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HQ: Toronto, Canada
Industry: Life Sciences, Software
Company size: >200 employees
Key features used: Comp Reviews, Pay Bands, Total Rewards
With Barley, preparing for compensation reviews now takes less than half a day, and the entire review process—once a month-long task—can be completed in under two weeks.
With everything from key dates to approval chains centralized in Barley, compensation review meetings with managers were cut in half — from 40 to 20 total meeting hours.
Using Barley, BioRender automates the creation of salary increase letters including spot bonuses and variable pay changes. Instead of drafting each letter manually, their HR Team can quickly generate accurate letters in just a few clicks, cutting letter generation workload by 75%.
With Barley’s Total Rewards portal, BioRender employees have a clear and easy way to understand their total rewards package. They can visualize their stock options, explore equity scenarios, and get a comprehensive overview of their perks and benefits.
Founded in 2017, BioRender is a software platform for life sciences communication. Recognizing the critical need for effective visual storytelling in science, BioRender created the world’s first tool to help scientists create and share beautiful, professional scientific figures. BioRender’s solutions are used by hundreds of notable institutions such as Genentech, Roche, CSL Behring, AbbVie, Cell Press, and AstraZeneca.
Emma Johnson works as a Senior Compensation Analyst at BioRender. She helps the company maintain competitive compensation structures and align its compensation strategy with market trends. In her role, Emma conducts market benchmarking analysis, oversees the end-to-end compensation review process, and supports other key compensation programs at BioRender to attract and retain top talent.
Before implementing Barley, BioRender’s compensation review cycles relied heavily on spreadsheets. The process was fragmented across 30 separate spreadsheets—one for each manager. This made compensation review cycles slow, manual, and prone to errors. Any update to an employee's data, such as a salary increase, had to be accurately reflected across multiple spreadsheets which led to version control problems, inconsistencies, and significant time spent on repetitive data entry.
“This process created a lot of extra work for people,” says Emma. “Our approval chain was unclear, and managers didn’t know who to send approvals to or when.”
Once the compensation review process was complete, letter generation was another huge undertaking for Emma’s team. Every salary increase or promotion letter had to be drafted and sent individually, taking substantial time and increasing the risk of human error. As a result, rather than being a quick and easy process, compensation and performance reviews took months to complete.
Showcasing BioRender’s Total Rewards was another challenge. Employees lacked a clear understanding of the non-cash value in their employment packages, including the value of their equity compensation. BioRender wanted to reinforce its dedication to employee satisfaction, competitive compensation, and transparency.
After facing ongoing compensation challenges and rapid business growth, Emma made the decision to seek out a compensation management platform. “This is something we wanted to do for a long time. I knew we needed to streamline our processes, improve our data accuracy, and have less moving pieces to increase efficiency.”
Emma took her time to evaluate various options, but she ultimately chose Barley for its ability to:
1. Be configurable to their unique structure: BioRender is able to centralize all of their pay bands based on their unique buckets.
2. Share compensation to inform offers and pay decisions: Barley’s access controls allow BioRender empower their team with the context to inform future offers.
3. Present a complete picture of total rewards, including equity: With Barley, BioRender employees can access a 360-degree view of their total rewards package that provides details on their salary, equity, perks, and benefits.
In terms of onboarding and implementation, Emma says it was a simple process. “After integrating with our HRIS, it was easy for us to analyze and validate our data, run test compensation cycles, and feel confident that we were running our process with accurate information.”
Barley was also able to deliver new functionality for BioRender. One standout feature was enabling projections of equity compensation within Barley’s Total Rewards in a dynamic way. In addition, Barley supported custom field mapping with BioRender’s HRIS to pull in additional data that was unique to their organization.
Since implementing Barley, Emma’s team has experienced significant improvements in time savings, data accuracy, and overall efficiency. Her team no longer has to manually input information into dozens of spreadsheets. With Barley, Emma’s team works from a single source of truth which has reduced how long it takes to conduct salary reviews and manage compensation. “Prep time is also exponentially faster. What once took three full workdays to create our compensation spreadsheets now takes less than half a day,” Emma notes. As a result, compensation review cycles, which previously lasted a month or more, can now be completed within two weeks.
With Barley, direct managers have more clarity into the comp review process as key information, such as review deadlines, approval workflows, and recommended budgets, are automatically included in their dashboard. “We still have live meetings with our managers, but instead of taking 40 hours, the entire process now takes about 20,” says Emma.
In addition, managers have easy access to pay bands without needing spreadsheets. They can show their direct reports exactly where they fall within the band and what they’re working towards. This promotes pay transparency and internal equity, and drives motivation for employees.
Another benefit is that their HR Coordinator’s workload has been reduced by 75% when it comes to promotion and salary increase letter generation. Instead of manually creating individual letters, she can now simply consolidate the data for HRIS uploads and use Barley’s customizable comp letters which automatically syncs the correct employee information.
These improvements enable Emma’s team to focus on more strategic tasks, support fair and transparent compensation processes, and drive greater productivity.