From chaos to clarity: Giac Soliman’s tactics for consistent compensation planning across departmental silos

Maintaining consistent principles in compensation planning is hard, especially as your company scales across different verticals and locations.

The early-stage approaches of founder-led and then department-specific compensation decisions – once the agile approach that worked best for a new startup – ends up resulting in inconsistent pay practices across the organisation.

Fixing those inconsistencies quickly becomes an overwhelming task. 

But, according to Giac Soliman, Senior Compensation Lead and the architect behind Monzo's new merit cycle design, bringing consistency to compensation decisions isn’t as out of reach as you might think.

Key learnings on the shift from chaos to clarity in compensation planning

For Giac, the struggle with inconsistent pay principles stems from allowing department-led decisions without a proper framework in place.

The lack of a consistent framework, combined with the ad hoc salary decisions often made early on in startup hiring (driven by founder relationships with candidates, offer negotiations, or desperation to fill roles quickly) leads to the emergence of significant internal pay inequities over time.

Shifting from chaotic decisions to a consistent approach to compensation planning is all about taking ownership of the pay formula – as well as setting clear boundaries as to when overrides can be considered. Which is exactly what Giac implemented at Monzo.

So what does that process look like in practice? Let’s take a look at Giac’s advice and lessons learnt.

Deciding the right time to formalise cross-departmental compensation planning 

In Giac’s experience, pay inconsistencies become an urgent problem when scale-ups are preparing to fuel a next phase of growth or raise a next round of funding.

“Securing venture capital, especially from Series B to Series D, invariably brings heightened scrutiny, both from investors and the board of directors,” Giac explains. 

These stakeholders expect that the company should, by this point, have formalised compensation planning processes in place.

“During the fundraising process,” Giac says, ”they’ll need assurance that capital is being deployed efficiently, that pay is aligned with market rates to attract and retain the talent needed to grow the business, and that equity allocation is being managed strategically to incentivise performance whilst controlling dilution.”

There’s increasing pressure to hire and retain talent to support the next phase of growth, and at the same time the company has now grown enough that it’s competing with larger companies for that talent who are offering more competitive compensation packages. 

“It’s at this point that leaders become increasingly cognizant of the toll that loss of talent can have and the importance of ensuring a consistent and competitive approach,” Giac says, “and this is typically when they start placing with the idea of hiring their first dedicated Reward leader.”

Live through a full merit cycle with the current decision-making processes before making any changes

Once that Reward leader is in post, Giac typically sees the same scenario play out again and again.

“They’ll spot the discrepancies and misalignments that have become costly and disruptive within the first month, put together a large-scale plan to introduce more structure, present it to departmental leaders, get pushback because those leaders can’t get past the idea of relinquishing control over pay decisions, lose hope that they can improve things, and quit the job – all in the space of under a year.

Why does this happen? For Giac, it’s because this very forward approach can feel like an attack against the company’s existing ways of working. 

"Don't muscle in immediately and try to force change,” he says, “or you'll be seen as an opponent working against the business.”

This can especially be the case when business leaders haven’t previously worked closely with a Reward leader. “They may have agreed in principle to the need for an expert,” Giac says, “but in some minds, the Reward leader is simply there to execute on existing will regarding compensation, rather than act as a strategic partner bringing specialised knowledge and proposing necessary structural changes.

Further, when you launch straight in, you risk making mistakes or incorrect assumptions which could leave the situation worse rather than better – especially if you try and replicate what worked at your last company. 

“Reward professionals will often bring up what they did in their last role to try and persuade new stakeholders on the need for change,” Giac explains. “Ironically (given they likely hired you precisely because of that role on your CV) that only drives the stakeholders further away from your point of view – just because it worked elsewhere doesn’t mean it’s right here.”

Giac’s advice is a more measured approach.

“Let the problems play out first by living through a merit cycle,” he says.

By observing a full merit cycle with the current inconsistent compensation planning processes, you'll be able to gather concrete evidence of the issues and quantify the impact – which is crucial for making your case for change later.

