This article will outline the stages of an active compensation cycle and explain how the employees assigned as proposers and approvers should engage with their respective tasks. Once a compensation cycle has been kicked off, the respective users will receive their tasks to complete via a to-do item on their home dashboard under the 'News' tab and email notification. The manager, who is by default assigned as the proposer will first receive a task to create a proposal for the participant.
How to submit a proposal?
How to approve a proposal?
How to sign-off a proposal?
How to re-open a proposal?
Submitting a proposal
The proposer can access the proposal table either directly from the task in the 'News' tab or via the compensation module in the 'Proposals' tab. Using the dashboard, the proposer can manage their to-do's and view previously closed cycles.
Opening the task will immediately show an overview with details, including the participant's name, the cycle name, the status of the cycle, and an overview of the employees' profile (i.e. their current level, tenure, recent review cycles they are involved in, and their goals). If your company has set specific salary ranges, you can also consider the annual salary band that you will see in the proposal.
You will also see the applied recommendation rules and the proposed outcome of a salary or share increase, bonus value or promotion. The proposer can agree with the recommendation and enter the increased amount, or even propose a higher value. You can enter a bonus value and promotion (yes/no) if applicable and update the proposal. You can also leave a note for all the relevant stakeholders to outline why this decision was taken; notes will be displayed in the notes history to those who have visibility.
Submit the proposal by clicking 'Propose'. As a result, the status of the cycle will move to 'Pending approval' and the approver will be notified of their open task.
Approving a proposal
Once a proposal is submitted, the assigned approver will receive a notification to verify it before the final sign-off. The notification will appear on the user's home dashboard under the 'Approvals' tab.
As the approver, you can review the proposed amount and any notes that are visible before approving the proposal. This will push the proposal to the next stage, where it can be signed off.
It is also possible to approve proposals in bulk via the proposal dashboard. To do this, navigate to 'Compensation' > 'Proposals' and check the boxes of the proposals you want to approve, before clicking 'Approve' to finalize.
Signing off a proposal and updated user profiles
The final step in an active compensation cycle is to sign off the proposal. Once a proposal has been approved, the original proposer (who by default will be the manager unless updated in the settings to a different employee) will receive another open task to discuss and agree on the proposal with the participant. We recommend this discussion takes place to ensure that the employee agrees with the compensation update, whether it's an increase in salary, share, a bonus, or a promotion. The manager can then sign off the proposal and add conversation notes if necessary.
Once a cycle is manually closed, all signed-off proposals are official, and their relevant data such as level, job title, salary, and bonus will be updated on the user's profile. The user data can be exported as an Excel sheet by a super-admin and compensation module admin.
Please note: Only when the cycle is closed by an admin, will the changes be made to the salary, share, bonus or level user information in Leapsome. Additionally, if a user's level or title will change following a signed-off proposal, this information in your HRIS tool relating to salary, bonus, and title will also need to be manually updated. Otherwise, the HRIS integration will push the outdated data to Leapsome and overwrite the new data.
Re-opening a proposal
If an agreement is not reached with the participant regarding the approved compensation amount, the proposal can be re-opened for further evaluation. Re-opening a proposal will take the cycle back to the initial proposal stage and the manager can create a new proposal and submit for approval.