2018
Financial Services
Private
Altruist is the modern custodian for independent RIAs, combining a self-clearing brokerage firm with intuitive software for account opening, trading, reporting, and billing – all in one streamlined solution. In doing so, the company is on a mission to make independent financial advice better, more affordable, and more accessible.
When preparing for their most recent compensation review cycle, Nanea Fujiyama, Director of People at Altruist, decided to apply those same principles by ditching spreadsheets and moving to a more streamlined approach with a people operations platform. Here’s how she delivered on that goal.
Previously, Nanea and the Altruist team lived in spreadsheets for compensation data. But that was challenging to say the least, especially when it came to managing comp band data. Of course we also can’t forget the headache of controlling access for collaborators – from the People and Finance teams to executives and frontline managers.
In search of a better solution, Nanea quickly found what she was looking for in ChartHop. Altruist already used ChartHop to manage their org chart, review people data, and more, and it once again stood out as the clear winner among the comp review solutions Altruist evaluated.
“We looked at various solutions for comp reviews, and the one thing that stuck out from the beginning about ChartHop was the trust we had in knowing who has access to which information and that everyone would have the right information they needed to make comp proposals,” Nanea explains. “ChartHop already knows our org hierarchy from our org chart, so I didn’t need to set people up as managers or stress about access to information, which made it a lot easier than other tools we evaluated.”
Nanea also appreciated that even though their org hierarchy was already set up based on their org chart, she could still easily change who could make comp proposals. For example, she was able to reassign direct reports to a different manager for comp proposals in cases where the current manager was on leave or had just started and didn’t have enough context.
Beyond better access controls, not having to spend time building, creating, and maintaining a monster spreadsheet led to enormous time savings for Altruist’s People, Finance, and executive teams. In turn, Altruist’s leaders were able to redirect their time to having more productive performance conversations and making better decisions.
“We didn’t have to spend hours of time trying to figure out when was the last time someone had a comp change or are they in the right pay band? We were confident in those answers since all that information lived in ChartHop, so we were able to repurpose our time on more productive and useful conversations,” Nanea says.
And what’s more productive than making more fair and more equitable compensation decisions?
Our first comp review cycle using ChartHop was an overwhelming success. It was kind of incredible. I kept holding my breath through the whole cycle waiting for something to go awry because it was going too well; people were sticking to their budgets and doing things on time.
NANEA Fujiyama
Director of People, Altruist
Because ChartHop provided easy access to information like comp history, pay bands, and performance ratings in a single place, Altruist’s managers and comp committee felt confident in their decisions. It also eliminated the need for multiple, hours-long meetings to walk through data on each employee.
Nanea shares: “ChartHop made it really easy to administer a budget and compare proposals based on pay bands and performance ratings within teams to make sure we were being fair across the board. That process was a lot more streamlined this time around because we were in a visual platform that worked really well instead of in spreadsheets.”
Nanea knew right off the bat that ChartHop would make Altruist’s comp review cycle easier for the People team, but what she didn’t expect was how easily everyone else involved would adopt the new approach.
“Historically, it’s been challenging for us to get people to adopt a new solution, even if it’s just a new part of a system we already use. So I was planning to have to spend a lot of time training our leaders on comp reviews in ChartHop and expected there would be a lot of hand holding, but I ended up not having to do that. It wasn’t hard to get people to use ChartHop at all because the comp reviews module was so intuitive and easy to use,” Nanea says.
In fact, because ChartHop’s comp reviews were so easy for everyone, Nanea ended up canceling multiple training sessions. Instead, she repurposed that time to coach people on the actual numbers they were putting into comp proposals.
“I just could not believe how many leaders told me how easy it was for them to use ChartHop. And that had a huge impact, because all of our managers felt empowered to actually manage their own budget and make smart proposals based on comp history and pay bands. As a result, they also felt a lot more comfortable having the actual compensation conversations with their direct reports,” she continues.
According to Nanea, this comp review cycle helped her People team achieve one of their big goals of closing the “knowing vs. doing gap” for managers: “Managers often know what they need to do but have trouble actually doing those things. ChartHop’s comp review module made it a lot easier to close that gap for comp proposals, so it was a big hit with our leaders.”
Altruist has found the answers they were looking for when it comes to comp reviews and more in ChartHop, and Nanea already sees opportunities to do more.
She concludes: “I definitely see ChartHop being our consolidated HR solution in the future. One consistent piece of feedback from employees is how many tools we use as a company, and I would love for employees not to feel that way about HR. I would love to reduce our HR tech stack, and I see ChartHop as being able to help us do that by acting as the primary solution for 1:1s, performance reviews, people data and analytics, comp reviews, and so much more.”
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