Who you regard as a comparator group is important: where talent is drawn from and where homegrown superstars are lost to. Some of the business’s employees will be both recruited from and lost to could be familiar names in your specific sector, but within the industries your business straddle, it’s just as likely you’ll have never heard of the organisation an employee will be leaving for or joining instead of you. Not everybody in the business is going to be able to offer the skillset and drive to help you make the leap to achieving the set strategic goals. Your organisation will need to offer a compelling package suitable to each differing group of talent and remain mindful as to how these core staff will be retained and recruited considering the culture shift.  Connectivity between the reward architecture and talent is key to success.

But how do we get to a personality for reward in business that attracts a different individual?  How do you customise it to the power of one? Potentially your organisation would have highly poachable highflyers of different career levels, roles and demographics will have varying aspirations and place a different emphasis on different aspects of their employment. Some are motivated by money, some by career progression, some by being given the opportunity to prove they can solve complex issues – Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy, covered in detail on our previous Open Letter.

By identifying these various ‘personas’ of talent, you will be able to segment and tailor the reward offering to those deemed as critical to the businesses success and development.

The type of individual contributors your business employs could be market scarce and highly valuable, so a tiered plan focusing on different parts of the EVP can support the retention and engagement of key players for those outside of the Leadership level that are deemed high performers or future stars.
Part of the Employee Experience is about effort being valued as well as results and impact matter.  This approach creates the environment to ‘fail forward’ to innovate and take sensible risks necessary to take your organisation offering to the next level.  Create: 

• An environment of safety that celebrates diversity of thought
• Encouragement and permission to give it a try, fail fast and learn from it
• Ensure that a culture is created where it is safe to ‘fall forward’, and reward noble failures and near misses to gain ground on the market with senior leaders managing this portfolio of risk.

Understanding what we are dealing with
What do employees need to be happy and perform well? If you understand the physical, mental and social needs of your employees, everything else starts to make sense and you can shape your leadership action plan and reward frameworks in order to remove the negative causes and enable leaders to perform at their best. Leaders that are showing that they are not connected to company and customers or have uncertainty over performance objectives are likely to have low productivity.  Overlaying this with performance scores or other business KPI’s will provide enable you to focus attention on the areas that matter and that will have the greatest business impact.

Building a personalised story
The aim is to join the dots and pull together an offering which is a more holistic and fully effective Reward programme. It is essential that the role of the individual reward elements have a purpose and work together in harmony to drive change, high performance in the right areas, encourage creativity and the right behaviours, which all drives business success.

Your Reward toolkit will ensure that it connects the tangible reward polices directly to the employee experience.

Segmentation and its impact on differential 
There will be different populations within your organisation to balance from a recruitment, retention and incentivisation point of view; one size will no longer fit all.  Broadly speaking, these segments include:

• the business’s leadership team whose decisions and strategic planning will be key to delivering the stated goals over the next number of years
• those that will be recruited into critical roles to drive the business forward
• those who may potentially already exist internally who are stars of the future, have potential, and can be incentivised to make big changes
• those that have formed the business’s core to this point, who retain key knowledge, and remain necessary to attain the baseline that has existed up until to this point

Tailoring performance expectations and the reward associated with these different populations will form the basis of a transparent and relevant reward architecture. This will enable you to focus investment in the correct areas, reduce grade creep and out of cycle pay spend by having an appropriate offering in place to deal the differing requirements each segment may have.

Departing from a generic package will maximise the value of your investment in reward.  By utilising the talent segments a unique and relevant architecture can be developed for each distinct population. Reward elements will have their own function in the attraction and retention of talent. Your organisation at present could have an offer that is a ‘one size fits all’ approach and doesn’t have a strong purpose across all the elements, if this is the case, Innecto suggests that the future position will need defining. 

« Back to Insights