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HRSOFT - LTIM
What is HRsoft
HRSoft is the central hub for all things compensation. It’s a unified, purpose-built SaaS platform designed to transform complex HR processes into seamless digital workflows, keeping budgets, employees, and communications on track. HRSoft software can operate as standalone solutions or integrate seamlessly with any HRIS suite.
Role and Responsibilities
As the Senior Product Designer, I was responsible for product creation and UI/UX flows. Additionally, I maintained the design system and collaborated closely with the front-end, back-end, and product ownership teams.
Project Goal
Understand the project landscape, characteristics, attributes and process.
Gather the requirements of what constitutes a Long Term Incentive Management (LTIM), and create a product vertical for the HRSoft Compensation platform product suite.
- Automate key processes such as grant approvals, vesting schedules, and equity plan reporting.
- Improve accuracy and efficiency while reducing the risk of errors or compliance issues.
- Be flexible in accommodating and customizing different types of equity awards, performance metrics, and vesting schedules.
- User-friendly interface for both HR and employees to understand and track LTIM awards and metrics.
- Forecast the required accruals for deferred compensation.
- Integrate with other HR processes and systems such as performance management, compensation planning, and employee data management ensuring data security and compliance.
Project Outcome
With the product fully released and a publicly accessible demo available, the following features were achieved in this MVP during the release stage.
Automate the creation and approval of LTI awards through a configurable planning and award system. Enhance decision-making with data-driven insights derived from historical performance and other relevant data aligned with your compensation philosophy.[/caption]
After the awards are approved, recipients will be notified through the employee portal. To officially accept the award, employees must provide an e-signature.
Monitor the progression of the vesting schedule with HRSoft’s user-friendly dashboard. You can also manage the timeline and conditions under which LTI awards become vested, ensuring transparency, compliance and efficient administration.
HRSoft helps you monitor and record any dividends or interest earned on LTI holdings. This ensures accurate accounting and transparency in reflecting the total value of the LTIs for employees, HR and finance team stakeholders.
HRSoft offers comprehensive reporting and dashboards tailored to all your key stakeholders, including finance, executives and HR.
- Leverage real-time analysis and sophisticated filtering tools.
- Distill complex data sets and figures.
- Extract precise insights essential for effective risk management and analysis.
When an employee leaves your organization or fails to meet certain conditions in the LTI plan, use HRSoft to create a systematic process that allows you to:
- Review vested and unvested incentives.
- Ensure compliance with the plan’s rules and regulations.
- Maintain transparency, fairness and accuracy.
Once the LTI plan is complete or participants become eligible for payout, it’s time to reward employees. HRSoft streamlines this process with a branded employee portal that provides a real-time view of payout details, tax implications and other relevant information.
Project Results
Compensation Platform Released on March 2024, with two clients scheduled for release in September, with over 400+ LTI Award recipients total. And others on the way!
Article on LTIP: https://hrsoft.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-long-term-incentive-plans/
Key takeaway: Long-term incentive programs can be a powerful tool for retaining and motivating talent by promoting loyalty and a sense of ownership. A successful LTIM program must be well-designed, effectively implemented, and regularly monitored and adjusted.
Project Steps
By leveraging both Figma and Confluence, I was able to focus our conversations and structure the project to allow for a new market vertical within the compensation space.
Our process went through the steps to Define, Shape, Compare, Refine, Launch and Optimize our product as follows.
Define
Conduct Market research and consult with specialists to understand the fundamental questions about the project space.
- What is Long-Term Incentive Planning?
- How is it maintained?
- What data are planners looking for?
- What operations are made by managers?
- How do they make their bulk operations and how do they see the awards?
Shape
Compensation planners use long-term incentives to align employee interests with the company’s goals. They design plans like stock options and performance shares to motivate and retain key talent.
Industry standards group awards by attributes: type of incentive, performance metrics, vesting schedules, and objectives. Incentives include options or shares, with metrics like revenue growth. Vesting schedules outline timelines for earning awards. Plan objectives align with company goals to promote behaviors that support long-term success.
By carefully planning these attributes, compensation planners create effective incentives that attract talent and foster a culture of performance and accountability for sustainable growth.
- Cash-based awards paid out to the value stipulated during award Creation.
- Unit Based awards provide a value-driven by market or some form of reference index.
- PSU (Performance Stock Unit) means each performance share or performance share unit award covering shares of Company Common Stock and granted by the Company.
- RSU (Reserved Stock Unit) Restricted stock units will vest at some point in the future and, unlike stock options, will have some value upon vesting unless the underlying company stock becomes worthless. Allowing employees to hold instead, and wait for more favoreable market conditions to present themselves.
- Hybrid Plans¹ are plans that create awards with both cash and unit-based components.
At what intervals will an award vest, and when to start counting. Options include the Hire date, Award Date, or a Custom date. this can be set by administrators to occur at a quarterly, yearly or oftentimes a custom schedule.
I.e. 40%Upfront, followed by 20% every year over the course of three years at the Award’s aniversary.
- To maintain SOC compliance as well as the auditability of system actions, administrators are required to provide a minimum of one approval step, with both primary and secondary approvers. This ensures that the process can be carried out when an administrator is on leave, and increases the reliability of the system.
Similar to the above, this will control the payment release functionality for a certain plan. Reducing system errors, or payments to be made due to oversights.
- This is a legal requirement for a lot of companies. We’ve developed an in-house document signing solution as well as partnered with DocuSign and AdobeSign, to facilitate more elaborate legal requirements.
- Through the usage of a formula builder, we empower users to define the conditions in which an award would be forfeited as well as the outcome of those forfeits. For this, every forfeit condition had two formulas, one for eligibility and one for output.
Compare
Having concluded the initial process, I have then taken it internally to be reviewed by our primary stakeholders. From both a product direction and a technical viability standpoint. As well as pair it against the features of market-ready LTIM solutions, such as Carta, GlobalShares and Decusof.
Refine
After this discussion, we’ve iterated on the content structure and wire-frames.
Centralized user actions into a transaction panel, made changes to the view of plans, and altered how users build their vesting schedules. As well a added a vesting schedules, and notifications tab on the platform. Allowing users to access information that may be mapped in a “one to many” fashion, through our tab system.
Launch
Working with a cross-functional team meant daily standups with developers on both the front-end and back-end teams. Attending scrum ceremonies to clarify any questions and further our Jira Boards and annotated design system.
Optimize
We’ve gathered initial stakeholder feedback as well as created a post-engagement survey.
When navigating the post-engagement part of the project, we’ve circulated surveys and allowed users to self-appoint for user interviews.
Our surveys indicated that clients were overall, with a rating of 4 out of 5 in 87%, of respondents, quite happy with the product. With recommendations to copy/content.
These recommendations were fed through the pipeline and helped populate our backlog for future releases.
User interviews indicated that the priority of information on the central panel could be optimized. Although this is a very customizable area of the product. The default configuration could be enhanced.