Allbirds: A Unified View of Employee Compensation & Total Rewards

Summary Key Wins Background Challenge Solution Looking Ahead

Summary

As a startup Allbirds uses Pave to communicate the compelling upside of their equity to compete against larger companies in recruiting top talent.
Previously directing employees between a multitude of platforms for compensation questions, Allbirds now uses Pave as a one-stop-shop that creates a personalized view of all salary, equity and benefit details.
Their HR & People teams are also now able to leave spreadsheets behind, significantly streamlining the merit cycle process to make data-informed decisions around compensation using Pave’s Compensation Planner.

Key Wins

Enhanced total rewards visibility and improved candidate experience via Visual Offer Letter.
Saved time and boosted productivity by switching from spreadsheets to Pave’s Compensation Planner
Centralized salary, bonus, equity and benefits information into one view for employees through fast and painless integrations.

“The decision to continue to grow with Pave was an easy one - it was unanimous buy in and a no-brainer for our team to move forward.”

Evan Salisbury, Director of Total Rewards & People Operations

Background

Allbirds is an apparel and fashion company founded in New Zealand that specializes in manufacturing eco-friendly wool shoes. Since its founding in 2014, the company has experienced rapid growth, raising over $200M in funding, and opening retail stores in countries such as the Netherlands, France, Germany, China, and Japan to complement its E-commerce business.

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Challenge

As a rapidly growing startup with demand for the company's footwear skyrocketing, Allbirds needs to hire, onboard, and retain the best talent. A key challenge in the hiring process was how to effectively communicate the huge potential upside of equity at a hyper growth startup to highlight more than just salary alone.

Allbirds uses Carta for equity, ADP as their HRIS system, and a variety of vendor partners to manage their employee perks and benefits. Without a comprehensive view to join these systems, employees lacked clarity around the full picture of their compensation (often focusing exclusively on salary), as well as where to find answers to their compensation & benefits questions (usually sending them directly to the People team).

Lacking a comprehensive overview of employee total compensation also made their merit cycle process a challenge for managers.

Realizing these inefficiencies, the company began to look for a solution that accomplished the following:

For Candidates: Streamlined the offer letter process to easily communicate the equity upside.
For Employees: Unified their compensation, equity and benefits platforms to create a single picture.
For Managers: Centralized all forms of an employee’s compensation variables and current equity plan to streamline decision making in the merit cycle process.

Solution

As Allbird’s Director of Total Rewards & People Operations, Evan Salisbury turned to Pave to create a single source of truth for all individualized compensation & rewards data that employees, candidates, and People teams could leverage. Upon seeing a demo of Pave for the first time, Evan recalls thinking “this is what I’d been hoping someone would come up with a solution for, and why I was so excited when I first saw it.” The platform offered both the unified view of compensation lacking in the current. Allbirds merit review process, plus a candidate & employee portal that tied every aspect of Total Rewards together to provide comprehensive insights.

Allbirds first implemented Pave’s Visual Offer Letter, quickly providing candidates with a powerful visual tool that modelled the complete package without the full legalese used previously. In addition to providing a compelling and easily navigable candidate experience, the Visual Offer Letter better reflected the level of care the company put into extending each offer, which assisted in closing top talent.

For managers and People teams, Allbirds proceeded to roll out Pave’s Compensation Planner during their next company merit cycle process. Now, not only was employee salary, bonus, and equity information all in one system, but both visibility and budgets were dynamic for each manager, enabling a personalized view of their reporting teams. These dynamic permissions completely removed the need for spreadsheets, instead offering clear, standardized visuals of employee positions in their compensation bands for a streamlined calibration process. This enabled a data driven approach to employee leveling and adjustments, where all raise & promotion decisions were made following a consistent recommendation framework that considered key factors, and generated equitable results.

One added bonus that Allbirds experienced during their Pave onboarding: the speed and ease of integrating their HR systems, with Evan noting, “one of the pieces that I was most impressed with was the ease of the integration process - all integrations are not considered equal: this was promised to be easy and it was.”

“I didn’t want to have to log into multiple systems to extract data and smash it all together in excel. Pave solves this problem, saving me time and energy, which for fast moving startups, is extremely valuable.”

Evan Salisbury, Director of Total Rewards & People Operations

Looking Ahead

After early success with Pave’s Visual Offer Letter and Compensation Planner, Allbirds is continuing their customer journey by onboarding the rest of the company to the Total Rewards solution. This Total Rewards portal will both better educate & inform employees on their equity (a topic that can be frequently misunderstood at startups), and provide a central hub for all compensation and benefits details. Looking back on their journey with Pave, Evan is excited by what their team has accomplished and what lies ahead, noting “the decision to continue to grow with Pave was an easy one - it was unanimous buy in and a no-brainer for our team to move forward.”