Latest / Beyond the Paycheck / Your Employees Are Guessing What Their Pay Means—and That's a Problem: Orion Innovation's Alana Gisleson on Transparency, AI Decision Tools, and Why FP&A Is Your Best Friend
Transcript
- Kelsey Willock (00:42) Welcome Alana Giselson, Senior Manager of Compensation and Benefits at Orion Innovation. We are so excited to have you as we kick off January. So to get started, I'd love for you to introduce yourself to our audience, where you're calling in from a little bit about your career and background and your current role today. Alana Gisleson (01:00) Thank you, Kelsey. It's nice to meet you. It's nice to be here. I am currently working at Orion Innovation. ⁓ We are a global tech firm based in New Jersey, which is where I'm calling in from. ⁓ I spent most of my career as an HR generalist, went to school at Rutgers, studied at their labor studies and employee relations program. And throughout my career, found that my passion for HR really lies in compensation and benefits in that reward space. So I've gone on to get some further certifications through World at Work and I'm now working in a primarily rewards role. Kelsey Willock (01:39) Fabulous. Well, I'm really excited to learn from you. It sounds like you've had just a phenomenal career to date so far. But before we dive into all the amazing work you've done and are doing, I'd love to get to know you better a little bit more personally. So if you'll indulge me, I'd love for you to share with us your earliest memory of money. Alana Gisleson (01:59) My earliest memory is getting, you know, $20 bills on your birthday or on a holiday and getting to take that money then to Toys R Us and getting to, you know, see all of the really fun toys and see how far your money would go or really can't go. ⁓ I think it taught me the value of like a little bit of fiscal responsibility and freedom, you know, in being able to purchase bigger toys when I saved my money. Kelsey Willock (02:29) Do remember what that first toy you bought was? Alana Gisleson (02:31) I'm sure it was something Barbie related. Kelsey Willock (02:33) What was your first job? And if you remember, what did you do with your first paycheck? Alana Gisleson (02:39) I applied to my first job the second that I could. I remember like getting all the information ahead of time and I worked at Target as a cashier and my first paycheck probably couldn't have been more than $100, know, based with all the child labor laws. And I 100 % turned around and spent that back at Target buying whatever I wanted, know, movies, books, magazines, beauty items. stopping at Applebee's for half price appetizers. You know, it was really the first taste of financial freedom where I could buy whatever I wanted. Kelsey Willock (03:16) I love that. And you're actually now the second person to say that their first job was at Target. And I think that that's one of the cooler jobs that we can all have because I just remember as a kid always begging my mom, please buy me something at Target. So how cool that you got to it for yourself. Alana Gisleson (03:31) We got an employee discount, so. Kelsey Willock (03:33) heck yeah, that's even better. Can you tell me about a recent embarrassing purchase that you've made? One of my favorite questions. Alana Gisleson (03:41) I think as I've grown up, I really tend to spend my money more on experience-based things rather than just things. So, you know, this is a hard one because I don't think I have anything, you know, embarrassing. But I will say that during the holiday season, I go a little crazy with gift buying for other people, for myself, and Amazon is showing up multiple times a day and I never know what's in those packages. So that's my embarrassing moment. Kelsey Willock (04:08) I will second that and echo. think I have four Amazon packages on my porch right now. So I'm also embarrassed, but we're in good company. How do you think your money story, whether it is that first experience getting that $20, your job at Target, or even more recently today, how do you think that story has influenced how you show up for your employees in terms of paying benefits? Alana Gisleson (04:14) Ha ha ha. I would say I'm really grounded when it comes to my approach because, you know, I learned really early on what money can and can't do. Very grateful to my mother for instilling that early on. You know, I was aware that compensation wasn't just a paycheck. It was my peace of mind, was my freedom to go out with my friends. And so, you I had to learn how to make choices and understand my limits. so now, you know, later on in my career, I really think about how pay and benefits show up in people's lives. I want things to be more important than how they look on a spreadsheet, how they feel, do they feel fair, clear, human? And, you know, to me, at the end of the day, Pay should be something that helps employees feel stable and not something that brings them stress. Kelsey Willock (05:23) You have such a unique