Totally Rewarding Chats | Ep. 17: Challenges Facing Today's Compensation Teams

The role of technology in addressing compensation challenges

In this conversation, Sean Luitjens interviews Rekha Gurnani, an expert in compensation and people analytics. They discuss the biggest challenges facing compensation teams, including capacity, capability, and the tension between standardization and personalization. They also delve into the hurdles of performance management and the importance of effective communication. The conversation highlights the role of technology in addressing these challenges and the need for transparency and compliance in compensation practices.

In this episode:

• Host, Sean Luitjens, General Manager of Compensation Benchmarks, Visier

• Guest, Rekha Gurnani Chowdhury, Founder, Compensation Consultant, and Salary Neogtiation Coach, The Comp Ally

Sean Luitjens (00:00.849)
All right, another totally rewarding chat. And I am about to, I've practiced your name and I'm gonna try to get it right. But Rika Gurnani. All right. So I'm off to a good start. We can just close now. I got one thing right. My week is good. That's a good start for me. I'm so awful at names. I jokingly is a nerd or

Rekha Gurnani (00:10.636)
Yeah!

Yup.

Rekha Gurnani (00:20.11)
Sign money.

Sean Luitjens (00:27.653)
The kids make fun of me have a better chance of remembering your social security number than I do your name. I'm awesome.

Rekha Gurnani (00:32.896)
Okay, well you're a numbers guy. You're a numbers person, so that makes sense. You're a contact.

Sean Luitjens (00:38.203)
Yeah, that's the politically correct way. My kids aren't always so nice when they say it that way. So thanks for joining. I think the easiest way to do it is usually have you do your own introduction. Give me your elevator pitch, however many floors you need in your elevator. It'd be great to get your background.

Rekha Gurnani (00:56.75)
Yeah, well I live in San Francisco Bay Area and we don't have a lot of tall buildings so I should probably perfect a really short elevator pitch, right? Because of earthquakes we're not allowed to build the buildings too tall. But anyways, so I have been in the compensation space about 12 years. I started out with consulting at Radford for about five years and then I've been in corporate tech industry roles since then at Symantec and then Atlassian and most recently at Box where I was head of compensation and people analytics and right now I'm taking a little bit of a break and looking for my next role and also doing some independent consulting work which has been a lot of fun and very rewarding so yeah that's my pitch for the moment.

Sean Luitjens (01:46.139)
You're going to get stuck, going get lured into the world of consulting. Getting to solve multiple problems all the time and then go to the next problem.

Rekha Gurnani (01:50.062)
I hope so. I hope so. It's fine. like... Sorry.

Rekha Gurnani (02:00.146)
I love the variety of that, so I would love it if I'm getting a lot of those because I like changing things up. I get bored if I have to do the same thing for too long.

Sean Luitjens (02:10.929)
So to prove you're a human, do you do for fun outside of work? Hobbies? Anything else?

Rekha Gurnani (02:18.382)
Well, I am a human but a mom of two kids so I don't know what kind of hobbies do you know can you have as a mom? This summer I'm spending a lot of time with my kids in the pool. We got this YMCA membership so we're there almost every day. We're swimming all the time. Fun fact is I didn't learn how to swim as a kid. I learned how to swim in my 20s so I'm not a very good swimmer so this is the summer where I've decided it's gonna be

I'm going to go to the deep end. I'm going to swim like my goal is to swim like 25 laps without stopping. So like I'm pushing myself. So try to become a better swimmer and just get out there. I know you said earlier, you're out in the sun a lot. I'm not. My vitamin D is so low. My doctor is like, are you like ever getting out in the sun? So that's why I was like, I need to get a good sunscreen. I need to get out there. And you know, I'm right now taking a lot of like vitamin D artificially. So I want to get some natural

Sean Luitjens (03:14.951)
It's some real summer. So we call them as a triathlete. I didn't learn until I was older too. So an adult onset swimmer. That's how we politically correct call it because people who swam when they were kids, they could not do it for 40 years and they jump in the water and it's very natural. And it's really hard to learn as an adult. So all I would tell you is like, be patient because as an adult onset swimmer, is, it is significantly harder. I don't know what the science is behind it, but it's harder. I'm stoked you're up there.

