Lane4

Their challenge

Lane4 was co-founded in 1995 by Olympic Gold Medallist swimmer, Adrian Moorhouse and leading sport psychologist, Professor Graham Jones. Success has led to the company expanding to the extent that it now employs 65 people and works with a large number of blue chip clients including BT, Coca-Cola, Sainsbury’s and the NHS. When Lane4 approached Innecto, the comapany was already recognised by its employees as an excellent place to work – Lane4 had made the top 100 for the sixth consecutive year in the Sunday Times Best Small Companies to Work For list. But, relatively speaking, reward did not compare as highly as other areas in the survey.

Our solution

Lane4’s HR Consultant, Charlotte Hignett says, “Our ethos is about building winning organisations and whilst we already had high levels of employee engagement, we felt we needed to look at our reward practices to ensure that we have a compelling reward package that will retain and attract the most talented people in our industry.” Innecto began by working with Charlotte to set out a comprehensive project plan that addressed reward strategy, career framework, external benchmarking, pay and grading structure and equal pay. They began by working with the board to craft Lane4’s reward philosophy and clarify principles in order to develop fair and consistent reward practices and create a sound strategic foundation for the other areas of the project. With support from Innecto’s analysts, they carried out market benchmarking which now informs annual salary reviews. Charlotte says, “The pay survey analysis has been really valuable. It’s helped us understand more clearly our market position, both where we are now and where we’d like to be. It has enabled us to correct some anomalies in pay so that we can honestly say to our employees your salaries are fair, consistent and competitive.” The next stage was to create a career framework that would clearly explain to people what they needed to do to develop and progress their careers at Lane4. Innecto facilitated a workshop with representatives from different levels and functions to look at what skills and experience were required at each job level and to train Lane4 managers to carry out their own job evaluations.

The outcome

This enabled Lane4 to continue confidently with the project in-house. As Charlotte says, “One of the things I really liked about working with Innecto was their flexibility and willingness to get involved or stand back as we wanted. It was important to us that we ‘owned’ our reward stucture and that it was unique to us, not off the shelf. Innecto were very good at guiding us and providing support when asked but let us direct and handle the project internally as we deemed appropriate.”

Lane4 subsequently launched the career framework, which includes case studies showing how both fee-earners and support staff can progress within the organisation. It has enabled them to create a broad, banded pay structure, designed in-house with ad-hoc support from Innecto’s analysts.

With Innecto’s help, they are now looking at benefits and are running reward focus groups to encourage employee engagement and increase understanding about total reward. Charlotte Hignett, HR Consultant says, “I would defintiely recommend Innecto to an HR colleague. They clearly understood our objective of improving employee engagement around reward. The consultants strike a great balance between being highly credible, knowledgeable and professional but also practical and down to earth. They offer an excellent service, are experts in their field, are very experienced and a pleasure to work with