FAQs

Compensation refers to both monetary and non-monetary compensation and benefits that companies provide employees in exchange for their contribution in their role at the company.

This includes compensation (base pay + bonuses + equity) and Benefits (monetary & non-monetary) such as insurances, superannuation, pension, 401k, recognition, development/career growth (training, mentorship, learning new skills, etc.), leave (eg. parental, sick, family etc) and flexible work.

Compensation Programs are the annual programs a company would undertake as part of it’s compensation strategy, for example:

Compensation Planning is the planning and process in which any of the above Compensation Programs take place. For example, the Compensation Planning of the annual merit cycle would be a regular process companies undertake to review employees' compensation, make recommendations based on the company budget and any specific guidelines. Pave and other Compensation systems help Compensation, HR, Finance and Senior Leaders undertake this process in a considered, thoughtful and strategic manner. It enables strategic decisions to be made with informed data, with ease and efficiency.

See below for some examples of factors which may contribute as part of a company's decision-making:

Broadly, the topic of compensation remains high on the list of what employees want out of their work, particularly in the current economic climate.

Compensation Reviews help tie employee Performance to Compensation outcomes. When it comes to performance-related pay, research suggests that it does lead to positive outcomes and is perceived favorably by employees;

Performance-related pay provides an important benefit as part of the total employee experience as it;

Whilst compensation does attract employees to an organization, we should also note;

Compensation plays a crucial role in the overall employee experience across multiple areas:

An integration refers to the process of connecting two or more software systems to work together seamlessly and share data. This allows different software applications to communicate with each other and share information to automate tasks and processes.

Integrations are enabled via an Application Programming Interface (API) between the different software systems, which enables data to be transferred between them. APIs provide a standard interface for communication between systems, allowing data to be exchanged in a structured and consistent manner.

A major advantage of integrations over .csv or manual methods of data transfer is that it eliminates the need for manual data entry or file transfers, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. With an integration, data is automatically transferred between systems, reducing the risk of errors and saving time and resources. It also improves the availability and freshness of data - it can be sourced as needed and kept up-to-date more readily.

In the context of compensation planning, API-based integrations can be used to pull multiple data sources together which feed into the compensation planning process. For example combining salary, job, equity and employee performance data automatically into a single central data store using APIs. This provides substantial improvements over manual data entry and transfer methods imposed by the use of .csv files for preparing compensation data.

Culture Amp’s integration with Pave is a specific integration between the Culture Amp Performance Management Platform and Pave’s Compensation Planning Platform. It enables the exchange of Employee and Performance Rating data from Culture Amp to Pave to include this data in Compensation Reviews run within the Pave app.

The Culture Amp <> Pave Integration allows for Culture Amp Performance data to be seamlessly included in your Compensation Reviews with Pave. There are several reasons why this is valuable:

Pave is a category-leading compensation planning software company that digitizes and enhances the way in which companies make compensation decisions. Their platform is an end-to-end planning solution that allows you to build a world-class team and smart, equitable compensation programs using objective data.

Yes. The majority of their customer base and sales teams are based in North America, and they have a growing EMEA presence. The customer base and support in the APAC region is small at this stage.

Pave has a suite of compensation planning, benchmarking and analytics products your organization can benefit from in delivering better compensation programs.

Their core products are:

Outside of these products their platform has a number of key capabilities that add to the depth and experience of their product’s functionality.

All levels of your organization benefit from using Pave and the seamless, structured, collaborative compensation planning their platform enables. In the long run, this will mean employees are compensated more equitably and subsequently become more engaged, recognised and satisfied.

Culture Amp revolutionizes how over 25 million employees across 6,600 companies create a better world of work. As the global platform leader for employee experience, Culture Amp empowers companies of all sizes and industries to transform their employee experience.

Compensation forms a critical part of this experience in every organization. It plays a vital role in engaging and satisfying employees, incentivising performance, recognising contribution and achievement, plus attracting and retaining talent.