Rekha Gurnani (03:14.988)
So yeah, that's what I'm trying to do right.

Rekha Gurnani (03:42.688)
It's so much harder. Yeah, yeah. just, cause you know, as an adult, you're like, overthinking it. So as a kid, you're just jumping in and just letting sort of your natural instinct take over. So yeah. Yeah.

Sean Luitjens (03:53.809)
Probably, that probably has a lot to do with it. So when we were chatting before, one of the reasons I wanted to chat with you is you've got this diverse set of background and you're at Radford and you've been at different companies and so you've got a couple different perspectives. so I guess the easiest way to open it up is if I had you to throw out at you the three biggest challenges you've seen comp teams trying to tackle in the past several years. What are those and then we'll kind of dig in.

Rekha Gurnani (04:20.173)
Yeah, I mean, think it's changed, you know, over the years. mean, in my 12 -ish years in comp, it's, I don't know, it's kind of just really depends on what the current trends are, what are we dealing with at the moment. I think for now, when I was thinking about this question, I'm thinking like most recently at the current time, what are comp teams dealing with? And the three things I would say is, you know, capacity, capability and...change, just the sheer volume of change, right? So what I mean, so I'll go through each one. like capacity, what I mean is, you know, lean teams. I mean, I know, you know, the tech industry, speak mostly with my experience being mostly in tech industry and in my case, mostly public companies, you know, enterprise.

Enterprise type companies. We're all running lean teams, know HR in general and comp specifically as well doesn't get always I've never had a fully staffed team. Let me put it that way. We're always being asked to do more with less.

So just that, the capacity of the team, right? Like I've had, you know, running some several global programs, annual cycles, multiple cycles, all of that. The program management piece and then the analytics piece, the survey submissions, your business partnering, all of it, right? So just running those lean teams, doing more with less. And then of course, like budgets being as small as they are.

Right now, just running comp cycles, trying to differentiate for comp with a 1 % budget is a challenge. And we're doing it. And we're the very small team and all hands on deck. So definitely capacity is one of the biggest challenges. And then the second thing is capability. And what I mean by that is,

Rekha Gurnani (06:12.43)
what defined success as a comp professional a few years ago is a little bit different and what defined success today is different. So on a comp team, like when I was designing my like ideal comp team a few years ago, the kind of capabilities and strengths I would be looking for is a little bit different. And now you need people who can do, you know, there's so much around keeping in...keeping track of all the changing legislation, right? Keeping track of all the, like if you're in a global company, every country that you're in has, there's different laws changing, legislation happening, pay equity reporting requirements changing, all of that stuff. So someone who's kind of really partnering closely with your legal team or just keeping track of all of that, staying ahead of that, and then communication, right?

The big thing now is we're communicating about pay and comp in general, like so much more than we ever did. Right? For years and years, like my first, I would say seven, eight years working in comp, everything was so like, it was all about maintaining confidentiality, right? Everything was like password protected. And then I'll send you the file, the separate email or the password.

Like the whole thing was all around protecting this information and only need to know basis and this and that and now it's like completely blown open and everybody's so we have to figure out how to talk about pay in a way to ensure that employees feel like they have confidence in that pays being determined in an equitable way and there's like a way to kind of explain these very complicated concepts in a simple way and maintain this build trust and transparency and all of that. So I never really looked for someone in my comp teams before who could do like comps and stuff like that. And now I do need that capability on my team. So that's an interesting challenge that think comp teams are dealing with. And then I think the third one, which

Rekha Gurnani (08:13.324)
I was trying to articulate this. I feel like the more I'm talking to people right now, there's two very strong opposing forces coming at us in comp and they're very, like they're completely opposite.

