Success Story
How we helped a visual storytelling agency develop their succession plan and refine their compensation & benefits.
About HighSpark
HighSpark, a home-grown visual storytelling agency, has enjoyed consistent growth since 2015, achieving annual six-digit sales figures. They have helped hundreds of clients, including Nike, Visa and Oracle, transform complex messages into impactful stories that accelerate marketing and sales.
The company’s success was achieved by their award-winning team. Recognising how crucial an engaged and motivated team is to the firm’s success, the founders place emphasis on talent strategies.
Goal
Manage sustainable growth through customised HR solutions
As the business grew, the founders realised that they needed to refine their existing HR strategies to ensure business continuity and growth. With the firm’s expansion, they also needed to hand over some of their management responsibilities while making sure that the high-quality work was still delivered to clients as the employees transitioned to their new roles.
Working closely with our consultants, we helped the founders
- Understand employees’ general sentiments and concerns
- Create organisational blueprint and succession planning
- Improve compensation & benefits packages
Solutions
Understand employees’ general sentiments and concerns
In order to recommend the customised HR strategies for HighSpark, we first understood the employees’ sentiments, needs and wants. Utilising our in-house employee engagement tool, TeamSight+, we gathered quantitative and qualitative feedback from the employees. Taking the data into account, we helped the founders realise that career progression and compensation & benefits were potential areas for improvement.
Create organisational blueprint and succession planning
We then worked with the founders to redesign their organisation blueprint. A functional organisational structure that spanned various functions and specialisations was recommended, considering the more efficient use of resources and the need for business scalability. With a bigger picture identified, we were better positioned to revamp each specialisation’s career pathways to include new leadership roles.
As a training consultancy, a key value for HighSpark is empowering employees to pick up specialised skills according to their interests and aspirations. Thus, we defined each role in the organisation blueprint through a modular competency framework. Modularised competency maps provided the flexibility for employees to pick up and work on skills outside of their job scopes. With the competency framework, employees could visualise what skill sets were needed for their next promotion, which eased the transition into management roles for some.
Improve compensation & benefits packages
To fully address the various components of a compensation & benefits package, we explored possibilities in three areas – fixed & variable salaries, benefits, and incentives.
We first conducted salary benchmarking exercises, allowing us to recommend salary revisions along with bonuses for certain key positions aligned with industry practices. This enabled HighSpark to remunerate employees fairly and competitively.
Next, our consultants recommended benefit policies customised to employees’ needs, such as health and wellness benefits. As the average employee age at HighSpark was below 30, many had indicated in our TeamSight+ surveys that they preferred wellness perks to traditional benefits such as insurance. Therefore, we took employees’ preferences into account when recommending the new benefits policies to keep them motivated. Other modes of rewards, such as commissions for the sales team, were also recommended to incentivise performance that contributed to HighSpark’s revenue growth.
Additionally, we proposed a flexible profit-sharing bonus scheme that the founders could adjust based on their finances. This initiative also formed a part of their long-term talent retention strategy by creating a sense of ownership amongst employees.
Working closely with HighSpark's management in the three areas mentioned above, we conducted another employee engagement survey to evaluate the effectiveness of the customised HR solutions.
As a result, one and a half year after completing the project,
we observed the following outcomes for HighSpark:
Results
9.1/ 10 Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)*
7 out of top 8 motivators were satisfied
100% employee
retention rate
*TalentKraft’s TeamSight+ survey evaluates overall job satisfaction through the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which helps the management understand how likely the team is to recommend a company to others. On a scale of 0 to 10, team members respond to the question, “how likely are you to recommend your company as a place to work?” and are categorised into detractors (score of 0 to 6), neutrals (score of 7 to 8), and promoters (score of 9 or 10).
