This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Payroll grew by a quarter this year. Nobody in the company can explain exactly what the business bought with that money.

Pay decisions made backwards

Someone asked for a raise and you gave it, because losing them would have cost more. Then the person sitting next to them found out and asked too. A bonus went in to smooth it over, tied to a number nobody had agreed was the right number. Now two people do the same work for different money, the structure exists only in your head, and the next time a strong candidate negotiates hard you will break it again. Meanwhile the finance side of the question — whether this shape of payroll survives the company doubling — has never been asked at all.

What this course covers

Forty lessons in four parts. The full package first: what total rewards includes and who owns it, building the strategy from business objectives, designing the elements and communicating them, compensation basics and job evaluation, reading a salary market review and deciding where to sit against it, grading and the basic pay structure, paying a sales team, executive and cross-border reward, linking reward to measured performance, cash bonuses, benefits and flexible cafeteria plans, budgeting the whole package, testing whether the system works, recognition programmes, and the link to the employer value proposition. Then the structure: compensation philosophy, fixed pay, grades and ranges, analytical against non-analytical evaluation, pay equity, the repertory grid, factor analysis, catalogue matching, choosing grade widths, connecting the structure to market data, and finally the pay policy, the ranges, payroll budgeting, the salary review matrix and payroll analytics. Then variable pay: what a bonus is for, job analysis and the critical success factors of a position, deriving indicators from them, leading against lagging measures, and six types of variable pay compared — fee, merit increase, commission, individual bonus, team bonus, one-off. Finally the money: what an efficiency-driven business means, why the financial model comes before the targets, how models change from startup to corporation, process management and the black holes that consume money, goal-setting people believe, the strategy pyramid, budgeting as decision-making, metrics across customers, people, processes and finance, Lean Six Sigma in financial processes, and building something that scales.

Why there is a finance block in a pay course

Every compensation course ends where the range is built. The question that follows — can the business carry this shape of payroll, and will it still work at twice the size — is left outside. In a service or knowledge business payroll is the largest cost line on the page, which makes the structure of pay a financial decision as much as a people one. That block is a general business finance course, included deliberately so the pay structure you design has a number attached and an argument behind it.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 40 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the reward strategy structure, job evaluation factors, grade widths, market review reading, pay ranges and the salary review matrix, six types of variable pay, critical success factors, the bonus description template, payroll budgeting and the four families of business metric

• The financial argument for the structure, not only the structure

Where to start

Take two people on the same grade doing comparable work and compare what they cost. If you cannot explain the difference in one sentence, that gap is what this course fixes. Enrol now and start today.