So I don't know where we're going to land as a function, but there's this desire for greater standardization because the more we talk about pay equity, the more we talk about transparency, I feel like there's a need to become more more standardized. But on the other hand, there's also this demand for hyper -personalization of rewards at the same time. So there's these two opposing forces, and I don't know where we're going to land with this. I'd be interested to see as well, but

Sean Luitjens (08:50.801)
Yeah.

Rekha Gurnani (08:56.386)
That's another challenge that I'm sure teams are dealing with.

Sean Luitjens (09:01.905)
So how have you seen, let's tackle those in a couple, in order, how have you seen the capacity side? Have you seen teams either leverage tech, prioritize and let things drop? Like, there's obviously a couple different ways you can tackle it. Or if they are prioritizing items, what have you seen at the top of the list and what have you seen kind of drop down to the, you know, I'll get to it if I can get to a list.

Rekha Gurnani (09:27.05)
Yeah, that's a good question. think for sure the reliance on tech has increased and has to, right? There's really no way to do it all without that, right? And right now, as we know, all in the budget constraint environment, especially in tech. So staffing and all of that is definitely a challenge. So.

Yep, there's a greater demand for relying on the tech stack and having your tech stack also do more with less, but that's definitely happening. And in terms of prioritization, I think what's happening right now is there's just so much being driven by the legislation changes and things like that. For example, back in 2022, when California passed the paid transparency law, we just had to drop everything and say, we have to be compliant. It's not only a compliance risk, it's also a reputational risk because...

Come Jan 1st, there were already folks on influencers on LinkedIn, actually like naming names and putting companies, you know, calling out companies that weren't posting ranges or like we're posting too wide of ranges or too narrow ranges or whatever else. So there was, there's this pressure to like prioritize that. And now with like the EU's pay directive coming up, I think people are just trying to get ready for that. So I think that's kind of taken over. Like where do we absolutely need to put our limited tech investment in and or human resource investment in. So that's, think, how we're prioritizing a lot. There's a lot of just reporting requirements, legislation coming at us. So that's, yeah, and then, of course, relying on tech to get it done in a faster way, but also in a smoother way and in a better way, right? Like, for example, pay equity analysis.

Rekha Gurnani (11:29.676)
That's like no longer just a nice to have. It's kind of becoming more and more legal and compliance requirement. So I do see more and more companies trying to find tech solutions for that work that used to kind of either be done by an analyst on your team or just some companies didn't do it at all. So I think that's the trend now.

Sean Luitjens (11:51.303)
So I'll leave capability aside because I think everyone's seen that transformation. But actually, I talk about all the time, actually, this kind of issue of we need to be the same. And it gets misconstrued, I think, a little bit. But we need to be the same and have more standardization. But we need to differentiate. And I think that message is interesting out there. I do think there's some misunder.

Rekha Gurnani (12:10.434)
Yeah.

Sean Luitjens (12:15.631)
So misunderstanding around the pay equity piece. So pay equity isn't same pay for the same job. It's basically the same pay for the same performance. So you still have the ability to differentiate.

For me, think though, it's that understanding and then getting all the systems in place. And I don't know if you've seen this because, you know, if you're going to differentiate by performance, obviously we're a little biased, you know, having a comp planning solution that can pay for performance and do all the cool tech things, but it's very reliant on having a really good performance system. And so you've got to have the performance numbers because if everyone's a five, it becomes really hard to differentiate or if different departments, you if you don't have segmentation inside your tech stack, then how do you deal with different departments scoring different for performance? And managers aren't dumb, right? Managers will game the system. So they got about a one cycle before you fix the problem and then they'll figure out how to get more money.

Rekha Gurnani (13:12.59)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And we're jumping ahead and we'll definitely talk about this, but I one of the questions which you'd asked me to think about was the biggest challenge for HR teams to solve. I was going to talk about performance management because that's like something we still haven't figured out. And we'll definitely get back to that topic. But yes, I'm 100 % aligned. That is the biggest thing we need to get right before we can do anything else. Because everything's you're lying on.

