How to design a collaborative rewards strategy which improves profit margins

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Inside HR, January 30, 2019

by Pete DeBellis




You’ve probably heard the ancient Indian fable about the blind wise men and the elephant. In it, each of the men touch an elephant in a different spot – trunk, tusk, ear, leg, tail, etc. Unsurprisingly, each comes away with an incomplete and inaccurate description of the beast. Trying to design and manage employee rewards from a functional silo presents a similar challenge.

When rewards professionals isolate themselves in a silo, they are, in essence, choosing to work with blinders on. They can’t see the full picture – missing critical details and nuances regarding how rewards can support talent acquisition and retention, and drive employee productivity and business results, among other things.

Consequently, the rewards that they design, which often add up to the largest expenses on a company’s P&L, don’t generate the return that they could and should, and their definition of “rewards” may be missing key elements of their employer’s value proposition, such as learning and development opportunities and much more.

Is this the case in your company? Bersin’s latest research into High-Impact Rewards suggests that approximately 80 percent of organisations are struggling to meet the expectations of their employees around rewards and are failing to drive high levels of maturity in their rewards function.

In many of these organisations, there is no or little collaboration between the rewards function and other HR functions, including talent acquisition, people analytics, learning and development, and diversity and inclusion. Moreover, when cross-functional communication does occur it tends to be unidirectional, with rewards functions sharing data, program, or policy information as needed and in a manner that does not generate or support true collaboration.

To help remedy this, the HR suite as a whole should look to embed regular communication across the suite, whether that means check-ins between functional leaders on a recurring cadence or, for more fluidity, deploying an online collaboration space.

The other 20 percent of organisations have more mature rewards functions. In these companies, rewards professionals collaborate consistently with their colleagues in other HR functions – especially talent acquisition – and throughout the broader organisation. Information sharing is a two-way street through which rewards teams not only share information, but also receive it from these other functions. Using such an approach with collaboration as a regular practice helps surface insights that can help rewards professionals design and deploy a compelling rewards offering, while also supporting the strategic mandates of other HR functions. Read the rest here.