This observation period also gives you time to build relationships with key stakeholders and understand the nuances of how decisions are currently made.

“Making a step-change in a company’s pay principles isn’t easy,” points out Giac. 

“Over time, the inconsistency becomes deeply embedded in the company culture, with departmental leaders so used to acting like micro-CEOs for their team. The accumulation of these issues creates a state of compensation chaos – a myriad of discrepancies and misalignments.”

“That’s incredibly difficult to reverse, consuming substantial attention from management stakeholders and requiring a significant budget for pay adjustments.”

“So, you need to take your time to come up with the right plan and get buy-in on it. Most compensation leads leave before they get to that point.” 

Use data to understand the depth of the problem from a business lens

After experiencing a full merit cycle, the next step is to dig into the data and understand the true business impact of the inconsistencies.

"Use the end of the compensation review cycle as an opportunity to highlight and quantify the scale of the problem,” Giac recommends, “from budget expenditure inconsistencies, to non-compliance with the company’s pay principles, to attrition risks following employee communications of pay outcomes, and pay equity debt.”

For Giac, the most important problems to interrogate during this analysis phase are:

• Unsustainable growth. In Giac's experience, when there's no clear playbook, the tendency is for managers to try and keep their teams happy with hefty increases for many employees, without clear rationale linking pay and performance. This quickly becomes an unsustainable cost for the business – and leaves employees confused about the approach taken to review their pay.
• Talent attrition. Without a framework for market positioning and the benchmarking data to understand the market, employee pay can quickly fall behind the market, leaving you bleeding out your best performing talent. Understanding attrition patterns and talent at risk of future attrition is a must.
• Pay equity debt. Legislation like the EU Pay Transparency Directive is bringing compliance and reputational risk to inconsistent pay practices, so understanding the current state of internal pay equity in the company is becoming increasingly important for getting buy-in on the need for change.

“When compensation chaos reigns,” says Giac, “you’ll see the same old names every time amongst the list of employees with the highest merit and promotion increases. The question to analyse is: can this be genuinely down to overperformance only?” 

Tools like Ravio can be invaluable at this stage.

"The power of tools is key," Giac emphasises. "Being able to drill down and apply different business lenses to a problem, and then have the insights to hand later, is essential to making a strong argument.

For instance, a tool like Ravio can be used to compare employee compensation to external market benchmarks – crucial for understanding attrition risk through the lens of why employees might be looking elsewhere.

Equally, Ravio’s compensation review software can be used to analyse the employees who had their recommended pay adjustment overwritten by their manager – a major cause of skyrocketing costs due to inconsistent principles.

Overall, this analysis piece will help you discover concrete issues that illustrate why it’s a risk to the business – which is ultimately what you’ll need to get buy-in to make changes.

Then, bring the business risks to the attention of the ExCo and RemCo

Once you've gathered and analysed the data, the next step is to bring the rampant issues to life to key stakeholders – particularly the Executive team and Remuneration Committees.

"When the culture involves leaders reviewing their team salaries in a siloed and inconsistent way, it becomes very difficult to change later," Giac says. "You've built up established behaviours that become entrenched over time."

"To undo that, it has to come from the top down,” Giac stresses. 

“You need to be seen as a reliable partner in business success by ExCo and RemCo. Without a strong mandate from the top to turn compensation chaos to clarity, any attempt to changing business leaders’ mindset can quickly turn into a suicide mission."

So how do you get buy-in from business leaders to put out that mandate across all departments that change is needed?

For Giac, it’s all about telling the right story with the insights you’ve uncovered.

“Your findings need to resonate with leaders,” he says, “so your presentation needs to demonstrate not just that there's a problem, but exactly what the problem is costing the business, and what potential solutions may look like. Your slides need to be crisp, clear, actionable, and they need to speak the language of business.”

“Emphasising the direct impact that pay has on the bottom line and business growth, and how this can be improved through solid principles and structures, is a must.”