Sean Luitjens (13:33.531)
Let's tackle that because I was going to talk next about the biggest hurdles, but if that's the first hurdle, let's just go right in. So why?

Where do you see, so, you know, it's interesting. I've never been a practitioner. I usually tell people it's because that looks hard. And so the one place I haven't really played a lot is performance management. And so I'm a little bit on the altruistic side, always the wrong comp. Like the assumption is, and I know it's wrong, that the performance stuff is right. So what is the hurdle? Why can't people get a good solid performance system in place?

Rekha Gurnani (14:07.862)
Yeah, I mean, I think that is the biggest hurdle for us to solve. There's just been so much. It is hard to do it right, right? So I think the biggest challenges are. Manager capability, right? It's not easy to. Really be able to differentiate and calibrate and have that vision across organizations. So if I'm a manager and I have like two people, right, how am I supposed to, and they're both good performers, right? Like, but then we expect performance management to be done at like, obviously an org -wide level. So there's that. And then, but the frontline manager is the one who has to go and communicate it. So I think the biggest challenge is.

One, manager capability around understanding performance and being fully bought into how performance management is being done. And then the communication aspect of it, right? And then the other thing is just in tech at least, there's a very strong opinion from tech leadership on how performance management is...the messaging around it and ratings and things like that, in the, like people don't focus on the message itself, but just kind of get hung up on like the labels and the ratings and things like that. Right?

So it's like, I'm a three or four and all of that. How, so over time, the solutions that CHROs and good CHROs have been trying to implement and good talent management teams have been trying to implement is how do we make it not like this once a year annual event and it's like this big doomsday, it's like report card day when you are a kid in school. It's not, it shouldn't feel like that, right? It's like, it's, it's, it's an ongoing conversation. You, you know, have those very, very frequent check -ins. You, we've done, there's been a lot of research on like the labels to use and how to take away some of that emotional sort of association with saying you're an average performer, you're an excellent performer, whatever else, right? and...

Rekha Gurnani (16:18.904)
How do we make it more about the message itself on like, not even about like how you're performing relative to peers, but just like more about like, are you relative to like what the expectations are for this role, for this job, right? And so for that, the career frameworks have to be very well defined and objectively defined for it. And organizations just aren't there yet.

First thing is we need to be clear in telling people what the expectations are. And that's already like extremely subjective right now. Right. So so I think there's many, many, many challenges to performance management. I still haven't like figured out what's the best way to do it. There are some solutions like the more ongoing conversations, the monthly check ins or the quarterly check ins. think that creates a little bit of better result. And the other thing is around pay, like, you know, kind of

Yes, we pay for performance. And if we're saying we pay for performance, then we have to be transparent about performance as well. If I'm being transparent on pay, we have to be transparent performance. And I think we're finally ready to like treat our employees as adults and treat our managers as adults and just be transparent and share all the criteria, share how performance management calibrations are done. The big reason there's this uncomfortable silence around performance management is because nobody fully understands how it's done. And we were scared when like pay transparency came upon us that like this would have all these negative consequences and people would not like to know where they are in position and range or they wouldn't want to, or they would, it would have these negative impacts on retention or engagement, but it actually didn't. just, just appreciated knowing.

How pay decisions are made. And I think the same thing, if we just treat them like adults and tell them like, this is how performance is done. Like Netflix did like a million years ago, right? Like Netflix came out and said that with that big deck that they did. How long ago was that? 10, 15 years ago, right? And they were very open in how they approach performance management, how they manage out performers and all that. everybody, I think if everybody's clear on it, then even if it's like a...

Rekha Gurnani (18:37.675)
I think you can have a rigorous performance management system. I think people just want to hear.

