leads to Fairer, More Transparent Compensation Decisions

Beyond better collaboration and automation, ChartHop has also brought more context to compensation decisions compared to Zip’s previous approach.

To start, Zip built out a workbook of details to govern the entire compensation cycle. Most notably, this allows the team to input performance ratings and then have ChartHop automatically calculate bonus amounts based on how each rating falls within a range preset by Zip.

This visibility extends to compensation increases and promotions as well, as Emma and her team can also view range penetration to see where each employee sits in their compensation range and how that changes based on an increase or promotion.

Perhaps best of all, ChartHop makes it easy to see this data at both the individual level and broader team level so managers can easily keep track of how they’re pacing toward budget.

“At the same time as we can see where each person sits with their compensation, we can also see a budgeting line at the top of the workbook fluctuate based on each manager’s changes. I think that is one of the best functions of ChartHop – the ability to clearly keep managers within budget. One of our biggest successes last year is that we stayed below budget overall as a company, and a large part of that is due to the visualization in ChartHop of when you’re below or above budget,” Emma shares.

A Compensation Win – and Beyond – for the Long Term

After two compensation cycles with ChartHop, Emma can confidently say that the new approach will continue to save the Zip team time, money, and stress.

“It’s great how we can log on to ChartHop and collaborate on changes, with updates reflected in real time. Managers like being able to see ratings, range penetration, and salary bands in one place, since that gives them everything that they need to see in terms of context. At sign off, our CEO was very pleased with how the whole compensation review played out,” Emma says.

Of course the overall time savings are nothing to blink at either. Emma shares: “If I were to estimate the amount of time we would spend cutting up spreadsheets, saving them into confidential files, sharing them with the right people, going back and forth creating new versions, and then also creating all the letters, we would have saved probably a week or two of work, and then with the letters at least another couple of days. Previously I can remember four or five people doing the job that two of us did last time around with ChartHop.”

Given the success Zip has had with ChartHop for their annual compensation review cycle, they’ve also started using the platform in new ways. Now, they use ChartHop’s Org Chart for an easy visual of the entire company and analytics to track metrics like DEI and turnover. They’ve also brought all of their equity plans that live across multiple systems into ChartHop for a single view of grants and vesting schedules across the organization, globally.

Emma attributes this success in large part to the level of service provided by ChartHop. She concludes: “With other platforms we use, the customer support is just emailing a generic inbox, but that is not my experience with ChartHop. The ChartHop team has been available all the time to answer our questions, and we had a weekly catch up during the compensation cycle to run through everything. So we were very invested and very committed on both sides, and that set us up for success.”