From Fragmentation to Framework: Aligning Pay Across a 30,000-Employee Vietnamese Conglomerate

Project snapshot

• Client industry: a Vietnamese multi-industry conglomerate with ~20 subsidiaries
• Workforce size: ~30,000 employees nationwide
• Background: Increasing organizational complexity and scale leads to the urgent need for a standardized, group-wide compensation and benefits framework to ensure consistency and scalable management across diverse business units. The most important aspect is ensuring strong collaboration, buy-in and alignment among extensive stakeholders from Group level to other subsidiary business units.
• Solutions: First comes the Group-level job evaluation for strategic standardization, then provide holistic rewards consultation (framework design and implementation) to ensure consistency.
• Timeline: Two-year duration

The Challenge

The complexity of the project did not come from a lack of structure, but from the existence of many structures.  

First, fragmentation across entities 

The group operated through numerous subsidiaries across different industries, each with its own compensation structure and policies developed over time. While suitable at the individual level, this created fragmentation when viewed from a group perspective, making it difficult to establish consistency or a common basis for comparison.

Second, limited data standardization

There was no unified data structure across the organization, including various formats between entities which requires extensive review and standardization before any meaningful analysis or framework design could take place.

Third, large-scale stakeholder alignment

The project required coordination across a wide network of stakeholders — including executive leadership, group HR, and HR teams across subsidiaries — involving nearly 100 individuals. Aligning different perspectives, priorities, and operational realities was a critical and ongoing challenge throughout the project.

In addition, a previous consulting effort had not fully addressed the organization’s needs, leaving unresolved issues that needed to be revisited. Expectations were high: beyond policy design, the solution needed to deliver practical guidance that could be applied effectively in the Vietnamese context while reflecting the organization’s core values.

The Approach

To address the complexity, the project was executed in two distinct phases, moving from alignment to full implementation.

Phase 1: Leadership Pilot and Alignment

The project started with a pilot at the leadership level, covering the Chairman, CEOs, and senior executives across subsidiaries.

The objective was to establish a common foundation before scaling, including:

• Reviewing and validating existing job evaluation outcomes from a previous consulting firm to ensure better alignment within the organization’s context.

• Benchmarking executives’ pay scheme against the market and across entities.

This phase helped to align leadership on key principles and demonstrated how the approach would work in practice, creating a solid base for group-wide rollout.

Phase 2: Group-wide Implementation

The second phase expanded the framework across the entire organization, covering all subsidiaries. The scope included:

Job architecture & role evaluation

Talentnet continued to review and refine job evaluation results by the previous consulting firm, ensuring a more reliable basis for comparing roles across different entities and establishing a solid basis for the subsequent market compensation benchmarking phase.

Compensation benchmarking

Compensation was analyzed through multiple lenses to ensure both market competitiveness and internal consistency. This included comparisons with the external market, within the same industry cluster, and across different industry clusters within the group, providing a comprehensive view of pay positioning.

Salary structure design

A layered salary structure was introduced to balance consistency and flexibility. One unified structure was established at the group level, supported by five tailored structures aligned with key industry clusters, allowing each company to operate within a common framework while reflecting its specific context.

Salary Increase Matrix and Bonus allocation

Talentnet also provided the principles for applying salary increase matrices, together with approaches to structuring and allocating bonus pools, helping the organization establish a more consistent and transparent approach to reward distribution.

Benefits benchmarking

Employee benefits were reviewed internally and benchmarked against market practices to ensure competitiveness and alignment with the overall rewards strategy.

Policy & governance framework

A structured set of compensation policies and annual salary review mechanisms was developed to guide implementation and ongoing management. ensuring decisions could be made consistently and systematically across the organization

The Impact

Clarity and Consistency in pay are the two most important outputs of the project, brought about by a comprehensively standardized rewards system right at the group level.

For the first time, the organization can compare roles and pay across entities using a shared framework, enabling more informed decisions on market positioning and internal equity—while still allowing flexibility for different business units.

Beyond immediate outcomes, the project established a long-term foundation for workforce governance, supporting continued growth with more structured, data-driven decision-making.

A Different Kind of Complexity

What makes this case notable is that the challenge was not methodology, but application at scale. The real difficulty lays in translating proven frameworks into a system that could work across a highly diversified organization.

Over a two-year implementation, the project mobilized three consulting teams (12–15 Talentnet consultants) and involved hundreds of working sessions with stakeholders across the organization. These stakeholders, from executive leadership to HR across subsidiaries, brought different priorities and perspectives, requiring continuous alignment throughout.

This level of sustained effort and coordination was essential to ensure the framework moved beyond design — and could be applied consistently in practice across nearly 20 subsidiaries and 30,000 employees.

For large, multi-entity organizations, compensation is no longer just an HR function. It becomes a core component of governance, directly impacting decision-making, cost control, and long-term growth.

Building such a system is not simply about adopting global standards. It is about knowing how to adapt them and how to make them work in the real operating context of the business while staying compliant with the Vietnamese regulations.