How our compensation and career development approach is helping this Kelowna, BC, based technical non-profit live up to its values.

Who is Accelerate Okanagan?

Accelerate Okanagan (AO), is a tech business accelerator that supports entrepreneurs through programs, mentorship, coaching, and community. With a small core team, they are tasked with supporting an ever-expanding entrepreneurial community in British Columbia’s interior.

While the organization knew their team would remain lean, they also recognized their leading role in modelling talent attraction and retention for the companies they work with. To do this, we partnered with AO’s Senior Leadership Team to develop a holistic compensation and career development framework that could scale and be replicable for other organizations.

The challenges

Bandaid solutions were ineffective, revealing cracks on the verge of fracture, like lack of clarity in roles and career progression resulting in department silos.

Leading our community by example required us to take action “We work with start-ups and growth companies every day and see the challenges that come with scaling and sustaining an organization, like retention and engagement. We wanted to lead by example but didn’t know what frameworks and practices were needed to build a sustainable model.”

Wanting employees to have clarity in their career development “We really wanted our employees to have clarity within their role and feel productive, but were lacking the skills as leaders to have those raw and real conversations around people's careers.”

Managing compensation was challenging as we lacked structure “When employees were asking for a raise, we didn’t really know what to say. We wanted to be able to share that we pay fair market rates but we didn’t have the data or the structure to back it up.”

The Solutions

With a people-first, holistic approach, we designed and coached the leadership team in a way that would build capacity internally while role-modelling these frameworks externally.

Compensation Strategy

• Created a clear compensation philosophy to help employees understand how AO values and rewards them
• Designed a market-based base salary structure
• Developed a career level framework and performance steps that align with the compensation structure

Career Framework

• Developed job success profiles, career levels and performance steps to support individual’s career progression
• Created a career mapping solution to help employees in planning longer-term career goals

Leadership Development

• Coached managers on having career development and performance conversations
• Provided frameworks for giving performance-based feedback to support employee’s growth
• Coached managers to develop leadership skills

“Objectivity was key to making this a successful project.

We recognized this work could have been biased had we conducted it in-house. Further, as a small team we lacked the bandwidth and expertise to do it. Now, thanks to Talent Collective, we are able to maintain our system and they are available to support our iterations along the way,” said Brea Lake.