Compensation
Compensation Cycle Optimization for Scalable Growth
Industry
SaaS
Company Size
1K-5K Employees
The Results
Clearer roles and accountabilities, end-to-end process maps, RACI matrices, and a repeatable framework that strengthened cross-functional alignment and enabled sustainable, efficient compensation cycle execution.
Client Background
A SaaS company with 2,800 employees globally, the client specializes in endpoint management, remote support, and unified communications solutions designed for small and midsize businesses. Recent organizational shifts, including leadership and team member turnover, highlighted challenges and inefficiencies in prior compensation cycles. To address these issues, the client engaged livingHR to streamline processes, improve consistency, and enhance the overall effectiveness of its compensation cycle practices.
Challenges
The livingHR team partnered with the client to lead a comprehensive workforce planning initiative. The discovery phase included a job analysis survey with 224 responses, a full review of organizational charts and strategic documents, job description assessments, and more than 20 one-on-one stakeholder interviews.
From these insights, livingHR delivered:
- A redesigned, detailed organizational chart
- A streamlined job titling schema to reduce redundancy and clarify career paths
- Recommendations to improve headcount efficiency and balance workloads
Key challenges identified by the client included:
- Structural complexity following multiple rapid acquisitions, leading to inconsistent job titles and uneven spans of control
- Lack of a standardized process for integrating acquired companies into the job architecture, organizational structure, or culture
- Internal inefficiencies such as workload imbalance at the executive level, duplicate roles, and misaligned positions across departments—impacting both employee experience and customer outcomes
Success Metrics
- As a result of livingHR’s engagement, the client enhanced its understanding of compensation cycle operations, clarified roles and accountabilities, and strengthened cross-functional alignment. This engagement established a structured foundation for consistent and sustainable administration of future cycles. Key deliverables included:
- Conducted stakeholder discovery to assess the current state of compensation cycle processes, provided targeted recommendations for enhancements, and facilitated knowledge transfer to the new Total Rewards leader to ensure continuity and sustainability.
- Delivered RACI matrices that clarified accountability and decision-making ownership across Compensation, HR, and HRIS.
- Created end-to-end process maps for bonus, promotion, and merit cycles to provide clear timelines, process steps, and stakeholder responsibilities.
- Established a repeatable framework for compensation cycle administration, reducing reliance on undocumented knowledge and manual interventions.
- Provided foundational tools that enable future efficiency gains, improved stakeholder collaboration, and sustainable compensation cycle execution.
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