Sean Luitjens (18:40.999)
I think the hardest thing though is the change. I think the biggest thing is going to be change management, right? So, you know, if I was a five and I've been a five for four years and you want to go and have a rigorous performance management and basically my manager was gaming the system because a five created the bands for me in my Excel spreadsheet. Now I have to make you a three. Like, I don't care how great the message is.

It's a human nature thing to be like, I don't care that Rick had told me I'm now a three and actually it's because of all the new performance system. I've been a five for five years. Now you're telling me I'm a three. Do I look for a job? Do I not get paid the same? Like I think that communication, the change management is the biggest issue. think if you started a brand new company and put the processes in place, you would have a much different feel.

Rekha Gurnani (19:30.232)
Well, yeah, Right, right. And I think that's why the labels and the numbers and all, like we have to do away with that old way of doing things. And it's more about the message itself and it's more about the measurement period. like the, when I'm consulting sometimes with clients or when I've been asked to talk about this, I'm, I feel like the performance management discussion, the narrative and the labels and everything should be about how well you performed in just that measurement period.

Like, did you have a good year or not? Right? Rather than saying good performance. Like that's too personal of an attribution to say you're a good performer and you're not, or you're a three or a five, whatever else. It's more

Sean Luitjens (20:10.439)
But you've got to score them, so I guess I'll push back a little bit because if you're going to tell them we're going to pay for performance and then you give them a bunch of words and they realize that, you I realize, oh, I got 2 % and Rika got 4%. So what you're telling me is I'm good, but not good.

Rekha Gurnani (20:16.268)
Yeah.

Rekha Gurnani (20:32.152)
Sorry, might be having some tech issues, but sorry, could you repeat that last part?

Sean Luitjens (20:38.055)
Yeah, I think you've got to give numbers because I think if I get 2 % and you get 4 % and we're just using words, I'm going to know you got a 4 % raise. That's just the reality of the world now. I can ask or you're going to tell me.

Rekha Gurnani (20:59.254)
Yeah. And that's why this was what you said, if you can automagically, I love that word, automagically solve it, because it is a very, very complicated gnarly and there's too many.

Issues like things going on here and companies try to get away with it and be sneaky and like not do it But they ended up doing shadow ratings and all of that. So my thing is it's never going to be perfect. Let's just be Very open and transparent about it Tell our employees exactly how we do it and everything that ties to it And then whether or not honestly whether or not base pay should be tied to performance or not is a whole other discussion that we'll probably have to say for another day But I have some thoughts on that as well. So like does it really?

Still make sense to do it? Like that 2%, 3%, like how meaningful is it? How differentiated is it? Or should it just be tied to like market forces of demand and supply for that skill and things like that? But next time we'll talk about that.

Sean Luitjens (21:52.807)
Yeah, and move, I think move more over time as long as the formula to STI, right? So you use the one, two, 3 % that you're given to deal with pay equity and kind of the catch -ups and give them more opportunity for better performers. I mean, that's one tactic you can take. So are there other hurdles? I know I sent you kind of some thoughts. So what are the other hurdles you see?

Rekha Gurnani (22:06.37)
Yeah.

Rekha Gurnani (22:17.344)
Yeah, I mean, I the hurdles are kind of tied into the challenges, right? Like the budget constraint environment we're working in, just really limited, you know, trade -offs that we have to make like with staffing, with HR, you know, tech stack, all of that. And then, you know, like I said, talent, finding the talent, finding the capabilities that you need, the right mix, you know, what we're asking comp professionals to do, looks very different now than what we did a years ago. And I'm seeing more and more of a trend of like,

A few different coes kind of now getting clubbed together like there's a lot of rules out there that you know You're doing total rewards and HR ops and analytics and HR is and you know Mobility and all of that right? So we're kind of I'm kind of seeing this expectation of someone who can do comp really well.

