Six months into the COVID-19 crisis and businesses have gone through tremendous change. The world of work is under a big reset and talent leaders are revisiting each and every people strategy. Among other things, the pandemic has challenged the current total rewards strategy for businesses and made them rethink about the unique challenges of their diverse workforce. Battling pay cuts, slashed bonuses, stretched hours, and new work arrangements, how do businesses now redefine their total rewards strategies to manage employee experience while maintaining cost controls?

“Organizations must remain committed that assessments must be based on reasonable performance expectations taking into account COVID-19 and agreed by both managers and employees through these frequent, open conversations based on individual circumstances, including consideration of real-life challenges and factors that might impact employees’ performance outcomes,” suggests Brandon Coate, the Head of Human Resources for HSBC Singapore. 

The pandemic in fact brings an opportunity for talent leaders, reward professionals, and HR enthusiasts to enhance their current total reward strategy. For leading the change, they need a deeper understanding of the changing total rewards landscape and business needs. To help the talent leaders, Aon HR Learning Center (AHLC) brings Certified Rewards Ready: A Holistic Virtual Course that kick starts from 26 September, 2020. 

Let’s deep dive into the changing landscape of Total Rewards and learn how Aon’s Certified Rewards Ready: A Holistic Virtual Course can help talent leaders bridge the gaps in their current rewards strategy. 

Beyond compensation and benefits

For a long time talent leaders have focused only on compensation and then benefits but the ongoing pandemic has further highlighted the need to broaden the scope. Compensation is just one part of a larger set of total rewards that companies offer, so it’s helpful to reinforce employees’ total rewards package that is available to them and their families. The employees are undoubtedly under varying degrees of stress. Hence, the need for transparency and empathy in total rewards strategy has also increased. 

Total rewards, by definition, encompasses not only compensation and benefits but also personal and professional growth opportunities, an inclusive work culture where employees can grow and fulfil their career aspirations. In the current scenario, it would also include creating a safe place to work, both physically and psychologically. 

Flexibility in work and working hours, profit sharing, and offering additional relevant benefits for the new reality of work are a few ways in which talent leaders can reimagine their total rewards strategy. However, it is important to understand that what works for one might not work for another. The one size fits all approach is no longer impactful as organizations are made up of diverse workforce with their unique needs and challenges. 

To help determine an optimal solution, leaders should stop guessing what their employees value and make fact-based decisions with better data and people insights.

A personalized approach

The world, especially for consumers, is becoming more and more individualized, and our experiences as consumers, particularly on the web, are shaping expectations of what we should encounter at work as employees. Indeed, the trend towards mass consumerization or personalization is now taking center stage in the workplace. For the success of an organization or its HR policies, it is imperative to understand the individual preferences of the employees and thus provide them with a more relevant, engaging and customized experience.

Experts from Aon share that in an ideal scenario, employees help shape change within their organization by becoming an essential part of the process. Figure 1 shows the inputs required to design the new normal for a total rewards strategy in which an employee’s preference towards different types of rewards plays a pivotal role.

Bridging the gaps in the current total rewards strategy 

As per Aon’s research, one-third of companies surveyed want to see their total rewards as a differentiator yet only 10 percent say they are there today. Furthermore about one-quarter of survey respondents want to be early adopters and innovators in total rewards yet only 10 percent say they are there today. To be able to bridge this gap talent leaders, reward professionals, and HR enthusiasts need to sharpen their business acumen, develop effective partnerships, and harness their technical expertise. For this they need to immerse themselves in a new learning experience and first enhance their own capabilities. Then they shall be better positioned to lead a change in Total Rewards.

How can AHLC help master the essentials of Total Rewards

Aon HR Learning Center (AHLC) brings together their consulting insights and capability building expertise to create highly-specialized learning journeys for HR professionals. Spread across 15 countries in Asia, Pacific and the Middle East it has so far helped over 10,000+ talent professionals impact business results. 

Dakshi Mehra, Compensation Analyst, Willis Towers Watson shared, “The course is a great way to acquaint and familiarize with best practices in the compensation industry. The assignments and assessment enable us to engage with real time world problems which helps understand compensation structure from a wider perspective.”

“One can just delve and understand the expanse of the Total Rewards with the help of the course content,” shared another learner, and talent professional Aditya Vayunandan, Manager - People Strategy, Indofil Industries Ltd (Part of KK Modi Group). 

Through a holistic virtual course AHLC is back again to help talent leaders, reward professionals, and HR enthusiasts get rewards ready. Starting from 26 September, 2020 the virtual course will include eight modules and cover everything from understanding the fundamentals to building guidelines for pay structures:

• Introduction: Explore key success factors for a rewards professional and gauge your personal readiness
• Engage with Business: Learn through Aon's Improving Business Results Model the relation between business strategy and people outcomes
• Understand Total Rewards: Understand total rewards and learn to leverage its different elements effectively in context of your organization
• Build Internal Equity: Learn about job description creation to enable productivity and job evaluation methodologies to build an organization structure
• Measure External Competitiveness: Equate your organization's jobs and pay to an external comparator set and review competitiveness of pay
• Drive Pay Management: Build guidelines for pay structures. Deep dive into the different methodologies used for salary structure design
• Conduct Annual Budgeting: Key factors influencing the annual budgeting process and the best practices to conduct an effective annual cycle
• Optimize STI & Communication: Get an overview of the types of STI plans, design process and learn to identify the right plan time for your context

Through interactive e-learning, webinars, case studies and best practices of leading organizations get rewards ready for the now & future of work. Click here to learn more about Aon's Certified Rewards Ready: A Holistic Virtual Course.