Payscale

Affinity Plus, a Minnesota-based financial cooperative, is committed to fostering an inclusive, engaged, and equitable workplace. Affinity Plus faced increasing pressure to mature their compensation program as Minnesota prepared to pass pay transparency legislation and employees became more invested in how and why pay decisions were made. There were some initial concerns about potential negative feedback from employees if pay ranges were shared more broadly, as well as the added complexity of translating compensation data into actionable insights. Thankfully, leadership recognized the need to reevaluate comp practices to ensure fairness, clarity, and alignment with company values.…

The partnership with Payscale provided the Affinity Plus team with expert guidance on developing a compensation strategy that made sense for the business. Payscale’s Comp Expertise team helped the company refine its pay structure, simplify its pay range placement guidelines, and align the compensation strategy to support company initiatives. This work created a foundation to make it easier for leaders to better assess their employee’s performance and development in their role, determine the appropriate salary, and confidently communicate pay decisions and career growth opportunities to employees.…

This case study explores how Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union successfully navigated the complexities of pay transparency legislation and compensation restructuring by partnering with Payscale. Moving from pay confusion to clarity, it increased employee engagement, proving the business impact of transparent and fair compensation practices. This work has positioned Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union as a leader in their industry for compensation best practices.

Centauri Health Solutions is a private equity backed company that provides innovative technology and services to payors and providers in government sponsored health programs. The company saw significant expansion in 2017, increasing in size from 120 to 600 employees due to multiple acquisitions. This is also when the utilization of Payscale’s compensation software, data and services began. Today, the company has eight main regional locations and over 1,700 employees working across the United States. With a rapid growth trajectory, it was imperative to leadership that a compensation strategy and formalized program be developed that could align with the speed of their business.…

Payscale provides the technology, adaptive salary data, and professional services that have supported the development and management of Centauri’s modernized compensation program. What started as basic benchmarking and annual pay reviews has transformed into a robust compensation strategy with a performance-based pay philosophy – all accomplished in a three-year timespan. Centauri has leveraged Payscale’s expertise every step of the way. Partnering with a compensation professional on the services team to build a pay structure, seeking recommendations on pricing difficult jobs, attending educational webinars, or keeping up to date on market trends are just examples of how the partnership has influenced business decisions over the years.…

Increased speed of hire by reducing turnaround time for job pricing requests

For a company with operations across multiple continents, managing an annual benchmarking review of pay ranges introduced uncertainty. The team relied on manual spreadsheets, which made the setting of pay ranges time-consuming, difficult to explain, and challenging to scale. Without a centralized platform, market data was decentralized, increasing the risk of errors and misalignment. Ensuring consistent market pricing or providing a clear picture of global compensation trends became more difficult. Another significant challenge was survey participation. The team completed over 200 compensation surveys each year worldwide, a cumbersome and manual process that took months and limited the time available for other important activities.…

Marketpay helped the company move from uncertainty to clarity. With robust market pricing capabilities, the team could align pay structures globally, respond to shifting market trends, and create a more consistent, defensible compensation philosophy across countries and roles. Automating key pieces of the survey participation process for over 200 surveys reduced errors and saved weeks of time, enabling the team to focus on strategic tasks. Participation became reliable and less stressful. Marketpay’s reporting tools converted complex data into actionable insights, enhancing the visibility and credibility of the compensation function.…

A Fortune 100 biopharmaceutical company transformed its global compensation practices with Payscale Marketpay, moving beyond the limitations of labor-intensive and error-prone spreadsheets to gain true confidence in its compensation programs. The result? A significant reduction in administrative compensation tasks. More importantly, the company gained the clarity and control needed to make data-driven, defensible pay decisions which brought consistency, transparency, and trust to its global workforce.

Fog Creek Software Inc., a 20-year-old software company and PayScale customer, recently received some well-deserved attention for revealing the salaries of all its employees. Starting in mid-2016, the company CEO – Anil Dash – announced that the company would publish salary ranges of all their jobs (individual salaries were not disclosed). By September of 2017, every employee got access to a Google spreadsheet with titles, levels and the corresponding salary bands of everyone in the company.

In many ways, Integer Holdings’ business is a matter of life and death. This 80-year-old company is a world leader in advanced medical design and manufacturing, providing the medical devices, components, and batteries that hospitals, doctors, and patients rely on every day. With a footprint that spans 10 countries, four continents, and an approximately 9,000-person employee base, its compensation management has to be handled with surgical precision as well, to keep the operation going strong. The global “Great Reshuffling” post-COVID brought additional emphasis to ensuring Integer’s pay-for-performance compensation plan remained competitive—particularly in its vital manufacturing operations.…

With Payscale, the compensation team has a centralized source for all market pricing. That means they can look at global pay practices in a holistic way for more efficient analysis and reporting. When pricing a job, they go into “Pricing Projects” to find the project with that particular job listing. When looking for something specific to a job, they go to the “Job” tab. The timely data aids in the analysis process. Also, once the Integer team loads their employee data into Payscale, the system is able to deliver information on who has that job today, what their pay is, and related reporting.…

Our biggest challenge as compensation specialists is moving at the speed of business. When it comes to people’s pay, you have to get it right., And to stay competitive—particularly today—you have to get it in place right away. Payscale gives us current, real-time market data and a streamlined way to access the information we need for analysis and validation.”

