Your Employees Are Guessing What Their Pay Means - and That's a Problem: Orion Innovation's Alana Gisleson on Transparency, AI Decision Tools, and Why FP&A Is Your Best Friend - Beyond the Paycheck

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Pay transparency Total Rewards Compensation strategy benefits education Orion Innovation

Episode notes

Pay Transparency, Total Rewards, and AI: Orion Innovation’s Rewards Leader on Building Trust Summary If employees don’t understand how they’re paid, trust erodes - and performance follows. Alana Gisleson, Senior Manager of Compensation and Benefits at Orion Innovation, shares how she turns “total rewards” from a spreadsheet into something people can feel: clarity, stability, and growth. With a background spanning HR generalist roles, Rutgers labor studies, and WorldatWork certifications, Alana explains why pay transparency is now table stakes and how to operationalize it with job architecture, governance, and manager enablement. She details what breaks down most - opaque decisions and under-communicated benefits - and how to fix it with education and total rewards statements. Alana also walks through building tangible wellness programs (from mothers’ rooms to decompression spaces), designing variable pay and sales incentives that drive revenue, and “managing up” with a business case that wins Finance and the executive team.