perspective. It sounds like you really put yourself in the shoe of the person you're making decisions on behalf of. Alana Gisleson (05:29) Mm-hmm. Yeah, I try to always approach it from both the business side and the employee side. I've been in both shoes. Kelsey Willock (05:36) Right, because it's not just about the business side if you can't understand what the employee's perspective is. Thanks for sharing that. Kind of shifting into today's challenges, where do you see compensation and benefits breaking down most often today? Alana Gisleson (05:42) Agreed. ⁓ It's probably the biggest thing. starts with transparency and just basic understanding of what total rewards are. A lot of employees and organizations are not transparent enough in how they make their compensation decisions, how they calculate bonuses. And employees are in this position where they have to ask or they have to guess. so when that information is not immediately made clear, people start to fill the gap in and then the frustration and mistrust start to creep in. And I think on the benefit side, most people think about benefits as health insurance and they don't really see what the full value of the full package they have available to them and what the employers might even be paying on their behalf that the programs that they don't know they have access to. So, I'm really big on total reward statements. I think they're hugely underutilized and So is education in general. So I think when employers really communicate and educate well, the employees feel more informed, they feel more valued, and they can be confident and some of those breakdowns will start to disappear. Kelsey Willock (07:02) Have you found your organization is building these total reward statements in-house or are there any interesting tools and resources that you're using that you've seen work really well to communicate that value to employees? Alana Gisleson (07:14) So I think it has to do with what systems you have in place. A lot of payroll providers like ADP have these total rewards systems in place, but if you don't use that as your benefits administrative system, it's not so seamless. So there's so many tools out there, but really I have yet to find the best tool that brings it all together for me, unfortunately. I'm always looking for one. Kelsey Willock (07:39) I would say, you I've done hundreds of interviews with folks like yourself over the past year. I would say what you're describing is a top four problem going on right now. Alana Gisleson (07:47) Mm-hmm. Kelsey Willock (07:50) Kind of want to dig a little bit deeper into the compensation and benefits trends that you're seeing. What do you think in terms of comp and benefits trends are really going to shape the employee experience most over the next year? Alana Gisleson (08:05) ⁓ I think that it pay transparency is not a choice anymore. It's something that with laws and employee expectations and just the culture of work shifting, we have to do these things. People want to understand how their pay works, where they sit, how they can grow. And, you know, we're seeing people really focus on their career trajectory. So the companies that get ahead and are starting to already think about pay transparency from a national or global level are the ones that they view transparency as flexible and a trust building tool. Kelsey Willock (08:45) What guardrails do you think leaders need to be aware of to ensure that pay is fair and empowering for employees? Alana Gisleson (08:54) You really need to have strong policies and procedures. Documentation is so important in this space. Like, not just compensation, total rewards professionals, leaders, they need to understand the clear framework, job architecture that makes sense, and strong governance in partnership with finance, tax, compensation professionals to make these fair and equitable pay decisions. Kelsey Willock (09:23) I couldn't agree more on that angle. In terms of the breakdowns that happen when we don't provide clear pay equity, are you seeing that really affect who feels empowered versus stuck at work? Alana Gisleson (09:36) Yeah, think that there is, ⁓ it depends on the workforce. So, you where I am now, we have a pretty segmented workforce. We have some people in staffing, we have some inside employees, and the way that you approach them, the way you communicate with them has to be different. And so you have this workforce that's almost unplugged. And you need to find ways of communicating to them on their level. And so that's something that I'm always really transparent about whether giving managers the tools that they need during compensation conversations, giving them talking points, helping them better understand, because not every employee is going to have the opportunity to sit down with me ⁓ or an HRB pay. They're going to feel more comfortable talking about compensation with their managers. Kelsey Willock (10:27) and it needs to trickle down because you can't replicate yourself. Alana