We’ve partnered with Pave to empower our customers to bridge the gap between their Performance and Compensation cycles, equipping them with the tools to deliver smart, equitable compensation programs more easily. You’ll now be able to view your employee’s Culture Amp Performance information within the Pave app after integrating the systems, giving your Managers the context and insight they need to make informed decisions.

Pave has an extensive track record in compensation planning, with over 5000 satisfied customers and a powerful, integrated, scalable solution. Pave is laser-focussed on providing you with a best-in-class solution for all your compensation management needs, so you can leave behind spreadsheets plus eliminate the stress and effort of compensation review season. With thousands of satisfied customers and a proven, battle-tested platform, Pave has the credibility and experience needed to support your company’s goals and growth.

Pave integrates with your entire HR stack so it's easy to centralize your data and get a full view of your employees' total compensation. It has an extensive breadth of integrations across HRIS, Payroll, Cap Table and ATS systems. Pave makes managing the variety of complex data involved in your compensation planning straightforward while ensuring data is accurate and up to date.

Keeping employees informed and clear on their total compensation package can be challenging. Communicating the full breadth of rewards from equity, to benefits and bonuses is not simple - it also requires an individualized solution. Pave’s Total Rewards portal for employees solves this problem by enabling employees to get a clear picture of compensation and demystify its nuances. The portal is individualized, visually appealing and secure, providing a powerful means of communicating value for employees. Build better trust, and engagement and clearly communicate your packages to each employee.

Take the guesswork out of compensation planning and give Managers the tools to make better, data-driven decisions. Eliminate biased, subjective compensation reviews and allow for enhanced collaboration between Managers with contextual comments, notes and review flows. Plus, with Pave’s powerful real-time salary benchmark insights, compensation bands and analytics capabilities your organization will get the insight to level up your compensation decision-making.

Pave has both the flexibility and depth of capabilities to grow with your organization - whatever stage you’re at. Its modular and tiered offering enables you to match functionality and pricing to your organization’s needs. Modularly add features to suit your goals. Pave has the integrations, streamlined workflows and unified data management capabilities to ensure you operate efficiently and effectively - no matter your company’s size.

Pave have a range of Case Studies available that detail examples of where their platform has been used by businesses and the results that were seen.

Here is some of the feedback received from Pave’s customers:

Pave maintains multiple important accreditations:

Pave also provides robust security for every customer on its platform via Single-Sign-On (SSO) authentication, role-based access controls, and in-product data protection to ensure you can confidently share sensitive compensation information based on the privileges you set.

What data Pave collects will depend on the data in the systems that its customers decide to integrate with its products. Pave may collect data relating to cash and equity compensation (including employee name, employee ID, employee email, base salary, variable pay, manager, title, level, equity grant details and equity vesting details). Pave calls this “Customer Data.”

Pave requires personal information on employees such as name and email for its product suite to function. This allows Pave to connect HRIS and equity management platform data to understand an employee's total compensation. This information is also required for its products to work (such as compensation planning, total rewards and visual offer letter).

Pave collects and uses Customer Data to provide customers with its products. To provide the Benchmarking product, it aggregates and de-identifies Customer Data about compensation and combines it with similar data from other customers. The Benchmarking product consists of aggregated and de-identified data from 4000+ companies. The single largest customer of Pave today represents less than 4% of the data (although the denominator grows daily).

Pave’s benchmarking product has built-in safeguards to prevent data from showing when insufficient data is present. It only displays aggregated slices of data, not individual data points. For more information, see Pave’s Master Subscription Agreement (MSA) (available at https://www.Pave.com/master-subscription-agreement), which incorporates Pave’s Data Processing Addendum (DPA) (available at www.Pave.com/data-processing-addendum).

Once you integrate with Pave you will enable the Pave app to access a narrow set of data from your Culture Amp account for the purposes of enabling this data to be exchanged to the Pave app and included in merit cycles. This data is needed to ensure you are able to use and benefit from the integration, as well as to enhance the experience of using your Culture Amp data within Pave’s platform.

This data includes employee data sourced from your Culture Amp service such as:

As well as Employe Performance data such as:

All data is transferred from Culture Amp to Pave via API in a secure, encrypted and private exchange protocol.

