Mid-year review : the best of Compensation Insider

This post is dedicated to my readers, old and new. In the past 6 months, the number of people reading Compensation Insider has grown from 12-15 per day to about 100 per day. I am very happy and hope to continue to see growth in my readership as I believe in sharing information and points…

Compensation and Benefits, the CSI of HR

One day one of my team members huffed and puffed : “But Sandrine, this is boring !”. One employee had complained and said she was being discriminated against. She claimed she had been left behind during a job grading change (promotion) that had been implemented 4 or 5 years before for a specific category of…

The value of post-mortem analysis for Compensation projects

A practice has helped me a lot in my career : to perform a post-mortem at the end of a project. You may call it a recap, wrap-up or a review. Post-mortems are common in the software engineering industry. Well, after all I worked for both Microsoft and Apple – I had to learn something…

How to be a Compensation leader – even without a title

Robin Sharma was in Abu Dhabi recently and I attended his seminar “Lead without a title” with my team… and a few hundred more people. Robin is the author of  The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and The Leader Who Had No Title among other best-sellers, and delivered an interesting performance on (self ) empowerment…

Spring cleaning : 4 tips to declutter your work

I always feel that when my environment is clear, my thoughts are clearer too. So here are 4 quick tips to help you spring-clean your work environment. 1 – Recurring Compensation & Benefits pain points : create a solution. Design a process, draft a policy or simply create a standard reply email or a cheat…

Four women’s influence on my career

Today is International Women’s Day and I want to take this opportunity to reflect upon a few women that have influenced my professional life. Many, many years ago I did an HR internship at French car manufacturer Renault. The company was very advanced in terms of HR practices, being studied in all business schools like…

A few career and life lessons from my last job in Italy

5 years ago I was in Italy for my third job in that country in less than 10 years. I love Italy, and really enjoyed Turin. It’s a great city with beautiful architecture, nice, contrasted weather with cold winters (after all they held Winter Olympics there in 2006) and hot summers. The food is great,…