Gisleson (10:31) Yeah, we need to be transparent, not just with the employees, but with our executive team. We have to trust that they understand the importance and the context around the pay decisions. Kelsey Willock (10:41) Absolutely. I want to talk now a little bit more about the changes you've particularly enacted at the company or even at prior companies. What's one change that you've brought to the company that you're particularly proud of that has helped move from attracting talent to really transforming the lives of your employees? Alana Gisleson (11:02) So I am responsible in my current role. I've always been responsible for benefits since I started at Orion. The compensation has added over time. I'm really proud of the wellness program that we've built. And so we recently moved into a new space at the end of last year, and we were able to build out wellness rooms and mother's rooms using the funds and these spaces are giving people you know, the 20 minutes that they need to decompress. And so we, you know, that's something I'm pretty proud of it from a financial perspective. a lot of experience ⁓ working on our variable compensation plans and not just from variable pay but also sales incentive planning. So that's the work I'm most proud of, the things that are going to help the organization drive revenue. Kelsey Willock (11:51) And I'm curious, when getting programs like that across the finish line, what are the things that you needed to do to manage up and ensure that the team understood that value? And secondly, what's the kind of ROI you're looking for? Alana Gisleson (12:08) I believe that, you know, leaders, want to be taken along for the dirty. They want to know what the decision is. is. You bring them the problem statement, you also need to bring them the solution. ⁓ So I had a manager early on who taught me the value of building that story in a PowerPoint and managing up and getting the team, getting the executive team on board, getting finance on board. If you can get the FP &A team on your side and in the room with you, that goes a really long way. So building those relationships with other enabling functions is really important to me. And then managing it across the finish line, you you want to see things like retention. You want to see your attrition go down. You want to measure specific periods of time, like after bonus payouts. Does the attrition go down year after year? Doing surveys and asking employees, you know, how do you feel like the process went? We do a lot of employee engagement surveys at Orion. And they really do help shape our strategy moving forward. Kelsey Willock (13:14) I'm hearing a lot about engagement strategies and there's been a lot of changes that have been enacted around them. What are some things that you've done to make sure that these engagement surveys really allow people the opportunity to be highly transparent? Is it the positioning of the questions? Is it working with your brokers to improve the quality of them? How have you found the most success? Alana Gisleson (13:36) Working with your broker is extremely important, especially when it comes to like benefit surveys. And I think it's easy to try and treat the exercise like you are just, you just wanna get it over with. You need to get the answers in and you need to know how employees are feeling. I like to separate out and do a separate employee wellness and benefit survey. Typically around this time of year. open enrollment has passed, people are starting to use their benefits. And so I use that information and I truly make it confidential. I'm not seeing emails, I'm not seeing anything because I want them to really tell me what is wrong with the package that I'm working for and what I can do to make it better. Ask them questions about what sort of wellness programs they're interested in and that shapes my strategy for the year going forward. Keeping the... surveying, you know, don't want to just ask 50 questions about a bunch of different topics. if it's a like really know what your purpose is, is it a global survey? What are you trying to derive from that data? Kelsey Willock (14:41) theme I'm hearing across our entire conversation is, know, Orion's importance and emphasis on transparency, and that's even coming through on how you engage and learn from your employee audiences, such as we are not going to identify your email, we want you to share the truth and the honest. So I think it's really cool to see that come across and whether it's how do we communicate total rewards to how do we get feedback on the programs that we're providing. So I want to spend a little bit of time getting a little bit deeper into tools and innovation that you're currently seeing. It's hard to have conversations these days to not ask questions around AI. So are there any interesting tools that you're leveraging, particularly in the AI space, whether it is to improve pay equity, well-being, or more at the company? Alana Gisleson (15:32) Yeah, AI