Maximize Your Budget and Impact with Big Upgrades to Lattice Compensation

We are so excited to introduce the next generation of Lattice Compensation – designed to help you implement and execute a fair and impactful compensation strategy that rewards high performance. 

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Since launching our initial version a year and a half ago, we've seen many customers benefit from the streamlined communication, added security, and built-in integrations with Lattice Performance Reviews.

But we didn't stop there. We listened, we learned, and now we're taking our compensation solution to the next level.

Through countless conversations with both existing and potential customers, we uncovered opportunities to make our product even more powerful and versatile. We recognized that compensation cycles and methodologies vary widely across organizations, and we were inspired to create a system that could adapt to these unique needs.

Over the past several months, our team has been hard at work, reimagining and rebuilding key aspects of our compensation solution. The result? A more flexible, intuitive, and comprehensive system that can easily handle the intricacies of your compensation cycles.

Key Areas of Innovation

We have added new features and improvements across the entire compensation cycle process to ensure that your cycle is setup to match your company’s unique approach to compensation, you can seamlessly collaborate across recommenders and approvers, and you can maximize impact while balancing equitable outcomes for your team. 

Compensation Cycle Setup

We've transformed the way you set up your compensation cycles, offering even more flexibility and control in how you allocate your budget. Here are the three major areas we improved:

• Top-Down Allocation: Our initial rules-based approach worked for mature industries but didn't suit early-stage and rapidly growing businesses where decision-makers have more control in the process. We’ve built more flexibility to allow for Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and Combination approaches to budget distribution.
• Separation of Budget from Guidance: Initially, budget was tied directly to the guidance provided to managers, which suited mature companies with standardized compensation cycles. However, many companies need to allocate budgets in a different manner than the method used for individual guidance.  We’ve decoupled budget and guidance to accommodate this need.  We’re also allowing guidance to be delivered as a range rather than a specific target value to provide further flexibility.
• Added Instructions:  We added an additional text field for admins to communicate instructions.  This allows admins to communicate considerations and philosophy when making a compensation decision.  This helps preempt questions and facilitate a more fair compensation cycle.

In addition to budget allocation and setup, we also made two additional (highly-requested) updates to streamline collaboration and information sharing across all involved stakeholders.  

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• Flexible Approval Chains: There are a variety of situations when a company may need to modify the approval chain.  Flexible approval chains now allow admins to make necessary adjustments for matrixed managers, compensation councils, HRBP involvement, or situations like recent reorgs or manager leaves.
• Promotion Improvements: We’ve added additional support for companies that run promotions during a compensation cycle, and for companies that include job title changes when communicating a promotion.

Coming soon 👀

And we aren’t stopping there! We will soon be adding the ability for customers to include multiple rules when allocating budgets or providing guidance.  

This could include factoring in compa-ratio, band penetration, geography, department, or anything else that your team takes into consideration when adjusting compensation. This would also support the ability to earmark specific budgets for top performance or as a market adjustment which would be included in addition to a merit increase. 

We are actively working on this update and expect it to be released in fall of this year. 

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2. Managing Compensation Cycles

We've introduced powerful new tools to give you greater visibility and control throughout the compensation cycle to ensure your review stays on track and in budget with:

• Cycle Dashboard: We’ve added new visualizations and notifications that make it easier to track changes during a cycle, like manager actions, budget adherence, and recommendations that fall outside of guidance. We’ve also give admins and approvers greater control and the ability to organize recommendations in the way that makes most sense to them. 
• Submission Tracking: We’ve built additional dashboards to track manager submissions, and to send reminders.  Within this UI, administrators can also modify the approval chain, to move the process along in cases where a manager is non-responsive.

3. Delivering Results

We know that facilitating a successful compensation cycle isn’t quite as simple just allocating funds and setting guidance. That’s why we partnered with our Analytics Team to bring meaningful reporting into compensation cycles. 

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Within your active or ended compensation cycle, you can visualize your spend to ensure you are staying on budget and easily identify areas in need of correction. You can also get insights into equity disparity in spend or average increases.  All of these reports can easily be exported to share results or insights with your colleagues. 

Coming soon 👀 

We are excited to be fully revamping our compensation statements feature! Soon you will be able to create custom templates for different employee groups (office location, department, etc) giving you more control over the included messaging and information. 

Admins will also gain more flexibility into who is sharing the statement and additional tracking to ensure participants receive their statements in a timely manner. 

Behind the Scenes

We also made a few improvements behind the scenes to ensure that you continue to have the best possible experience when managing your compensation program. 

• Performance Improvements We shipped 44 enhancements related to improving site performance, halving the average loading time (LCP) for compensation pages over the quarter.
• Data Architecture We’ve standardized employee fields across the platform, incorporated universal standards on permissions, and applied universal controls on fields to improve data architecture and consistency.
• Improved Error Handling: We added user friendly error messages and easy-to-understand options when the system encountered data that couldn’t be handled.  This allowed admins to easily correct the data or exclude participants.

Facilitating Fair and Impactful Compensation Strategies

All in all, it’s safe to say that your compensation experience just got a major raise. 😉

These improvements represent a leap forward in providing you with the flexibility, control, and insights needed to run successful compensation cycles that drive performance impact. But more than that, it's a testament to our commitment to continuous innovation and our partnership with our customers.

We’re excited for your to experience these new improvements and look forward to what’s to come. As always, we’d love to hear you’re feedback or ideas for how we can continue to innovate. 

Not a Lattice customer? Request a demo to discover how Lattice can help you create a transparent and fair compensation strategy that rewards high performance.