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HQ: Vancouver, Canada
Industry: eCommerce/Digital Commerce
Company size: >100 employees
Key features used: Comp Reviews, Pay Bands, Total Rewards
Through the automation of compensation review creation, direct integration with their HRIS, compensation letter generation, and approval chains, Elastic Path achieved an estimated 75% time savings, freeing up resources and expediting compensation cycle management.
Working from an intuitive system and all of the data needed to make decisions in one place, managers were able to consistently and easily make pay decisions with the right context available to them.
Employee survey responses showed an increase in perceived fairness of total compensation. When asked, “I believe my total comp is fair relative to similar roles,” more employees responded positively compared to last year.
Barley enabled Elastic Path to expand compensation transparency globally through its Total Rewards portal, providing employees with more clarity on their total compensation and their position within their salary range.
Elastic Path is an eCommerce platform designed to help businesses break barriers and bring their most ambitious commerce visions to life. By championing flexibility and innovation, Elastic Path gives merchandisers the tools to push the envelope, uncover new opportunities, and deliver extraordinary shopping experiences.
Joanna Kmiec, the Global SVP of People and Culture, works closely with the executive team to build a “people first” culture that drives a strong and positive environment where employees can thrive. Supporting this mission is Ashlea, People & Culture Manager whose goal is to support and enable managers through automation and program simplification.
Together, Joanna and the P&C team drive a culture of innovation that enables the company to focus on meeting its business goals versus time spent on outdated tasks.
Before Barley, Elastic Path’s People & Culture (P&C) team wrestled with the challenging task of managing compensation cycles using disparate spreadsheets — a time-consuming and manual process that took place twice a year. Each cycle required the team to manually export data from their HRIS and build a master spreadsheet with every employee’s compensation information.
To enable the compensation process, they then had to manually split the master spreadsheet into fragmented, department-specific sheets for each executive to work through. With multiple spreadsheets handled by different executives (many of which had their own approach) and spanning three major regions with multiple currencies, there were inconsistencies on how pay decisions were made across the departments.
Once the spreadsheets were filled out and approved by finance, the P&C team had to create individual salary increase and promotions letters for every employee, manually pulling the data from Excel. This process took more than a week to complete, and had the potential for errors. Each compensation cycle was an ordeal, filled with weeks of prep work and even more time spent following up and going back and forth with leaders to finalize decisions. This constant back-and-forth stretched timelines, delayed decisions, and bogged down the team’s ability to focus on strategic initiatives.
“We need to be agile and automated, so we can focus our time on strategy rather than manual processes,” says Joanna. “This means empowering our managers to make informed decisions. They need to understand the compensation framework and ranges in order to make the right calls for their teams and the business as a whole.”
When Elastic Path’s P&C team began their search for an HRIS solution, they knew they needed an all-in-one platform to streamline processes, eliminate manual tasks, and empower managers with data-driven insights. “There weren’t many platforms truly focused on compensation — and doing it well,” Joanna notes. So when she heard Barley’s CEO, Jafar Owainati, speak about compensation at a conference, she set up a meeting between her team and Barley’s. They were immediately impressed by the platform’s intuitive design and ease of use.
Barley helped Elastic Path achieve what other solutions couldn’t: A simple way to streamline compensation reviews, empower managers with compensation information like salary bands, and enable better communication of total rewards — all from one easy-to-use platform. Instead of disparate spreadsheets, Barley integrated with Elastic Path’s HRIS system, and the P&C team eliminated the need to use spreadsheets. From there, they could easily set up their compensation cycles, build tailored guidelines per employees (and forecast their budgets), and securely share information with managers about their teams without worrying about formulas breaking or a spreadsheet being shared with the wrong person.
Another priority was around enabling global pay transparency and total rewards communication. "Communicating total rewards was a top priority for us. We wanted employees to see the full scope of what Elastic Path provides — not just in salary but in the benefits we invest in, like insurance premium contributions, training, work-from-home support, and other resources to help employees succeed,” Joanna explains. With Barley, total rewards wasn’t just an abstract concept — it enabled Elastic Path to visually showcase the full rewards package for each employee, including salary, benefits, bonuses, stock options, and other perks.
Since implementing Barley, Elastic Path has drastically streamlined its compensation processes, saving them 75% of the time they were previously spending on running a compensation review cycle.
“Before Barley, it would take me a week to generate compensation letters. Now, I can finish them in a single day. It also minimizes manual errors, and empowers our managers to quickly complete their comp reviews in under an hour, versus needing to go back and forth with our team over a period of days or weeks," says Ashlea. Once reviews are done, approvals are instant, with full visibility into what’s completed and approved, saving managers both time and confusion.
The impact on managers and executives is clear. “With all necessary data in one centralized platform — no more juggling multiple spreadsheets — managers now have a complete view of their teams,” Joanna adds. “This not only saves time but also promotes a more equitable, transparent compensation process.”
In addition to a time-saving and streamlined compensation review process, Barley has also supported Elastic Path’s mandate to roll out pay transparency globally. This includes the ability for Elastic Path employees to access the salary ranges for their roles, which are now centralized through Barley.
“Our employee value proposition centers around total rewards, and we aimed to create a complete picture that showcases how Elastic Path supports its people at every stage of life,” says Joanna. “Barley helped us communicate this value clearly, so employees could fully understand and appreciate all the ways we’re committed to their success."
The experience has been so positive for Joanna’s team, that she considers Barley as more of a partner than just a SaaS provider. “I place significant importance on the partnership aspect of any external relationship. As a leader, I only work with partners I trust and who really understand our priorities. With Barley, the partnership and support we receive, and understanding of our needs was critical — making our decision to build a lasting partnership an easy one,” says Joanna.