Budget season is here. Performance reviews are underway. Annual planning is right around the corner. In most organizations, all three quietly circle back to the same underlying question: Are we competitive, and can we retain our team at current salary levels?
It's tempting to treat this as a simple line item - pull some market data, adjust a few numbers, and move on. But compensation is extremely complex. It's also one of the clearest signals an organization sends about what it actually values.
Get compensation right, and you build a foundation for strong culture and high morale. People see the "why" behind leadership's decisions, and they're more committed to staying. Leave it vague, however, or let it drift out of alignment with your stated values, and compensation starts to erode trust and sustainability.
Why compensation is different now:
The old assumptions about pay don't hold anymore.
Salaries have moved quickly. Remote work has complicated what "competitive" means when your team is spread across different cost-of-living markets. Budgets are tighter. Employees expect more transparency than they used to. And leaders are left trying to balance internal equity, external competitiveness, retention, and financial sustainability, all at once.
Our goal when developing an offering around compensation was to design a study that gives companies more than market pay data; we wanted to leave you with a values-aligned system you can put to use immediately.
How our compensation offering works
Here’s an overview of our process:
Job Benchmarking
We match your organization's specific roles against comp databases to find real, relevant market comparisons, not generic industry averages.Market Analysis
We assess how competitive your salaries are, controlling for industry, org size, and geography, and broken down by department, salary ladder, and organizational level. Where possible, we look across base salary, total cash compensation, and total compensation, since a role can look competitive on base pay alone but tell a different story once bonuses or commission are factored in.This step also includes an equity check to ensure that pay differences are driven by legitimate factors, not protected characteristics, with a formal equity analysis for larger organizations.
Structure & Philosophy Design
We build your updated compensation structure and ranges and document the values and decision points behind them in a staff-facing compensation philosophy. The goal is for this to be a reference people can go to before escalating a question to a manager or HR.Budget Forecasting
Because compensation compounds, small adjustments now shape your costs 5-10 years out. We help you understand that trajectory and build a multi-year budget forecast, so you're planning ahead rather than reacting later.Rollout & Communication Support
Once the data and decisions are in place, we help you sequence and communicate the changes to staff, including what changed, why, and what it means for them. This allows leaders to implement the new structure and actually explain it with confidence.
“DevelopWell helped us make sense of a really complex compensation landscape and gave us much more confidence in the decisions ahead. They helped us understand where we stand in the market while also thinking more holistically about living wages, salary, bonuses, and equity. We walked away with clear, actionable recommendations and a stronger foundation for building a compensation approach that feels equitable, competitive, and sustainable.”
Chief of Staff, Political Technology Sector
What you walk away with
By the end of the engagement, you'll have:
☆ A comprehensive market analysis showing exactly how competitive your organization is overall, and broken down by department, salary ladder, and organizational level.
☆ A spreadsheet with specific raise and adjustment amounts for every staff member, tied directly to where they land in the new range structure.
☆ A multi-year budget forecast, so you know not just what changes cost today, but how they compound over the next several years.
☆ A compensation philosophy document to act as an internal, staff-facing reference that explains the values and reasoning behind your pay decisions, so the "why" doesn't live only in someone's head.
☆ Guidance and sequencing support for the rollout, so leaders can communicate the changes to staff clearly and confidently.
Beyond the documents themselves, you'll walk away able to answer the questions that actually come up in practice: How competitive are we, department by department? What's a living wage in the markets where our people live? What would it cost to move toward a specific target percentile? How does this play out for a new hire coming in, someone who's just been promoted, or a longtime staff member already on the team?
The questions above highlight the moments compensation systems tend to get tested, and this work means you'll have already thought through them.
How to know if it's the right time for your org
Here are some signs you could benefit from a compensation study:
You're struggling to hire strong candidates for open roles.
Staff are increasingly vocal about pay or cost of living.
Turnover is ticking up.
You simply want to be more intentional (or more creative) about how you recognize and pay people.
It also helps to have a working sense of the budget you could put toward adjustments, since compensation decisions compound over time and it's easier to plan for them than to walk them back.
A full engagement typically runs about six months, moving through setup, data and analysis, and reporting, though not every organization needs the full arc. We also offer more scoped, advisory-style support for teams that want guidance without the complete build-out.
Meet your facilitator, Kaelan Forbes
This work is led by Kaelan Forbes, Senior People Operations Consultant, who has spent the past five years building comprehensive compensation structures for nonprofits and socially driven organizations with budgets ranging from $2M to $100M.
Rather than applying generic benchmarks, Kaelan designs equity-centered, custom compensation programs rooted in each organization's values. This ensures that pay strategy reflects the same principles of fairness and inclusion that guide the rest of the workplace.
⇨ Ready to learn more or have questions? Get in touch with us today!