How Aware Improved Employee Retention and Offer Acceptance Using Pave Foundations

Summary Key Wins Background Challenge Solution Looking Ahead

Summary

Aware’s AI Data Platform provides real-time employee listening at scale, unlocking valuable insights about the business while securing the digital workplace.
Aware enlisted Pave to help them update their pay bands to align with market data and to ensure pay equity.
Since adding Pave Benchmarking and Foundations, Aware has enjoyed increased retention, a more seamless hiring process, and reduced operational inefficiency.

Key Wins

Increased retention of key employees by implementing more equitable compensation bands backed by data.
Created consistency around hiring practices by introducing more processes around how compensation offers are determined.
Reduced operational inefficiency by using a software purpose-built for streamlined compensation band creation.

Background

Aware AI Data Platform that transforms digital conversation data from Slack, Teams, Zoom and more into insights to improve employee engagement and the customer experience. Founded in 2017, Aware currently has 115 employees working remotely across the U.S.

Challenge

A key pillar of the Aware culture is pay equity, especially as it relates to market rates. Markets change quickly and Aware recognized they needed to be more nimble in attracting and retaining highly marketable employees. Given the organization had always had strong retention, this turnover prompted Aware’s People Team leaders to revisit the company’s compensation philosophy and pay bands. The team realized their pay bands were lagging current market expectations and sought out a way to utilize more data in compensation decisions.

Additionally, Aware’s pay bands lived in a series of spreadsheets, meaning a lot of manual labor was required every time the team wanted to update the numbers. Aware selected Pave as a partner to access best-in-class comp benchmarks and build bands.

“We needed to update our bands because it was having an impact on retention. We viewed it as foundational to helping us grow quickly and retain key talent.” – David Medwid, Head of Talent Acquisition, Aware

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Solution

Aware initially brought in Pave for its compensation benchmarking data, then later expanded to Pave Foundations for end-to-end support with building their bands. Since implementing Pave, Aware has been able to:

Improve retention: Pave’s best-in-class compensation benchmarking data has helped Aware in their pursuit of a pay equity strategy consistent with the market for its employees across multiple locales. During implementation, the Pave team guided Aware on how to implement their various pay bands into the software, and adjust them based on the latest market data. Since switching to Pave benchmarking data, the company has been able to retain high performers, and has seen average tenure grow from 1.5 years to nearly 2 years.
Create more consistency in hiring practices: Prior to Pave, Aware was in search of more process around compensation and letters to candidates. Now that they have access to Pave’s benchmarking data, the team can easily identify a minimum and maximum salary for a given role, and partner with the finance team to ensure alignment with internal budgeting requirements. So far this year, Aware’s offer acceptance rate is 93%—the highest rate they’ve ever observed. What’s more, Pave’s data has allowed Aware to share their bands publicly in job postings in compliance with new pay transparency laws.
Earn buy-in from leadership: Having data-driven bands maintained in a purpose-built system has streamlined conversations with leadership. The People Team can easily present the latest bands and explain the methodology behind them, making it easy for leadership to understand and justify compensation decisions.
Streamline compensation-related work: Aware used to update compensation bands quarterly through a series of spreadsheets—a process Medwid estimates took his team upwards of one month to complete due to numerous manual workflows (data parsing, tagging, leadership approvals). Pave Foundations streamlines this process with an interface purpose-built for compensation bands. The Aware team can now build their job families and compensation levels directly in Pave, pull real-time benchmarking data to construct the bands, and custom edit the bands to align with their internal compensation philosophy.

“Pave has introduced so much more structure around how we handle compensation while saving us time and making everything a lot less stressful. The comprehensiveness of the platform and its ease of use allow us to operate with a lot more confidence.” – David Medwid, Head of Talent Acquisition, Aware

Looking Ahead

With Foundations and Benchmarking in place, Aware’s People team is now looking forward to next quarter’s pay band review cycle so they can showcase the productivity gain Pave has provided them.