Pay-for-performance sounds great, until it's time to actually run a merit cycle.
If you’ve ever scrambled to align raises with performance reviews, reconcile budgets with manager requests, or explain pay decisions across teams and time zones, you’re not alone. For many HR and Total Rewards teams, connecting compensation to performance remains one of the toughest challenges, especially on a global scale.
This 45-minute expert panel will discuss what it takes to make performance-based pay work. You’ll hear from compensation experts and HR leaders about the principles, processes, and systems that enable fair, motivating, and scalable comp strategies across geographies.
What's on the agenda?
Whether you're building your first performance-based pay model or refining one across multiple markets, this session will provide frameworks and tactics you can implement right away. We’ll cover:
- Why connecting performance and pay is so hard: We’ll unpack why most organizations struggle, especially across borders. Think data silos, inconsistent criteria, subjective calls, and budget constraints that derail good intentions
- What happens when merit cycles go wrong: When pay feels arbitrary or reactive, trust erodes, with a downstream impact on engagement, retention, and your culture
- The five principles of effective performance-based pay:
- Transparency: Clear expectations and evaluation criteria
- Consistency: Anchored to levels, frameworks, and calibration
- Motivation: Reward growth, not just output
- Equity: Design for fairness across teams and countries
- Accountability: Equip managers with the tools and knowledge to make good decisions
- The systems behind the principles: We’ll explore how effective teams operationalize these values through performance frameworks, review structures, calibration processes, budget guardrails, and compensation bands that drive better, fairer outcomes
- How Deel runs merit cycles at scale: Get a peek into how Deel’s own People team runs biannual, performance-based merit cycles in our own platform, across 100+ countries.
- Live Q&A: Bring your most pressing questions and our experts will answer them
Who should attend
This session is ideal for:
- Total Rewards and Compensation leaders rethinking performance-based pay
- HR and People Ops professionals managing merit cycles across regions
- Talent, People, and People Systems leaders looking to build scalable, fair comp frameworks
- Business and HR execs ready to align compensation with growth, performance, and retention
Join us to learn how to turn performance reviews into clear, fair, and motivating pay decisions—supported by systems that scale. Reserve your spot now.
