Have you started setting targets for this year's reward strategy?

Congratulations to those who’ve now survived another pay review and submitted your Year 2 Gender Pay data in time!

Now you have emerged from these challenges (and hopefully rewarded yourself with a weekend to recover), you can start to focus on your year ahead. What does this time of year look like for you? Does it highlight areas you need to focus on and change?

For many HRD’s & Reward professionals, it's hard to find time to go above and beyond the day job whilst keeping an eye on long term goals.

As we have discussed in previous blogs and seminars, making time to anticipate large-scale 'waves' of change can help you effectively dampen them and not become overwhelmed. Awareness and preparation are key to managing the ebb and flow of long or short term strategic planning.

As our clients emerge from pay review we are noticing a few typical strategic reward trends:

Simplification

When faced with legacy reward structures that have become overly complicated, HR/Reward have to create a myriad of workarounds to deliver pay review. Let's not be shy in admitting that it’s exhausting and no one understands how it all fits together. Ripping up the existing system and starting again can be daunting, but if no one understands how it works, then the fundamental premise is broken. Keep it simple and reap the rewards in time and effort.

Digitisation

It doesn’t have to be an expensive all singing and dancing payroll or compensation system. We find many companies spend months preparing for pay review and managing benchmarking when there are plenty of tools out there to help manage the process. Stop and question: how can I make this easier on myself?

There is a proliferation of HR tech solutions all purporting to answer your prayers, but too often these are over-engineered and just don’t work the way you need them to. Instead focus on your direct challenge and business need; Innecto's tools such as Advance and PayLab have been specifically designed to be cost effective solutions that deliver the insight / functionality required in an easy to implement way, whilst saving HR teams considerable time and effort.

Transparency

How are your engagement scores? Do employees say they trust pay decisions and feel fairly paid? I’ll bet not. This is the one area where most engagement scores nosedive because we don’t build trust and share how decisions are made or what their impacts are.

Consider how you can share the rationale for pay decisions and how they link to your strategic objectives. If your goal is to pay market median, how far away are you as an organisation? If you recognise contribution, what impact does this have on your pay awards? If you are looking to close your gender pay gap, sharing how you check pay decisions for bias will start to build that trust

Engagement

You may offer great reward packages but rarely talk about them. Storing all the benefits in one place on your intranet is not true engagement in action. How can you encourage employees to feel part of the process? What could you do to make them more than just a cog? The employee experience encompasses every interaction employees have with your organisation; therefore consider the delivery and adoption of employee comms, engagement, benefits and wellbeing.

In isolation your employee value proposition is not enough. You must be able to translate and communicate the value.

Datafication

We all collate so much data and never do anything with it or bother to update it and it soon becomes useless. Staying on top of data, creating robust processes and generating better insights can open up a whole world of improved decision making and to the point above, building employee trust. How can you set aside resource to do this?

A luxury you can afford?

Often, we consider taking time out to consider the bigger trends as a luxury we can ill afford. This seems like perverse logic when you consider how much time we waste running around implementing last minute, knee jerk decisions.

Maybe you don’t have the resource or time to tackle your full reward strategy, but making the time to indulge in the 'luxury' of planning will not only benefit the short term strategy but the long term too. Project yourself ahead a year or two and just think how grateful you will be for what you tackled now?

Strategy Considerations:

What are your top 3 challenges for the year ahead?
Where are your opportunities to make a difference this year?
What has been loitering on your to-do list for a while?
Where can you add the most value?
What can you start this year that you’ll be glad you did in 3 years' time?
How do your challenges fit with the wider aspect of people and business strategy?
How can you make a positive impact on pay and reward, your culture, key stakeholder relationships, business growth and performance, communication and engagement?

Strategy planning should feel exciting, inspiring and ultimately give you and your employees clear direction and motivation. To get started, call Innecto on 020 3457 0894.

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