Whether you are a generalist HR Director with high-level reward expertise in your team, or a specialist reward leader needing to fulfil a huge reward agenda in a short space of time, there are times when you need to boost the reward knowledge in your team to deliver what is needed.
There are a couple of ways to approach this:
- Hiring a Reward Specialist to join the team
- Engaging a Reward Consultancy
Here’s our take on navigating this to ensure you get exactly the right reward resource you need.
Hiring a Reward Specialist
Often, hiring a permanent or semi-permanent reward specialist to join the team seems to be the obvious choice - someone who can get to know the business gradually over time, and become accountable for the delivery of the reward agenda.
There are apparent advantages to this approach. Typically you can negotiate a lower daily rate/annual salary for this individual, which might appear to be better value for money. However, this can be a false economy – becoming part of the team means attending meetings, managing emails, and dealing with bureaucracy that is unrelated to the deliverables. The daily rate might sound attractive, but it’s worth considering what proportion of their time will be spent on actual delivery.
Nevertheless, when the ongoing volume of work is there to suit the specific skills and experience of the person hired, it is probably the right approach. The challenge is when a blend of skills is actually what is required, or horsepower is needed to get an initiative landed.
Expertise balance
How do you know what level of expertise to hire? Do you go for a seasoned reward pro, someone who can manage senior stakeholder interactions without much/any handholding? And would you ask that same person to manage the data analytics, day-to-day reward admin and queries, maintaining the integrity of the HRIS data? It’s a tricky balance to get right, especially on medium to long term basis.
Limited Bandwidth
While adding resource to your team is obviously going to help, when managing a large reward programme, there are times when more resource is needed at pivotal moments in the project, to drive momentum and engagement of the initiative in the business and land the change in the business in a sustainable way. At key points, this may be unrealistic for one person to manage alone, leading to delayed delivery which could mean extra costs.
Engaging a Reward Consultancy
The key benefit of engaging a reward consultancy to boost your reward strategy is that you are able to access the knowledge of a whole team of seasoned professionals with a broad range of skills, not just one individual with a specific skill set.
At Innecto we take a full team approach. You pay for what is needed, at the right time, to deliver the project.
Broad Expertise
By engaging a reward consultancy to manage the delivery of your reward agenda, you can ensure that you are utilising the most experienced person available, every step of the way. Board level presentations and high-level strategy are handled by our experienced Client Directors, whilst our team of Analysts can dig down into the analytics to help provide a data-driven approach. Finding one individual with all of these skills is incredibly difficult, which is why we use a full team approach.
Our Client Directors are senior Reward & HR professionals, who have both the depth and breadth of experience to operate at Board/Exec level, and are able to provide the very best expertise and strategic advice. Unsurprisingly, each Client Director has also evolved greater expertise and experience in particular reward areas (including bonus, strategy, and benefits), so we can ensure that you are partnered with the right person to achieve your objectives.
Working alongside our Client Directors are our Senior Reward Consultants; experienced reward professionals who act as the right-hand to the Client Director on larger projects, or deliver a smaller scale projects end to end.
Our Reward Consultants and Analysts, put simply, are our secret sauce. Under the guidance of the Client Director, they perform wizardry with analytics and do things with Excel most of us can only dream about. Most organisations beg and borrow analyst support from the finance team, with patchy results. Here you have a team of them with deep reward-specific expertise – ready to take on everything from bonus and pay structure modelling, benefits analytics, winners and losers analysis of different approaches, deep dive insights, equal pay audits, pay progression tools… From a reward analytics perspective, the list goes on. The insight that our analysts can gather is truly invaluable to the reward programme process, and vital to making the reward project a data-driven success.
Unlimited Bandwidth
Innecto’s full team approach to your reward project means you get access to the widest range of skills and expertise, with optimum insight and advice on each aspect of the reward programme, without paying over the odds. The Client Director won’t pore over spreadsheets for hours, and the Analysts won’t be expected to manage a senior stakeholder meeting. The right people will be involved where they need to be, every step of the way.
