Joint Board Session: People Analytics Board & Total Rewards Leader Board Virtual Meeting - Analytics for Total Rewards

Meeting Details

The April 10 joint meeting of the i4cp People Analytics and Total Rewards Boards marked a pivotal moment in cross-functional collaboration. Under the leadership of new People Analytics Board Chair Alexis Fink and guided by Total Rewards Board Chair Pete Manias, the group explored themes such as data governance, opportunities for ROI studies and conjoint analysis. A shared goal emerged: building stronger, more strategic partnerships that align analytical rigor with the nuanced demands of rewards and benefits strategies.

Welcome Alexis Fink!

At the top of the meeting, the People Analytics Board welcomed Alexis, who was one of the original founding members of this board, back! She kicked off her first meeting as chair, highlighting her goals to reconnect with her scientific roots and the practitioner community. She underscored the critical importance of building close partnerships between People Analytics and other HR functions through meetings like this. Her past teams were deeply integrated with Total Rewards, tackling initiatives like:

• Using offer decline data and exit interviews to identify compensation misalignment
• Evolving benefits and bonus structures through joint analytics
• Weekly meetings to maintain alignment between PA and TR teams

Moreover, she remarked on her goals to promote people analytics as a strategic enabler, informing big decisions, such as job architecture, retention risks, and succession planning that clearly connect to business outcomes and create a culture of shared learning and innovation.

The boards then launched into a practical exploration of how to optimize compensation and benefits strategies.

Meeting Details

• Total Rewards & People Analytics Integration:
  • Trust, early involvement, and aligned goals as the foundation for collaboration
  • Challenges in data ownership and coordination
  • Strategic opportunities for dashboards and shared analytics platforms
• Maximizing compensation and benefits strategies:
  • Integrating data to understand the ROI of compensation and benefit strategies
  • Growing traction but resource-intensive
  • AI anticipated to streamline future applications
• AI & Talent Intelligence in Compensation Strategy:
  • Incorporation of external labor market data
  • Enhancing decisions related to skills, sourcing, and location strategies
• Governance, ROI, and Metrics Alignment:
  • Avoiding duplicate efforts and conflicting narratives through consistent definitions
  • Call for shared ROI stories to demonstrate collaborative value
  • Desire for unified, meaningful metrics across functions

Total Rewards & People Analytics Integration

The meeting reinforced that while People Analytics and Total Rewards teams often possess complementary capabilities—analytical depth on one side and deep domain expertise on the other—they frequently operate in silos. Alexis Fink and Pete Manias both emphasized the need for intentional collaboration, highlighting past missteps where analysis was conducted independently of comp teams, leading to confusion and misalignment. The broader message: integration must begin with trust, shared intent, and aligned governance models.

Key Takeway for People Analytics Leaders: This validated challenges PA leaders often face around data ownership, governance, and ensuring their work is interpreted appropriately. This helped reinforce the need for structural and relational alignment, especially when working with sensitive compensation data.

Maximizing compensation and benefits strategies:

The meeting included specific, real-world examples of how PA teams can support TR in more strategic and proactive ways, such as:

• Using offer decline + exit data to assess comp competitiveness
• Building dashboards for real-time manager decision-making
• Partnering on benefits optimization and bonus design
• Using talent intelligence (external labor data) to inform comp and job architecture

The conversation spotlighted conjoint analysis as an underutilized but powerful method to quantify what employees value—whether it’s benefits, job titles, or office arrangements. Alexis shared a vivid example of employees opting for private offices over a $10,000 raise, while others described challenges using internal platforms like Qualtrics to support such work. Several participants noted that AI advancements could soon lower the barrier to entry, enabling in-house teams to run such studies more easily and with broader application.

Key Takeway for People Analytics Leaders: These use cases demonstrated that PA can go beyond reporting to become a true business enabler when aligned early and effectively with TR.

AI & Talent Intelligence in Compensation Strategy

Talent intelligence was flagged as a significant opportunity to understand the skills environment and how that translates to compensation. The skills movement has emphasized the deconstruction of jobs into skills but that complexifies compensation strategies because compensation is organized at the job level and not by skills. AI is throwing a wrench into this because organizations do not understand how it will impact headcount. There are organizations like Shopify that aren’t adding headcount unless leaders prove that a specific task or job can’t be done by AI. Alexis noted there have been some hypotheses that AI adoption will push compensation upward as the work that must be done by hhumans will require higher skills and come with higher risks.

Key Takeway for People Analytics Leaders: People Analytics functions have a critical role to play in helping organizations navigate this emerging complexity, align compensation with future-of-work realities, and bring evidence-based clarity to emotionally and financially charged decisions.

Governance, ROI, and Metrics Alignment

A recurring theme was the critical role of governance in ensuring consistency and strategic value from analytics work. Without clear operational definitions and boundaries, well-intentioned analyses can produce conflicting narratives or overstep data privacy boundaries. Multiple participants emphasized the importance of pre-alignment—particularly when working on compensation-related data.

Key Takeway for People Analytics Leaders: Strong governance is essential to ensure that analytics deliver trusted, strategically aligned insights—especially when dealing with sensitive areas like compensation. This reinforces that People Analytics doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Its power and influence grow when it is embedded in a governed, collaborative framework that supports shared business goals.

Summary:

For PA leaders, the meeting’s greatest value came from real-world stories, shared challenges, and strategies for working more effectively with Total Rewards. The themes of collaboration, governance, and elevating analytics to strategic conversations directly supported their goals of advancing people analytics maturity and influence inside their organizations.