SEATTLE, May 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Payscale Inc., a modern compensation management company, is the winner of the software category in Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards for its Peer compensation technology product. The winners of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas Awards honor businesses, policies, projects, and concepts that are actively engaged and deeply committed to pursuing innovation when it comes to solving health and climate crises, social injustice, or economic inequality.
Payscale, which recently merged with Payfactors, helps organizations set fair compensation by providing on-demand access to continuously updated salary data. Where traditional salary data is collected via a survey process and takes half a year to validate and distribute, the Peer product enables organizations to exchange salary data in real time with segmentation by industry and differentials for location and skills. The Peer platform saw its customer base boom in 2020, with an average of 40 new companies joining each month for 32% year-over-year growth.
Now in its fifth year, the World Changing Ideas Awards showcase 33 winners, more than 400 finalists, and more than 800 honorable mentions—with Health and Wellness, AI & Data among the most popular categories. A panel of eminent Fast Company editors and reporters selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 4,000 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, and more.
“The pandemic really highlighted the need for accurate data, and I think it accelerated the need for having these really strategic conversations around compensation,” said Sarah Kalogerakis, vice president of Peer. “With the shift to remote working and the social justice issues, it really shined a big spotlight on compensation and getting pay right.”
“Think LinkedIn, but for compensation — in that it facilitates direct connections,” Payscale chief strategy officer Jeff Laliberte wrote about Peer at its launch. “With these direct connections, you get access to living, dynamic markets. You can securely exchange compensation data within closed, highly relevant groups in near-real-time. And the data you exchange and the frequency it refreshes is completely up to you.”
“I like the ability to get market values in real time with Peer,” said Erin Stoloff, senior manager of human capital solutions with PetSmart, a customer of Payscale. “For some jobs, the data is continually changing, and it can be hard to get these recent changes from traditional surveys. We can always find a benchmark in Peer.”
For employers, compensation strategy has become critical. The labor market has been changing swiftly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with positions such as “contact tracer” or “social distancing ambassador” appearing in 2020 that didn’t exist the year before, as well as rapid growth in pay for the hottest jobs. To adapt, organizations have needed to develop an agile approach to compensation management. According to Payscale’s 2021 Compensation Best Practices Report, 65.3% of orgs said that given the events of 2020, changing their compensation strategy is important in the next 12-18 months.
“There is no question our society and planet are facing deeply troubling times. So, it’s important to recognize organizations that are using their ingenuity, impact, design, scalability, and passion to solve these problems,” says Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “Our journalists, under the leadership of senior editor Morgan Clendaniel, have discovered some of the most groundbreaking projects that have launched since the start of 2020.”
About the World Changing Ideas Awards: World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company’s major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honorable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With the goals of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.
About Payscale: As the industry leader in compensation data and technology, Payscale helps organizations #getpayright. Payscale is the only technology solution for managing compensation that provides multiple streams of transparently curated, and validated market salary data. Combined with modeling engines that learn continuously and generate recommendations and insight, Payscale empowers HR to price jobs and adjust compensation to reflect near real-time changes in the market — all on one trusted data platform. With Payscale’s Adaptive Compensation Advantage, teams operate with efficiency, focused on outcomes rather than manual data management. To learn how companies like The Washington Post, Perry Ellis International, United Healthcare and The New York Times rely on Payscale to attract and retain top talent, motivate and engage employees, and plan their future workforce, visit payscale.com.
Contact:
Max Thon
press@payscale.com