Intermountain Healthcare is an integrated, nonprofit healthcare system and the largest healthcare provider in the Intermountain West of the United States. Headquartered in Salt Lake City with centers throughout Utah, Intermountain Healthcare has been on the path of expansion, with clinics in Nevada, a hospital in Idaho, and a new children’s hospital in Utah which provides care to pediatric patients throughout the western United States. Intermountain Healthcare is a growing healthcare organization and needs a compensation solution with the ability to manage a multitude of traditional surveys as well as access to fresh, reliable data to fill gaps in rural locations and new markets.…

A small compensation team manages pay for Intermountain Healthcare’s 40,000 employees. Due the size and complexity of their salary data, Intermountain benefits greatly from Payscale’s technology, data and customer success team, which enables the organization to complete their annual compensation cycle from start to finish while making real-time adjustments and refinements that come up along the way. As a healthcare organization, Intermountain Healthcare was heavily impacted by COVID-19. Market data for pricing in-demand jobs like nurses, respiratory therapists, and other clinical jobs was critical during the pandemic.…

“​​With Payfactors, we have replaced our labor-intensive spreadsheet job pricing process with a system that works like a dream. We are able to match to benchmarks within the system, easily get up-to-date pricing and age for future cost planning. We’ve cut our process time down by at least 80%."

Within 6 months of implementing pay increase cycle automaton, CRMC moved from static and manual spreadsheets to streamlined processes that delivered over $80,000 in cost savings and significantly reduced the amount of manual work required to manage compensation planning from months to weeks.

Within 6 months of implementing pay increase cycle automaton, CRMC moved from static and manual spreadsheets to streamlined processes that delivered over $80,000 in cost savings and significantly reduced the amount of manual work required to manage compensation planning from months to weeks.

Sage Software is a global market leader for technology that helps small and medium business perform at their best. Sage is trusted by millions of customers worldwide to deliver the best cloud technology and support to manage finances, operations, and people. In 2019, Sage’s reward team was stuck dealing with a complex matrix structure and backward-looking approach to handling their reward programs. From generic pay ranges and inconsistent grading, to a lack of transparency for managers and colleagues about reward calculations, Sage was ready for a transformation.

In 2020, Sage teamed up with PayScale (formerly CURO) to ensure they put their people first and make it easier for managers and executives to take control of fair pay and bonus decisions based on performance. In doing so, leadership developed a simplified compensation system and bonus plan, and employees felt happier and motivated by understanding how their work progress was reviewed and tracked. Complete 11K+ employee reviews by 1,600 managers in 3 weeks Capture pay, bonus, and LTIP recommendations for all employees Redistribute £1.5M in bonuses more effectively and fairly Realize and reallocate £366K in absence adjustments

In 2020, Sage teamed up with PayScale (formerly CURO) to ensure they put their people first and make it easier for managers and executives to take control of fair pay and bonus decisions based on performance. In doing so, leadership developed a simplified compensation system and bonus plan, and employees felt happier and motivated by understanding how their work progress was reviewed and tracked. Complete 11K+ employee reviews by 1,600 managers in 3 weeks Capture pay, bonus, and LTIP recommendations for all employees Redistribute £1.5M in bonuses more effectively and fairly Realize and reallocate £366K in absence adjustments

Pay transparency is raising expectations for how organizations explain pay decisions, but transparency itself is not the challenge. The real challenge is whether employees, managers, and leaders understand how pay works.

To understand how organizations are moving beyond these constraints, Payscale partnered with independent research firm UserEvidence to survey 60 current customers across a range of enterprise sizes, industries, and job functions.

See how smarter compensation decisions drove significant annual ROI, freed up valuable time for comp teams, lifted offer acceptance, and strengthened employee retention. hours saved across compensation teams each week improvement in offer acceptance rate additional employees retained annually Enterprise compensation teams are under mounting pressure to compete for talent in a fast-shifting labor market, keep pace with pay transparency legislation, and deliver data-backed recommendations to leadership. Yet many still rely on fragmented data sources, manual spreadsheets, and outdated market information that slow decisions and increase risk.…

Compensation processes at Smith College had grown increasingly complex over time and required more robust and specific practices and tools. The College had outgrown its decades-old general job classifications and salary grades. Managers needed clear guidance on pay positioning or market alignment, and employees wanted greater transparency into how decisions were made. Operationally, the absence of standardized governance created inefficiencies. HR spent significant time reconciling compensation data, reviewing historical decisions, and responding to ad hoc pay questions. Leadership also lacked streamlined visibility into compensation trends, limiting strategic and long-term workforce planning.…

Smith College partnered with Payscale to bring structure, market intelligence, and governance to its compensation program. Priorities included: Rebuilding the compensation framework Newly designed job architecture, leveling methodology, and market-based salary ranges created a common language around compensation. Strengthening data utilization and governance Emphasized consistent data definitions, structured review processes, and alignment between practice and policy to support more transparent decisions.…

"We wanted to evolve from being reactive to having a scalable compensation strategy and structure that supports institutional and employee needs now and in the future. This wasn’t just a compensation project. It was about enhancing understanding and transparency around jobs, pay and career growth. Payscale was instrumental in helping us achieve key goals."