And in the past, like being a good comp person, especially at like early career to mid career levels was more about just being good at spreadsheets and like this sort of introverted person who wanted to just sit there and like be lost in Excel all day and like nobody ever to come talk to me. And now we need people who can do, who can talk about pay, who can answer, help enable managers to have some of those difficult conversations around pay and really kind of be a partner to the business and to enable paid transparency. So we're looking for a lot of different, a mix of different capabilities. So finding that good source of talent and compensation isn't, there isn't like a steady source. There's no like university degree or like necessarily the right steps that lead someone. Most people in comp like kind of just stumbled into it. They came from an HR role or financial or whatever else. So for me as a leader like that.

Sean Luitjens (24:00.315)
If comp finds you, you don't find comp. That's the saying, comp finds you, you don't find comp.

Rekha Gurnani (24:03.798)
Right. Right. So my, I'm on a mission to get more like MBA students and IO psychology students to consider comp as a career, like as soon as they like right after graduation. Cause we don't, I did my master's in IO psychology and nobody talked to us about compensation being a viable career. And I think it's a great source of good talent. So yeah, that's another thing I'd like to try to do.

Sean Luitjens (24:25.831)
I mean the crux of it I think is that capability piece because you know having been around 30 years or more, I won't say how long, in the space. The budget thing's never gonna happen. Comp is always jokingly, they never get money. unless you can, the way you're gonna buy software is you're going to be able to do more things and when you can pool resources and get tech to handle some of this and free up some stuff, you can start to centralize and do more. But that's the only way because nobody finds extra money in comp, it's just not a thing.

Rekha Gurnani (24:58.41)
No. No, we don't. Yeah.

Sean Luitjens (24:59.611)
But the capability piece, I think you're right. You're going to have to communicate more. You're going to have to be able to, the tools will do the work, but you're going to have to be able to communicate that really smartly and have, be more strategic and be out in the space a little more talking to other business leaders. That's a different skill set.

Rekha Gurnani (25:15.254)
Yeah. And we're managing so many more programs now in comp than we ever did. So you also need that program management, project management type of capability, which, you know, like to your point, we don't get like a full fledge. I've probably met like one comp leader who had like a dedicated program, project manager assigned to comp programs. That's very rare, right? So, so you need that, you need that. Yeah. So it's really, really hard to get someone who has all of these strengths.

Sean Luitjens (25:45.873)
So how, I know we talked about the changing challenges then kind of mixed in here a little bit, but how do you see tech being selfish and being a development nerd? Like how do you see technology in all this? And I guess having been a couple of places and worked on different sides, curious your perspective, how do you see departments or comp teams getting technology because they all want it for all the right reasons, but how do you rationalize it?

Rekha Gurnani (26:16.002)
I think the two ways that I've had success in rationalizing the spend is one is like, again, when it's like a legislation, legal compliance requirement, it's a, it's an easier case to make. Right. So.

The last couple of companies I was at, we invested in like a pay equity solution. And I know a lot of companies right now are spending the money for a pay equity solution because the risks of not getting that right are high. And like, you know, that's an easier case to make to your executive team, right? And they, yeah, so that's one, right? And that's happening right now. And then the other thing is again, just...

The competitive advantage argument, right? So if you're trying to make that case and you're like telling your executive team that...the big bang, whatever it's called now, companies are doing it and all our, you know, the companies that are our peers where we compete for talent, like this is a talent competitive advantage to get the talent that we need. They're all doing it. We need to be part of this to like do benchmarking and all of that. Right. So like, for example, even busier, even though we implement, I implemented it at box when I was most recently there on the people analytics side.

And one of the big, big justifying factors was the fact that we could do benchmarks for all these talent metrics that we wouldn't do. So that helped make the case, for the spend, that ROI. So there's a lot of tech industries competitive. always like want to, you know, don't want to be the one who missed the train and everybody else is on it or whatever else. So I think those are the two things that I generally use to make the case for ROI.