is everywhere and it is here to stay, but I think it's really, really important to just start out by saying that I truly believe it's not a job replacement tool. Total rewards professionals, we can leverage these tools, but it doesn't replace human judgment. It doesn't replace conversations with employees. You know, the best tools that I've seen out there on the market are ones that pull together actual organizational data and make it actionable. Too often you have fragments and systems where your compensation targets are stored in one system, but your actual compensation paid is stored in a payroll system in another system. And you're manually doing compensation letters. So things that make your day-to-day processing easier so you can focus on the strategy. You can look at the data aggregated and make decisions. I think in the benefit space, the best tools that I'm seeing are things that are like decision support tools that ask you actual questions about how you've used your insurance and how you plan to use the insurance in the future because I've done. probably 15 open enrollments at this point in my career. And these are all the questions I've always asked the employees. So this is the proper use of AI. Again, I don't have the opportunity to sit down and talk to every employee one-on-one as much as they'd like me to, as much as I'd like to. So this helps employees in a very human way, in my opinion. You know, I like that it takes into account your actual spending and it asks questions about, if you have any upcoming procedures. We used NIA this year through ADPay. And I mean, I definitely saw some behavior changes in doing my analytics of how people use the tool. Kelsey Willock (17:28) I love how you also just made sure to emphasize that it's not here to replace employees, but rather really enhance them. In your specific example, Alana cannot be here for everyone at all times. You're only one person, but leveraging tools like AI to communicate more effectively with folks can really impact the power you're able to make within the organization and support them. Alana Gisleson (17:52) Absolutely. Kelsey Willock (17:54) Another one of my favorite questions to ask is, what's a 30 day experiment that our listeners could try to particularly boost their financial well-being or engagement? Alana Gisleson (18:04) So something that I tried, really worked well for me. You save the amount of money of the day of the month that it is, and you do that for, I know you said 30 days, but I did it for a year at one point. And at the end of the year, I mean, you go back and suddenly you have all this money. so nobody really carries cash anymore. I did it through my, with my Venmo and I just kept putting money into an account. And at the end of the year, I had a little savings to go on. my Christmas shopping spray. Kelsey Willock (18:34) What time of the day did you do that? I love that idea. Alana Gisleson (18:38) I did it every morning, first thing. Kelsey Willock (18:40) Love it. So you didn't give yourself an out or, I missed it at 5 p.m. because I had competing priorities. You made sure to make it a priority every day. I love it. Alana Gisleson (18:47) Yeah, and 30, you know, 31 is still not that much money that that's an easy spend at Wawa on my way to work, you know. Kelsey Willock (18:55) Right. think it's so brilliant. I'm going to try that one after this conversation. Well, Alana, thank you so much for joining us, you know, as a quick recap of some of the brilliant things that I've learned from you. think that you started us off with teaching us about the importance of transparency and understanding total rewards. Organizations are just today not transparent enough. And when information is not made clear, breakdowns happen. So leveraging tools like total reward statements can be incredibly powerful. and things that we might already have access to through payroll providers like ADP. Paid transparency is no longer a choice. With laws and culture shift happening, we all need to do better. I loved how you highlighted bringing mothers rooms and wellness rooms to your space. It's such a tangible way that we can show our employees value immediately. And how do we get those across the finish line? We manage up, we communicate with finance teams, we manage across the board, as well as the executive team, the power. And then lastly, you had mentioned AI is really here to stay, but it's not here to replace our employees, it's here to enhance them. So thank you again so much for this conversation. I'm really excited for our listeners to tune in. What's the best way that they can connect with you beyond this conversation? Alana Gisleson (20:09) on LinkedIn. I love to connect. love to read other people's posts and share updates about what's going on with my continuing education and my career. Kelsey Willock (20:18) Fabulous. Well, connect with Alana on LinkedIn. Thank you so much again and have a great rest of your day. Alana Gisleson (20:24) Thank you.