Any Culture Amp customer with an active Performance Module subscription will be able to access and use the integration at no additional cost providing they also have an active Pave Compensation Planning service (available on the Pave Pro and Premium plan tiers).

The Culture Amp <> Pave integration is included for customers with a Performance Module subscription and is not charged separately as an add-on.

Only your Account Administrators will be able to set up, view and manage the Culture Amp <> Pave integration via their Account Administrator Settings.

Managers and Employees will be able to benefit from the integration through their involvement in compensation reviews within the Pave compensation planning app and the improved compensation programs this solution enables.

For Account Administrators, the integration and its settings can be accessed via the Account Administrator Settings.

As an Account Administrator - Simply log in, view settings, click ‘Integrations’ under the side navigation bar, then choose Pave out of the integration selection options displayed under ‘Compensation Planning’.

To set up and use the integration you must first have an active Pave account and Compensation Planning service which is included in the Pave Pro and Premium plan tiers. You can purchase a Pave subscription by contacting Pave here.

Setting up the integration is straightforward and can be completed in several steps.

As an Account Administrator - simply log into your Culture Amp account, view settings, click ‘Integrations’ under the side navigation bar, then choose Pave out of the integration selection options displayed under ‘Compensation Planning’.

Follow the prompts to generate a new Client Credential and Client Secret. Once created, copy your Secret Key. Never publish or copy your secret key to any public location, repository or unsecure area as this poses risks to your data.

Log in to your Pave account as an Account Administrator. Navigate to your Integration Settings within the Pave app. Find your Culture Amp integration under ‘Performance Management’ integrations within the integration page. Complete authentication by pasting your Client Secret into the input field as prompted on page.

This will complete authentication and enable you to exchange Culture Amp employee and performance data with the Pave app when you run merit cycles with Pave.

Single Sign-On (SSO) is a user authentication process that enables individuals to access multiple applications or services using a single set of login credentials, such as a username and password. SSO offers numerous benefits for companies that use multiple applications, such as Pave and Culture Amp. Some of these include enhanced security through centralizing authentication, reduced password fatigue and the need to remember many passwords, in addition to a better user experience.

As part of setting up your Culture Amp <> Pave integration, it is recommended that you set up SSO to improve the log in and access experience for users in your organization that need to access both apps.

Both Culture Amp and Pave support SSO via Google or SAML. Add both applications to a preferred common identity provider to benefit from mutual SSO access.

For details on setting up and configuring Culture Amp SSO check here.

Pave SSO set up and configuration information can be found here.

Different roles within your organization will have different access levels and interaction with the integration. Views and permissions for roles in Pave can be configured and controlled within the Pave Administrator settings. More information.

Account Administrators

People Team, Managers and Executives

Employees

Merit Cycles in Pave can only be created by an Administrator. New Merit Cycles require input from a Pave Implementation Manager (IM) to set up and configure initially. Once created you can customize the Cycle’s settings and configurations. To find out more and set up your Merit Cycle please contact Pave.

Further details can be found within Pave’s FAQs here.

Most data within the Pave app is sourced from integrations with your HR systems such as HRIS, ATS and Cap Table applications. Data can also be alternatively sourced from .csv files.

For more information on data upload methods and options please see here.

Once you have created and configured your new Merit Cycle, you’ll be able to pull in Performance Ratings for employees you have included in the Cycle.

Navigate to the ‘Performance’ tab of the Merit Cycle and follow the prompts to pull in the Culture Amp Performance Ratings for each employee.

Employee Performance ratings will be displayed in your Merit Cycle summary dashboard against each employee’s record. This provides Managers and Executives with a simple and easy way to obtain important contextual information about Employee Performance during Merit Cycles that help inform Compensation adjustments and reduce bias in the decision-making process.

No. Data can only be imported to Pave from Culture Amp. The API is one-way and does not support two-way data exchange.

No. Merit Cycles can only be created and run within Pave’s app via the compensation planning product.

