How BTC Inc. Built and Implemented Their Compensation Strategy

Before Lattice

BTC Inc. has grown from 14 to 100+ employees in the last two years. While this rapid growth was a testament to the company's overall success, it posed significant problems for Nick Beaird, the company's head of people, and his team. BTC's compensation and people practices needed to be built from scratch to scale with the growing employee base.

“Our people team's mission is to ‘Find the right people, equip them thoroughly, and design an organization that supports their success.'” shares Nick.

We knew early on that scaling effectively while providing a great employee experience wouldn't happen with six HR platforms. We needed to consolidate.

These disparate HR platforms made it nearly impossible for BTC to maintain a single, holistic view of its people data and HR initiatives. Moreover, before Lattice, BTC didn't have job leveling, compensation bands, or formal compensation review cycles. Managers would review employee pay and award raises on an ad hoc basis, a practice Nick and his team knew wasn't sustainable or aligned with any larger business strategy.

How BTC Inc. Uses Lattice

Below is a step-by-step account of how the BTC's people team partnered with Lattice to develop a transparent, equitable, and scalable compensation strategy that benefits both the company and its employees.

1. Defining a Compensation Philosophy

First, BTC needed to flesh out its compensation philosophy. “We knew there were certain factors we wanted to move toward — like recalibrating how we viewed compensation entirely, removing sporadic bonus plans in favor of profit sharing and longer-term incentives. Lattice led the charge, and my team included our founders and leadership team for feedback along the way,” says Nick. Together, through multiple iterations, they landed on the following compensation philosophy for the company:

Attract, develop, and retain passionate Bitcoiners with a balanced rewards package that includes cash, benefits, and perks anchored in accurate market data from similar companies.

Nick attributes the new compensation strategy's overall success to the fact that his team took the time to establish this philosophy from day one so it could act as their North Star throughout the process. "You'll get lost if you're not anchored into where you're going and what you need to get there. Starting from first principles and addressing our people strategy helped with the entire process, leadership buy-in, and communications,” Nick recounts.

2. Building Job Architecture and Competencies

Next, BTC built out its job family structure by leveraging Lattice Compensation Benchmarks powered by Mercer. This process was the most labor-intensive, taking the team around four months to build their job families — groups of roles with relatively similar work and compensation structures. “We looked at every role, title, function, what they did, and how they interacted across the org to ensure our job families made sense and accurately reflected their functions,” says Nick.

Overall, BTC created 11 job families, with the flexibility to add more as the organization grows. Next, their team created job levels and competencies for each role within Lattice Grow. This step played a pivotal role in defining the required qualifications for each position while establishing clear pathways for employee career progression.

3. Using Benchmark Data to Establish Pay Bands

BTC was getting closer to its promise of delivering competitive compensation based on market data. Nick and his team loved that Lattice's Compensation Benchmarks could easily be tailored to their business needs based on location, company size, valuation, and industry.

Using this data, his team created compensation ranges for each job family and job level, defining the minimum and maximum pay for that role nationally. The company also established location premiums so employees in higher cost-of-living areas could be more competitively compensated for their location. With company-wide salary bands in Lattice Compensation, Nick and his team got one step closer to their goal of better compensation practices with increased pay transparency.

4. Communicating the Changes

It was time to put the compensation strategy into practice. BTC believed that a compensation review cycle directly after performance cycles, twice annually, would be optimal for their organization. Nick’s team communicated multiple times leading up to the rollout to ensure teams were aware of upcoming changes and could feel energized about a more equitable practice moving forward. Here is how they communicated their rollout plan:

• Historical practices and perspective on compensation
• Why we're changing our compensation practices
• How we're changing our compensation practices
• Expectations moving forward

It was important for everyone to know how their compensation package would be affected, where they fell within their salary band, and how they could get to the next level of their career. With annual reviews quickly approaching, managers needed to quickly get up to speed on the new compensation model. Since Lattice Performance and Compensation are intuitive systems, the transition and training were seamless, and BTC successfully launched its first performance and compensation reviews with Lattice.

5. Evaluating Impact

Following its first compensation review with Lattice, BTC saw overwhelming results. From employee reception to organization-wide cultural shifts, here are some benefits of the new review process and improved compensation program.

• Improved pay transparency: BTC employees now understand their job level and where they fall in their compensation band. “Compensation discussions had less friction and more energy with everyone knowing decisions were anchored to market data inside an intentional process,” shares Nick.
• Newfound clarity around career growth: Thanks to Lattice Grow and Compensation, employees can now roadmap their progress and how their compensation may change when they reach the next level of their careers. “We hope Grow gives employees clarity to work on specific, high-value things and equally know it's a potential for growth and compensation.”
• They incentivized a pay-for-performance compensation philosophy: With well-defined job levels and competencies, managers can approach compensation decisions with market data and an informed assessment of employee performance and impact. “Tying compensation and performance reviews together helped us automate many parts of the process, making our compensation model a powerful force,” Nick says.

While each achievement is remarkable in its own right, Nick says the most valuable aspect of partnering with Lattice has been centralizing the company's people data in a single location. “Having all of our people data in one spot, allowing us to see where we stand in real-time, has been the biggest impact of Lattice for BTC.”