The solution aspect is vital – leaders need to see proactive problem-solving, not just an issue brought to the table for them to deal with.  

Giac also highlights that in companies where the founder still has a lot of involvement, there might be a greater need for education on this.

"Founders can be particularly tricky to get on board,” Giac highlights. “They often see the company as being a big family and want to keep everyone happy. To avoid upsetting some of their most senior leaders, they may be lenient towards deviations from their own approach.”

Job architecture is your foundation for consistency

The foundation for consistent compensation decisions is a robust job architecture.

"Job architecture underpins everything," Giac emphasises. “As the organisation grows and stratifies, implementing a formal job architecture with defined levels and career paths becomes necessary for benchmarking pay, managing promotions fairly, facilitating talent development, succession planning, and providing employees with clarity.”

For Giac, a comprehensive job architecture provides the structure that will ensure consistent pay practices going forward, and should address:

• Role, title, and level structures. Clear delineation between roles, levels of seniority, and job title conventions allows you to draw direct comparisons between roles, understanding the skills required (including existing skills gaps within the company) and their relative influence to business outcomes. 
• Progression pathways and succession planning. Defined career progression pathways are a must for employee engagement and retention, but also for succession planning to support the team you want in the future.
• Mapping to benchmarking data. Clarity on roles and levels then enables you to ditch the Glassdoor-like salary guesstimates, and replace them with accurate matches to comparable roles at talent competitor companies – making it possible to understand what fair and competitive pay actually looks like at different levels of granularity, i.e. per job family, job area and individual role.
• Skills identification, premium analysis, and critical role definition. A well-defined job architecture facilitates the identification of the specific skills required for each role, enabling the analysis of skill premiums when benchmarking compensation and clear identification of critical roles essential for the company’s success.

With the job architecture in place, you then need to define how compensation decisions will be made across the organisation.

For Giac, some of the most vital pieces in this are:

• Peer group – the market that you compete for with talent, to ensure you’re using relevant benchmarking data. Giac’s advice is to identify the companies that you’re hiring talent from and losing talent to for a realistic peer group. “Your business competitors may not always be on top of the list of your closest talent competitors. You’d be surprised by the differentiation in talent sourcing that exists across departments, especially at tech companies born with a mission to disrupt an industry or introduce a new trend”, Giac points out.
• Market positioning – how you aim to pay relative to the market i.e. the target percentile you will use when benchmarking roles, with the balance between payroll costs and competitive compensation a key decision to make. 
• Talent priorities and exception management – be clear about which roles or projects are strategic priorities that the company is willing to invest more into, and therefore would make exceptions in the market positioning.
• Offer positioning guidelines – clear instructions for recruiters and hiring managers on how to build a compensation offer for a new hire based on where their experience and skills places them within the salary band for the role.
• Pay review process – a structured approach to how and when compensation is reviewed for all employees, including who the decision-makers are throughout the process, is key to bringing consistency across departments. 

It’s worth noting at this point that it will take time and patience for the processes and principles you implement to become widely and consistently adopted across all departments – as we saw earlier, those ad hoc pay decisions by department leaders become very entrenched over time.

“Even with a strong mandate from the top, it takes time for the managers who have compensation planning responsibilities to adjust to the new reality,” Giac highlights. 

“They’ve been used to siloed thinking and making decisions based on their own whims, and moving from that to alignment with new structures won’t be instant.”

“In the first few merit cycles after you implement your new approach, for instance, I’d actually expect to see an increase in the amount of overrides proposed by line managers to your centralised recommendations. My advice is to prepare for this by adding a step in your timeline to run an override analysis, walk the CEO through it, and then push back on costly overrides that lack solid rationale.” 

Bring employees on the journey with you, and be open about what's broken to build trust

Finally, once you've established the new consistent structures and processes, you need to communicate them effectively across the organisation.

Giac’s advice is to communicate openly and honestly about the changes being made.

"Be honest when communicating with your employees,” he recommends, “we had an inconsistent approach, here’s why it was broken, and here's why we're changing things.”

