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Total Rewards Strategies
An integrated total rewards strategy offers advantages for both employers and employees. It can:
- Drive organizational success through greater talent attraction, engagement and retention
- Guide investment decisions for the employer while enabling informed choices for the employee
- Clarify the employer-employee relationship
- Build a distinctive employment brand
- Increase the return on rewards and create value for the enterprise
Sibson Consulting can help your organization adopt a more strategic, comprehensive and integrated approach to total rewards that includes both financial and non-financial rewards. Under this approach, we prioritize your rewards investments according to the needs and preferences of key talent segments in your organization.
The Employee Value Exchange
The cornerstone of Sibson's total rewards strategy is the Employee Value Exchange, which examines the balance between the rewards that employers offer and the expectations they set in exchange for those rewards. In our Rewards of Work Model, we identify five types of rewards:
- Compensation: The money employees receive for their work and performance
- Benefits: Indirect compensation including health, retirement and time off
- Work content: The satisfaction employees receive from their work
- Career: The long-term opportunities employees have for development and advancement
- Affiliation: The feeling of belonging employees have to the organization
Sibson uses research conducted through our Rewards of Work Study to help clients understand how to best craft their own value exchange, the preferences of their staff, and the causes of any gaps between employee and/or organization aspirations and the actual exchange presented.
Aspects of employer expectations that usually stir strong reactions include:
- Retention: What is it worth to have turnover lower than average for the industry? Is it possible without additional costs?
- Stretch: To what extent is employee productivity influenced by employees versus the design of the business model and technology?
- Behaviors: Is it okay to prescribe desired behaviors such as "cheerfulness"?
Generally, companies are not as explicit as they could be in defining the Employee Value Exchange, and often the Value Exchange is out of balance. Having a balanced Value Exchange is especially important in the current economic environment, where organizations must carefully measure behaviors, productivity and people cost, and ensure that goals are clearly stated and aligned with business objectives. Offering moderate to high rewards with low or unclear expectations leads to a culture of entitlement, which causes low performance and retains the wrong people. Offering low rewards with high expectations repels talent.
Sibson Consulting's Steps to Creating an Employee Value Exchange
| 1 Ideal | Understand the ideal or desired EVE and how it differs by organization or employee segment |
| 2 Inventory | Understand the full current EVE and People Outcomes |
| 3 Information | Create a scorecard to measure people performance |
| 4 Implementations | Make the value exchange real; close gaps between the desired state and reality, and between reality and understanding |
| 5 Impact | Use the value exchange to solve and prevent problems, e.g., turnover, low productivity |