Every People team knows the moment when a spreadsheet stops being a convenience and starts being a liability. At Oviva, a digital healthcare business operating in the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and Poland, that moment showed up every Friday.
Members of the People team, Finance, and the CPO would join a call to work through a shared spreadsheet: who needed to hire, whether the budget existed, and who had approved what. It was a system built for an earlier stage of the business, and it worked well until it didn’t. As Oviva grew, the weekly process became harder to sustain.
Oviva’s People team needed a faster, more reliable way to manage headcount, compensation, and the decisions connecting them. Working with Bob, Global Compensation & Systems Lead Brady Foster and the People team began building the structure they needed, starting with clearer salary bands and expanding into workforce planning and talent development.
Making pay decisions more consistent and transparent
Before Oviva invested in Bob’s compensation module, managers didn’t have a consistent framework for making pay decisions, and no clear benchmark to support an offer or explain it if questions came up. Without that structure, decisions could vary between managers, making it harder to understand how pay had been set or whether it was equitable.
So Brady used Bob to benchmark every role at Oviva individually, build the company’s job architecture using job catalogues, and introduce salary bands by title and level. That structure now automatically powers comp ratio and pay equity tracking. This is especially important as organisations across Europe continue to adapt to the EU’s pay transparency requirements, Oviva’s salary band structure gives the People team a stronger foundation for making consistent, compliant, and explainable pay decisions.
Now, managers open Bob and see exactly where someone sits in their band, what that means in the context of their pay progression, and whether a higher offer is supported by the framework rather than past practice.
The evidence sits in Oviva’s exit-interview data. In 2024, before the new structure was in place, a higher salary elsewhere was the most common reason for leaving, cited by 41 percent of leavers. One year after salary bands were fully embedded, that figure had halved to 21 percent, salary had dropped to the sixth-most-cited reason for leaving, and it has held near that level since.
Since then, Oviva has also used Bob to run its annual compensation events, reducing the time and effort involved for the business because the whole process is managed in one place. Pay decisions are made by managers, guided by the People team using talent placements, comp ratio positioning, and the salary band framework.
Custom talent placements that put development first
Compensation was just the beginning. Oviva also wanted a more consistent way to develop its people, one that gave every employee a clear picture of where they are and where they’re heading.
The People team built custom Talent Placements in Bob, using fields and workflows they configured themselves, to give each person a defined place within Oviva’s talent framework. The four placements are core, high growth, misaligned, and critical talent: whether someone is performing consistently in their role, progressing quickly and preparing for their next step, in a position where expectations and current performance may not yet align, or considered especially critical to the business.
This gives managers a shared starting point for development conversations that might otherwise rely on a guess. Rather than labelling people, the placements help managers understand what each person needs next, whether that’s stretch opportunities, targeted support, or a route to their next role.
Oviva uses Impact Plans to turn each placement into practical action. The plan links from the person’s Bob profile, and an automated task prompts their manager every three months to review progress, discuss what support is needed, and agree on next steps together.the organization.
The People team piloted the approach with one group before rolling it out across Oviva, creating a shared rhythm for these conversations without imposing a rigid, one-size-fits-all process.
Workforce planning that turned HR into a strategic partner
At Oviva, headcount decisions were tracked position by position, and nothing moved until the People team, Finance, and the CPO had talked it through. That was a lot of moving parts for a business that needed to move fast, especially with new contracts landing at short notice.
Today, managers at Oviva raise position requests directly in Bob. Because each position is already tied to a salary band in Bob Compensation, its expected cost is visible from the start, no digging required. Finance and the People team review requests as soon as they’re raised, and approval cycles that once took a week now close the same day.
That same data flows straight into Oviva’s financial planning tool, Pigment, supporting more accurate and timely forecasting. Instead of piecing together a snapshot from a spreadsheet, Finance always has a current view of proposed and approved headcount costs.
This has changed the People team’s role in business-critical conversations. Finance no longer needs to chase the People team for numbers, and the CPO no longer has to wait for an update before reviewing requests. The People team provides the data Finance and leadership rely on to make decisions, strengthening its strategic role in the business.
A platform that flexes as fast as Oviva does
Brady worked with several enterprise people platforms before Bob, including Oracle HCM, PeopleSoft, iTrent, and Workday. In his experience, Bob gives Oviva greater freedom to adapt fields and workflows around the way the business operates.
That configurability shapes how the team works day to day: new ideas are built quietly in Bob, trialled with one team, and only rolled out once they’ve proven themselves. It’s exactly how the talent placements came to be. “I always say to people: You can just build it in Bob, and you don’t have to give visibility to anyone. Test it with one team, and if it works, roll it out.” says Brady.
It has also helped Oviva expand how it uses Bob over time. Core HR came first, followed by Talent and Time and Attendance. Compensation, Workforce Planning, and Learning came later, with each module building on the people data already in the platform.
Main takeaways
- Salary fell from the most-cited reason for leaving (41 percent of leavers in 2024) to the sixth (21 percent in 2025) within a year of salary bands being fully embedded in Bob, and has stayed near that level since
- Annual compensation events now run end to end in Bob, with managers making pay decisions guided by the People team
- Custom talent placements, impact plans, and automated quarterly check-ins give every employee a consistent development conversation
- Same-day headcount approvals replaced the weekly spreadsheet-and-call process, with position costs visible from the moment a request is raised
- Connected systems, including Pigment, draw on Bob as the single source of workforce data for People, Finance, and leadership
- Oviva now uses six Bob modules,which include Core HR, Compensation, Workforce Planning, Talent, Learning, and Time and Attendance.