"If you skip that and go straight to what's changing, it becomes jarring and employees immediately perceive the changes as negative, especially when it concerns something as personal to them as their paycheck. Start with the problem statement, then the solution, using context to bring people on board with context. Tell them it's broken but we're going to fix it – make a commitment and explain what’s in for them."

When you’re moving away from a previously chaotic approach, it’s also important to consider how transparent you want to be as a company (especially given the growing shift towards pay transparency), and when you want to share certain information.

“Transparency without a solid foundation can be detrimental,” Giac highlights, “if you reveal historically inconsistent salary information it will expose inequities, which could lead to increased distrust and dissatisfaction rather than fostering fairness.”

The right balance is first to focus on sharing the project with employees, filling them in on the problems that existed and the reasons for introducing more structured compensation planning. This should include:

• Regular updates on progress and milestones in implementing the new structure
• Forums for employees to ask questions and provide feedback
• Clear documentation of the new compensation philosophy and approach, including pay review processes
• Training for managers on how to discuss compensation with their teams, as well as running updated processes such as merit cycles.

Later, once you have a robust and defensible compensation planning approach in place – meaning a clear philosophy aligned with company culture, consistent job role descriptions, levels, and job title conventions, and thorough market benchmarking – you can decide how transparent you want to be with sharing salary information.

Example: The formula for consistent pay reviews at Monzo

When Giac joined Monzo, different business areas were using different principles to make pay decisions – causing costly inconsistencies and inequities to arise.

The pay review process had historically been de-centralised, allowing different departments to adopt their own principles, with up to five different approaches to how salary increases were rewarded. 

This left ample room for unconscious bias and a higher likelihood of unfair outcomes, so fixing this was an important driver in the shift from “chaos to clarity” at Monzo.

Implementing a centralised, formulaic approach meant that compensation decisions were no longer arbitrary or dependent on which department an employee belonged to. 

This consistent framework has been crucial as Monzo’s team has continued to grow – the sheer volume of employees, distinct and specialised roles, and frequency of pay decisions, means that, without clear principles and processes, compensation would simply overwhelm the capacity of the HR team. 

“Consistency is essential for creating fairness,” Giac points out, “when employees understand that the same rules apply to everyone, regardless of department or location, it builds trust in the compensation process and the company as a whole. Without a clear structure linking pay to roles, levels, and performance, justifying discrepancies becomes an intimidating task.”

There are three key elements to the pay formula that Giac introduced at Monzo:

1. Performance-driven and band-adjusted pay increases
2. Promotion vs merit increases
3. Managerial discretion

Performance-driven and band-adjusted pay increases

“Employee performance is at the core of our compensation philosophy at Monzo,” Giac explains, “and we maintain a generally high bar for performance.”

To bring consistency to how performance is rewarded, Giac introduced a pay formula for granting market-driven merit and promotion increases – with increases primarily driven by performance and marginally adjusted to reflect where employees are placed within the salary band (a common example of this being the merit matrix approach).

To ensure the new pay formula delivered the right outcomes for everyone, Giac also introduced more granular job families and related salary bands to enable better market alignment, competitive pay, and the most fair outcomes for all employees.

“This design means that employees that exceed performance expectations will continue to receive larger salary increases than those who meet (either partially or entirely) expectations, and all employees receive a marginally unique salary increase relative to where they sit in their salary band,” Giac explains, “So at the same performance level, if an employee is paid less than another in the same band, the pay gap converges over time.”

Using salary band position as a key input for the formula also ensures that decisions account for shifts in market premiums and cost of labour – salary bands are refreshed using up-to-date market benchmarks first, before salary increases are determined. 

“Salary bands are updated to reflect the latest market reality,” Giac explains. 

“For job roles where the market has shifted, the band minimum and maximum will be increased which, in turn, means that the band position for all employees in that band will shift downwards. Their recommended salary increase will, therefore, naturally be larger because we account for band position – allowing employees in these roles to catch up with the market during the merit cycle.”

