About the 6 Dimensions of CompensationTM
6DOC started with a simple conviction: compensation is bigger than a paycheck.
Every organization pays its people. Far fewer understand what their people actually care about — or whether the experience your organization offers matches what motivates them.
Trade engagement and retention guesswork for clarity.
The 6 Dimensions of CompensationTM assessment gives you data that shows:
- What your employees value vs. their actual experience
- Retention indicators
- Psychological safety markers
- Leadership alignment
Compensation strategy is business strategy. While most compensation assessments stop at pay and benefits, that’s just our starting point.
Connecting your people to what they care about.
We’re human — and each of us is motivated differently.
By understanding what your people value, you can make proactive, meaningful investments to improve the employee experience. And no, the answer is not a pizza party.
The 6 Dimensions we measure:
- Financial — pay, benefits, and financial value. Does reward feel aligned with contribution?
- Emotional — energy, enjoyment, and the emotional experience of work. Do people feel energized and supported?
- Social — connection, belonging, and relationships. Do people feel part of a healthy team?
- Psychological — learning, growth, advancement, and challenge. Do people see room to grow?
- Spiritual — meaning, purpose, and doing work that matters. Can people connect their work to something bigger?
- Physical — work-life balance, environment, flexibility, and boundaries. Do conditions let people do their best work?
Interested in bringing the 6 Dimensions of CompensationTM to your organization?
We’re currently running a pilot program for companies serious about improving their retention, engagement, and overall job satisfaction.
Meet the people passionate about retention, engagement, and job satisfaction.
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Tonia Butterworth
Co-Founder & CEO
Tonia Butterworth took the original 6 Dimensions concept and saw the opportunity to make it something bigger: a way for organizations to understand not just whether employees are engaged, but why.
With decades of leadership and operations experience, Tonia has spent her career inside organizations wrestling with the realities of performance, retention, culture, and employee engagement. She saw firsthand the limitations of traditional engagement surveys and single scores that identify a problem without giving leaders enough insight to make better decisions.
As CEO, Tonia has led the evolution of 6 Dimensions into an organizational assessment and insights platform designed to show leaders what matters most to their people, where expectations and experiences are misaligned, and where action can have the greatest impact.
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Jonathan King
Founder & Speaker
Jonathan King created the original 6 Dimensions of Compensation concept in 2021 after decades of working with leaders and organizations on strategy, performance, and people.
Through his firm, Get Strategy Done®, Jonathan has worked alongside hundreds of leadership teams to turn strategy into action. That work surfaced the same pattern again and again: organizations invest heavily in their people, yet often don't understand what their employees actually value or what keeps their best people engaged.
That insight became the foundation for 6 Dimensions of Compensation, challenging the traditional idea that compensation is primarily about pay and benefits. Today, Jonathan speaks to leaders about turning strategy into action: understanding what matters, making better choices, aligning the leadership team, and placing the right bets. 6 Dimensions gives leaders the insight to do that, turning people strategy from an HR responsibility into a leadership responsibility.
Frequently Asked Questions
6DOC is an anonymous, organizational assessment that measures what your employees value and how they actually experience work across six dimensions of compensation. It turns those patterns into leadership-level insight and clear recommendations.
More than most leaders expect. Pay matters — it's one of the six dimensions — but it's rarely the whole story. Employees also value connection and belonging, growth and challenge, meaning and purpose, the emotional experience of their work, and the balance and environment that let them do it well. 6DOC measures all six, so you can see which matter most to your people and where you're delivering.
They have their place — but the numbers suggest something's missing. Over decades of surveying, Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report found just 20% of employees worldwide are engaged, down from 23% in 2022. Measuring engagement isn't the same as understanding what drives it. 6DOC goes underneath the score to what people actually value across six dimensions — and where their experience falls short — so leaders know not just that engagement is low, but why, and what to do next.
6DOC measures them by looking beyond a single number. Employees rate how much each of the six dimensions matters to them and how they actually experience it. Comparing the two reveals the gaps that drive engagement, satisfaction, and retention — the specific places where experience isn't meeting what people value.
Yes. 6DOC is organizational and anonymous. Leadership receives patterns, themes, and organizational findings — never individual employee-attributed responses. No employee's name appears beside their answers.
No. 6DOC is not about evaluating individual employees, and there are no right or wrong answers. Employees respond based on what matters to them and how they actually experience work.
About 15 minutes.
Leadership receives an Executive Business Review — a board-ready read on your organization's strengths, your most meaningful gaps, quick wins, and focused recommendations for the next 90 days. To take part, reach out through our contact page to apply for the pilot or request more information, and we'll follow up to schedule a kickoff conversation.
Understand what your people value. See what they're experiencing. Invest where it matters.
Applications are open for the current 6 Dimensions of CompensationTM pilot.