Flexible salaries at the Dataroots House

The Leuven scale-up Dataroots consists of a team of 78 people with 637 years of experience, eating 12 kilograms of fruit on a monthly basis and having climbed almost 76 times the equivalent of Mount Everest in sporting achievements (more figures here). Since January, Joke, HR manager at Dataroots, is also able to present interesting figures on the brand new flex reward plan that Payflip helped to set up at Dataroots! 

Where did the idea of more flexible pay come from? 

If we can let our people choose how they want to compose their salary package, we are not going to miss the opportunity! Extra mile for extra mile! Motivation, knowledge and performance should be rewarded, is what we think at Dataroots. And as a fast-growing company in the competitive sector that is IT consultancy, we are not alone in this view.

The flexibilization of the salary package therefore fits perfectly into a series of other, innovative tweaks that we had already set up to strengthen our HR policy: own R&D laboratory, bonuses via a Slack nugget system, sports credits,...

Personally, as an HR manager, I also think it's important to keep my finger on the pulse around everything that's going on in terms of HR tools, both in terms of soft HR and hard HR. So I bumped into Payflip, as a new salary player in town, and was triggered by their digital way of doing things. 

Together with Maura (co-founder of Payflip) we analyzed where exactly in the current salary package a flexible component would have the most impact. After a brief survey of our team, it turned out to be in the area of mobility (company car) and bonuses (year-end bonus and cash bonus). This is how we ended up going full steam ahead with Payflip for their projects on setting up a mobility budget and cafeteria plan!

What arguments persuaded you to choose Payflip as a flex reward partner?

We simultaneously contacted Payflip and our social secretariat for more information on flexible salaries. This resulted in interesting interactions! We were able to compare the different approaches, tooling and pricing with each other.

Although we were correctly informed by our social secretariat during this process, we were more attracted to the young, passionate character of the people at Payflip. I have the feeling that, as a startup, they really want to make a difference for young companies that want to pay differently . The fact that they are so transparent in terms of pricing and process was also the deciding factor for me.

How was the collaboration with Payflip? 

Smooth and transparent! Because of their project-based way of working and the close communication with their customer success team, we always knew very well what still needed to be done from both sides until the launch of both the cafeteria plan, and the mobility budget.  

We deliberately chose to introduce both concepts of flexible pay, cafeteria plan and mobility budget, simultaneously in January this year. At first glance, this seemed like a challenge, since our team had not previously been introduced to the opportunity to put their personal stamp on their pay package and the entire flex setup was thus brand new.

But also this challenge was managed with the necessary expertise and enthusiasm by Payflip: several webinars (in NL/ENG) were organized around both topics, Q&A sessions and there is a very popular chat function in the Payflip tool through which employees can ask their questions.

We, as the HR team, never had to wait long for an answer to our questions either! Thanks to an integrated Slack channel(similar to Microsoft Teams), the Payflip was quickly at the ready! I would even dare to say more: our personal Payflip expert was even allowed to monitor her own time a bit more ;-). The fact that we can always book virtual phone calls for additional questions does not always make it easy for her.

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What were the team's reactions to the introduction of the mobility budget and the cafeteria plan?

Very good! 

Somewhat similar to the response of Eveline of Cheqroom in her Payflip testimonial, we also see the effect of "the new wind through the pay packet" and the increasing interest in the "taxation of things."

And the numbers don't lie! Currently, exactly 75% of employees have chosen the cafeteria plan and 30% have chosen the mobility budget. 

Then we can't say that the efforts of the HR team have fallen on a cold stone can we? 

How do you see the concept of flexible pay continuing to evolve within Dataroots? 

Thanks to the smooth implementation and the good response from the team, I can say that flexibility in our remuneration is becoming the norm. The cafeteria plan and the mobility budget have become important elements in our salary policy and are standard items on the negotiation table for new candidates. More than a nice extra, so to speak! 

Of course, this is not to say that there is no more work to be done! 

We want to continue to check with Payflip in which direction the legal and fiscal trends are going around flexible pay. We would very much like to work on the incentivization of sports / exercise / healthy living within the team. But above all, we're going to let the data we collect as part of the first year of launch speak for itself! Call it the nature of the beast ;)