When a new Merit Cycle is created in Pave, you will have the option to include available Performance Rating information for your employees from Culture Amp. This data is refreshed every hour from Culture Amp automatically. If your Performance Ratings change, the changes will be reflected in Pave without the need for further action.

Performance Ratings data should be accurate and complete before using it in a Merit Cycle. Follow the Best Practice guidelines outlined below to minimize the likelihood of your Performance Rating data changing after a Merit Cycle has been launched.

Performance Cycles run in Culture Amp will remain open until they are manually closed by an Administrator. Once closed, all of the content in the Cycle will become read only and employees will no longer be able to submit or update their self-reflections or reviews.

This is important to do before using the Performance Ratings from the respective Performance Cycle in a Merit Cycle with Pave. Performance Ratings can be changed at any point up until the Performance Cycle is closed. While changes to ratings will be updated in Pave every hour automatically, it is advised to avoid making changes after you have launched a Merit Cycle to avoid confusing Managers.

For more information on how to close a Performance Cycle - see here.

Calibration is a process that aims to make reviews fair and consistent across managers, departments, and even job levels. It can improve the accountability of your reviews and ensure every employee receives feedback that’s both fair and designed to support their growth at your company.

Calibrating Performance Ratings is an important method for both improving the accuracy of the ratings, in addition to mitigating potential sources of bias or error. Calibrations improve the quality of the performance information provided to Managers in your organization during Merit Cycles. While calibrations are optional, we recommend running a calibration phase for your Performance Cycle prior to importing Performance Ratings into a Pave Merit Cycle.

For more information on how to run a Calibration - see here.

Running many Performance Cycles for various teams, departments or even individuals has benefits in enabling more tailored review questions and individualized experiences for different stakeholder groups in the organization when it comes to reviewing Performance.

However, it can also pose challenges in creating consistency, standardization and equitable reviews for each employee if differing rating scales or labels are used across these cycles. This can impact the consistency and quality of Performance Rating data imported into your Merit Cycles.

To avoid this problem, we recommend:

Your integration will be disabled to prevent any data from being exchanged between the Culture Amp app and Pave app.

Cancelling your Pave or Culture Amp account will disable your integration. You will need to authenticate your integration again in order to use it for a reactivated account. If you need help - please contact support.

You must run at least one Performance Cycle to have available data to use in the integration.

Performance Ratings can be used from an incomplete Performance Cycle and the integration will function. The drawback of using incomplete Performance Cycles that have not been closed by an Administrator is that they carry a much higher risk that the Performance Ratings will change after a Merit Cycle is launched, causing data errors or inconsistencies.

Please see the above section “Importance of closing your Performance Cycle prior to importing Performance Ratings into a Merit Cycle” for more information on why it's advised to close a Performance Cycle before running a Merit Cycle.

If you didn’t include a Performance Rating question in your Performance Cycle, you will not have ratings data available for input into Pave for the Merit Cycle.

For employees who weren’t included in a given Manager Review Cycle, they won’t have Performance Ratings produced from the cycle in question. They can still be included in a Merit Cycle but may not have a Performance Rating to display and their Performance Rating record will appear blank.

Performance Rating Calibration is an optional phase of the Performance Cycle process. While it is recommended to improve the accuracy of the rating, mitigate sources of bias and ensure the rating has been reviewed, you can still elect to include uncalibrated Performance Ratings into a Merit Cycle.

You are still able to include Performance Ratings into your Merit Cycle where multiple Performance Cycles have been used across different teams or employees.

If your Merit Cycle has not been launched yet and is still in a draft state, simply update the employee list you used to set up participants in the Merit Cycle.

If you have already launched your Merit Cycle, you will not be able to update the employees included in the cycle without reverting it back into a draft state. To do this, you will need to contact Pave support for help in reverting the cycle. Once it has been reverted, simply update the employee list you used to set up participants in the Merit Cycle.

You can contact Pave support here.

Performance Ratings are shared and updated automatically with Pave every hour from Culture Amp through the integration. This applies even for data within an active Merit Cycle.

If you’re still having issues you can contact Pave support here.