Your Money or Your Life? By Paul Bissell

Total Reward, the approach that seeks to maximise employee engagement by delivering all of the elements, fiscal and non-fiscal, that the average employee needs in order to become truly engaged with the businesses they are employed by, has been around for a long time. So why is it that so many companies still struggle to make adequate use of the concept?

As reward professionals we should be in the vanguard of bringing about this shift in thinking and facilitate the education of managers and employees to view their “reward” in the broadest of terms. But what barriers to progress are there?

For some, there is a belief that what is needed is a complex systems solution. And it is true that data is important and the ability to display that data in an accessible form is exceedingly useful in articulating total reward. But I would suggest that this not the real reason behind a failure to adopt the total reward approach. Some organisations have done a fantastic job with very limited resources and certainly without online reward statements.

In some organisations there is still a belief that monetary reward, in all its forms, is the primary way of recruiting and retaining people, although in most cases this crude ‘truth’ is never given voice. Not surprisingly in these organisations the need to talk about such esoteric things as the quality of leadership in the organisation, or the organisations values and principles, seems irrelevant. It’s also probably perversely even truer that these same managers will not know all the benefits that they receive because of their monetary focus, so they can never fulfil their full potential as primary communicators.

In some organisations the HR function itself isn’t fully integrated, or perhaps more commonly, is so under resourced that spending time creating the total reward solution is more of an attractive day dream than a strategic goal.

For some, it all comes down to money, or more accurately the lack of it. When budgets are tight, or being cut back, then work is prioritised and what hasn’t been done before stands no chance of being done now.

For some it’s about time, or rather the lack of it. HR in general seems to suffer from collective ‘Crocodile Syndrome’. In other words when you are up to your ass in crocodiles, it’s difficult to remember you came here to drain the swamp!

Every Reward practitioner knows that Total Reward represents a proven route to employee engagement. A number of studies now show that engaged employees feel more satisfied and loyal and produce better business results through better engagement with the customer. As long ago as May 1998, Jeffrey Pfeffer, in his article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “The Six Great Myths of Pay”, showed how powerful non-monetary rewards were in retaining employees in a Hi Tech firm in the pre dot com bubble burst environment.

So whatever the reasons for not pursuing a total reward strategy (and the annual CIPD Reward Management Survey shows businesses are still struggling in this area) I would suggest that it is our evangelical duty to move our businesses forward. All of the above reasons for not pursuing this strategic goal are delaying tactics. The benefits to be derived will far outweigh the time, costs, systems changes etc, that may (or if you are extremely resourceful may not) be needed.

People are complicated beasts. When you are next in your work environment ask yourself why you are there and perhaps more importantly, why you prefer to be there rather than in some other business. Then look around you at your colleagues and see if you can guess how they would answer the same questions. Chances are you come up with a variety of answers. And in this simple test lies the proof that not only is Total Reward a good idea, it’s an essential strategic approach that paints the full picture of the employment relationship, rather than the caricature that is pay and benefits.