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Published on: Case Study

Case Study: Jo Dogherty, Chief People Officer, Verastar

Type of Activity

A 12 month reward transformation programme to design, build and implement a market aligned pay framework across the Verastar Group, and wider strategic reward expertise to support growth and business transformation.

The Challenge

Verastar is a business to business essential services providers with c 1000 colleagues, covering call centre, head office and specialist job roles including Insurance and Fin Tech. The business has grown rapidly, with plans to scale further, and the reward architecture needed a strategic review and transformation to support this evolution and further growth.

The Approach

Gemma supported the team with the full range of reward activities including:

Job evaluation – designed and implemented a bespoke job evaluation framework, using levelling methodology to ensure roles are sized consistently across the organisation. This framework was consistent with Willis Towers Watson principles, to support accurate pay benchmarking

Pay benchmarking – full scale review of over 300 unique job descriptions, assessing these compared to the Willis Towers Watson survey data to find the best job match and salary range

Pay structure design – using this architecture Gemma then built an integrated pay framework, with roles grouped into job families, to support scalability and growth.

Pay progression principles & governance – designed core principles and processes govern pay progression, and internal salary and remuneration committee terms of reference

Reward analysis – As part of the reward recommendations proposed, following the job evaluation work, Gemma completed some key reward analysis activity, providing insights on the impact of pay decisions on: gender, role grade and department.

The Outcome

The company is now in the process of implementing this fully transformed reward framework, with clearer and more robust architecture to support market competitive salary decisions and pay governance.

Gemma is a strong technical reward expert, with deep technical understanding, in addition she is also amazing to work with, making sure workloads are managed in a straightforward and simple way. I would highly recommend Gemma as a reward partner.