Workato is an enterprise orchestration platform that empowers enterprises to transform their business operations by orchestrating business processes.
Workato needed a solution to help them implement their long-term talent goals through their compensation strategy, and to build a more efficient process for leaders and managers alike.
By leveraging Pave’s Market Pricing tool, Workato’s compensation leader was able to streamline the compensation cycle, cutting his benchmarking and salary range process from 10 weeks down to 3 weeks.
Workato is an enterprise orchestration platform that empowers enterprises to transform their business operations by orchestrating business processes end-to-end and operationalizing AI across the entire organization. Designed with best-in-class security and governance, scalability, performance, and availability, Workato makes it easy for IT and business teams to orchestrate their applications, data, and experiences.
Neil Pfeiffer, Senior Manager of Global Compensation, joined the Workato team as the first compensation employee on staff. The company had many of the basics in place when it came to job levels and job families, so Neil initially took on the project of systematizing the firm's job architecture. He also partnered with talent management to develop a new approach to performance reviews, and redesign the compensation philosophy to align with the company’s long-term talent strategy. This included moving from a five-point rating scale to plotting employees on two different axes based on their goal achievement and skills growth assessment.
When Neil first joined Workato, he had not used Pave before, but he was quickly impressed with how the company was already using Pave’s Total Rewards Portal and Visual Offer Letters to help communicate the value of stock options to employees. Still, he continued to use his tried-and-true spreadsheet for job matching, benchmarking, and building salary ranges.
“That's just the way that I've always done it,” Neil said. “It was a massive spreadsheet we're talking about—something like 200+ megabytes, with lots of formulas in there. I have a developer laptop to be able to process that to be perfectly honest.”
While Neil saw long-term value in running Workatos’s entire compensation ecosystem on Pave to exert more control over how pay decisions were made, he wasn’t fully confident in all of Pave’s tools yet. To help create the world he wanted, Neil partnered with Pave’s product team to share his feedback directly with the people building the platform. Following the release of Pave’s enhanced Market Pricing & Pay Ranges tool in late 2024, Neil knew he had finally found a solution to replace his spreadsheet.
“Ultimately, what [Market Pricing from Pave] enabled me to do is free up seven weeks of time to focus on pre-planning with business partners, leaders, and managers.”
After seeing a demo of Pave’s enhanced Market Pricing tool at Total Rewards Live, Neil realized it had all the functionality he had asked for in meetings with the Pave team. Market Pricing was now fully ready to support enablement and education around the systems and processes Workato uses for its cycles. The Workato team quickly implemented Market Pricing from Pave and leveraged the tool to run two compensation cycles that both closed on schedule—a company first.
In the past, Neil noted that he would typically race to have a just-in-time delivery of salary ranges for compensation cycles. Now, with Market Pricing’s ability to handle a larger portion of the administrative and analysis tasks in the platform, Neil could take charge of the consultative elements of the cycle earlier, such as training and communication. Using Pave brought the hands-on, data-crunching portion of his benchmarking and salary range process down from 10 weeks to 3 weeks.
“Ultimately, what [Market Pricing from Pave] enabled me to do is free up seven weeks of time to focus on pre-planning with business partners, leaders, and managers,” Neil said. “Once the cycle started, I had very few managers take me up on office hours. There was so much done ahead of time, I was able to have key consultations finished two months earlier.”
Not only did Market Pricing help with processes and workflows, it also helped Neil build confidence with the leaders and managers who participated in cycles. Top executives shared unprompted feedback that using Pave was intuitive and aligned with their thought process. Managers reached out to say how helpful and smooth it was. The reception was, in Neil’s words, “incredible”.
“It made us [the People team] look awesome. Pave enabled that from a comp planning perspective.”
Implementing a compensation and talent strategy in a way that everyone in the organization understands is a big step forward for the Workato team as they seek to achieve their long-term business objectives.
Looking ahead, Neil has plans for a continued partnership with Pave, working with the support and product teams to provide feedback for the next round of product enhancements. While he’s excited about many things on the product roadmap, he’s particularly interested in potential in-app enablement features that will help him scale his expertise to build trust even further with his team.
“I’m one person, and I have 180 managers I have to enable every comp cycle. To the extent that this can be done through in-app enablement, it scales me to our managers.”
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