Maintaining oversight despite an often-fragmented HR ecosystem, trying to keep a distributed workforce engaged, and ensuring your rewards programs are competitive and equitable in the current environment, are just a few examples of the challenges businesses face. Sequoia’s People Platform, a digitally driven resource to serve both employers and employees, was designed with these pain points in mind.
Approximately 75% of a business’s total spend goes toward their investment in people. Given this, it is no surprise that investors, Board of Directors, regulators, prospective employees, and other stakeholders continue to want more visibility into people programs, metrics, and goals. As a result, management teams struggle to pull together data from multiple systems, cobble together relevant (and often outdated) benchmarks, and then track progress toward goals in a controlled way.
By serving as a centralized, real-time resource, the Sequoia People Platform provides leaders with Total People Investment insights that can be leveraged to showcase holistic, ongoing people program management to the board:
1. Invest in the Right Places (and Showcase it)
Employees want to feel invested in, and a total rewards statement showcases your company’s comprehensive investment in your employees through salary, bonus, equity, healthcare, wellbeing, and retirement specific breakdowns. Additionally, while equity is a key retention tool and a large component of the total rewards program, many employees struggle to understand the potential value of their awards. Sequoia’s Total Rewards Statements models out various equity scenarios for employees to drive an even deeper connection with the company’s mission and long-term goals. Employee utilization of this tool can be a great indication to the board of employees understanding (and appreciating) the full investment received.
2. Managing your Equity Burn Rate
Keeping track of your equity spend is critical as it has implications for employees, board members, and investors. The board is accountable for maximizing shareholder value which, in part, entails a delicate balance of utilizing the equity plan to attract, motivate, and retain key talent while also managing dilution. As a private company, the majority of your board will be composed of the company’s primary investors. As a public company, your board represents the interests of all retail and institutional investors, while also needing to answer to proxy advisory firms such as Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). In either case, a clear, ironclad equity strategy and accompanying burn rate forecast are table stakes in any Compensation Committee or Board meeting. Balancing external market conditions, the company’s health and growth plans, management’s philosophy, the board’s philosophy, finding appropriate market data (and using it appropriately) and, of course, incentivizing employees in the right way is no small task. Baking this into an equity strategy and projecting how the chips may fall is even more daunting. This makes equity strategy managing your burn rate a critical task to be thoughtful and proactive about.
3. Define and Measure Total Rewards ROI
The value of individual rewards elements has historically been hard to measure. Additionally, the most successful programs have a clearly defined total rewards philosophy that takes into consideration each element of the program, tied directly to company goals and the broader mission. From there, determining if the program is effective can be complicated. The People Platform analyzes the size of investment by department, location, level, or tenure and compares it to turnover rates of the same categories to ensure your investments are producing positive outcomes.
4. Monitor Workforce Movements & Retention
The People Platform looks beyond employee turnover and enables companies to start solving the mystery as to why these changes are occurring. The dashboard identifies your organization’s retention challenges to successfully support sustainable growth.
5. Forecast Total People Spend
It’s hard to keep up with trends and strategize a way to apply it to the total people investment. The People Platform looks at trends occurring right now using up to date data and helps forecast where your organization is trending toward in the future, all in one dashboard.