In terms of performance, in-line with Monzo’s high bar on performance, around 60% of the company receives a ‘meets expectations’ performance rating. This is communicated as a great achievement and rewarded as such via a competitive pay increase – with ‘exceeding expectations’ and ‘greatly exceeding expectations’ given to less than 20% of employees combined.

Promotion vs merit increases

The pay formula Giac introduced meant that employees could actually receive a smaller increase at promotion compared to prior years, but the business was completely on board with this approach.

“Salary budgets, and therefore salary increase recommendations, are hardly ever static.” Giac explains. “They go up or down depending on financial affordability, shifts in the labour market, company growth stage and desired positioning in the market.”

“Whilst promotion increases may go down or up, they should never be lower than merit increases. Promotions should be celebrated and felt as a meaningful change, both career-wise and financially by employees”, says Giac.

At Monzo, promotions had previously guaranteed a fixed increase (e.g. 10%), with each department deciding where to set their own floor level. 

That worked for some, but for others it led to pay disparities – especially when promoting people who were already above their band or close to the top, as well as newly hired employees ending up higher in the salary band than employees who had been in the same band for a much longer time. 

In the new approach, promotion increases are based on the higher of:

1. Bringing the employee to the minimum of the salary band at their new job level
2. The standard increase using the merit cycle pay formula, but using the new salary band as the reference point for the employee’s band position, rather than their current band. 

“It ensures promotion increases are more consistent and fair,” explains Giac. “Everyone who is promoted always receives a higher increase than they would have if they were not promoted, and employees who are new to a role or level are rewarded fairly compared to those who have been meeting or exceeding expectations in that role already.”

Managerial discretion

“The success of any approach to comp planning not only has to be fair, but has to be perceived as fair by the team too”, points out Giac. 

In Giac’s experience, managers and compensation planners will always be frustrated by an approach which is absolutely rigid on pay outcomes – and given the new formula being implemented, this was an important consideration at Monzo.

“Some level of managerial discretion is always needed during pay reviews for teams to perceive the process as fair, so we never ‘red circle’ any employee who is eligible for the review,” Giac says. “But the key is to make room in the budget for this, and then be upfront with managers about when formulaic overrides can be considered and what the approval process looks like.”

Recommendations are made based on the pay formula, and then planning managers are encouraged to review and adjust the recommendation based on their knowledge of wider contextual factors. 

A common example is an employee whose pay is already positioned above the maximum for their salary band, and who is eligible to receive the minimum salary increase recommendation based on their performance score. In Monzo’s pay formula, their position in the band would be 100%, meaning no further increase is applied for their band position, but factors like long-term high performance might lead a manager to apply a discretionary additional increase.

“The last thing we’d want is high performers paid at or above the maximum of the band to feel we’ve introduced this approach to silently manage their exit from the company,” explains Giac.

“There could be good reasons that explain why they are positioned where they are, and it’s up to the manager to apply sound judgement following our company guidelines in reviewing exceptions and adjust recommendations whilst ensuring pay equity in the team is preserved.”

In summary: Key takeaways on making the shift from department-led to company-wide consistency

As we’ve seen, transitioning from inconsistent, department-led compensation decisions to a structured, company-wide approach isn't easy.

It requires patience, data analysis, leadership buy-in, lengthy implementation, and careful communication.

But the benefits are substantial: improved pay equity, better financial allocation, increased employee trust, retention of the most valuable team members, and a stronger culture of fairness and transparency.

As Giac's experience demonstrates, Reward teams can successfully navigate the transition from ‘chaos to clarity’ by:

• Observing and listening before diving into change
• Using data to demonstrate a compelling business case
• Securing leadership mandate
• Adopting a consistent logic for granting pay increases, with clear boundaries as to how managers might apply discretion
• Building a comprehensive job architecture as the underlying foundation for consistency
• Communicating transparently with employees.

In doing so, they can transform compensation from a source of confusion and inequity into a strategic advantage that supports the company's growth and values.