Rekha Gurnani (28:01.016)
we're gonna somehow miss out if we don't get this solution because XYZ is doing it and all these companies are doing it. And then the other thing is like, yeah, we're the legal or compliance risks of not doing

Sean Luitjens (28:14.899)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I the legal is a big one. You know, for sure. I think that's driving a lot of places. The ostrich method for the compliance is gone. You're going to have to comply. So I know we talked about it, but, you know, if you could automagically solve one issue, I think, you know, where, you know, what is that? Let's dig in. Is that the performance piece? Is that something else?

Rekha Gurnani (28:46.262)
Yeah, I was thinking performance management, because so much else hinges on that, right? Getting that right is like sort of the foundation for everything else. Your reward systems, your talent management, your retention, your engagement, all of it, right? So yeah, really need to figure out how to magic one to get that right. And yeah.

Sean Luitjens (29:05.247)
It's just math after that. mean, that's the interesting thing, right? And with tech, the way it is and the complexities, you can segment out, you can do all the math in a myriad of ways. You can pull it together. You can analyze your decisions. You can do what ifs, but still the fundamental data, very similar to the comp data and getting the right data pulled in. So at the end of the day, you can do a ton of stuff with tech, but the tech's all built on top of that data. And if that data, you know,

Payroll data and comp data, you can find good sources of truth, but that, you know, the performance management system, it's not sent out in someone's paycheck. It's not sent out somewhere else. And then of course, it's a relativity score in the grand scheme of things. So if you really want to differentiate, you have to the bullet at some point. And I do think it's automagical to me. I would say the same thing, but I would say it's the automagically fix the transition year.

So I'd probably be a little more specific and say that year of how do we migrate across and not have to deal with, you know, it's human resources and it like, even if you don't change their pay or their increase is 3 % this year and 3 % next year, if you tell me I got a three and I was getting fives, like some people are going to take that and be like, whatever, I buy her story that we've got a new system. And others are going to be like, I see the writing on the wall and start talking to themselves. So I think it's, it really

Humans as a whole, I keep saying are very statistically predictable, but they're individually unique. And that performance thing, you know, people will take it differently. It's hard. And you know, the other thing is to your point of why I think it's a good reason. The manager has to work with them, right? So HR can say, you need to do this dispersion and you need to spread it out. And then, you know, I need to go tell you, Rika, you're now a three and you've been a five. And then we have to come to work together tomorrow and you're going to be

Sean Luitjens (30:58.813)
Sean sucks now, he gave me a three. And you have to pretend like it's the same. And so it's very difficult.

Rekha Gurnani (31:06.09)
It really is, it really is. And then obviously we all know the impacts on engagement and retention and everything else that comes from it. So yeah, it's a tricky one, but I think we've been trying as a discipline to get that right for a long, time, but yeah.

Sean Luitjens (31:20.937)
Well, the tools are there and I think it's an interesting one because like obviously we're in the comp planning space. And so the ability to segment and do things and create complexities, like you can do that and it's math, right? And we can solve all that, but the performance thing still comes back to getting the number and putting a process in place and getting all the managers to buy in. And there's the human aspect that makes it, you can't develop your way out of that. You've got to have a

Rekha Gurnani (31:51.062)
Yeah, it's interesting. think I've said this before is I think we're better in general at fixing the complex stuff and we've got all this complex stuff figured out, but it's the simple stuff that I think sometimes is the hardest and it requires the most, you know, buy -in from everybody and leadership, ownership of the message and, you know, tying with the culture of the company and the trust and everything. So it sounds simple, but it requires just a lot of commitment to making the change. yeah, it is the

Sean Luitjens (32:19.519)
Well, I agree on that. So that's a good one. So I'll leave you to get your magic wand and just magically wave that over every company out there. Thanks so much for coming on. I think it's a great perspective, you know, having someone who's a practitioner and obviously was at Radford Prior. So it's super, super perspective for us. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on.

Rekha Gurnani (32:44.45)
Thank you for having me. This was fun. Thank you.

Sean Luitjens (32:46.729)
All right, awesome.