I am definitely not an expert in C&B, but I have been (and still am) lucky to find Rewards specialists who made (and make) my life much easier and my teams’ bandings a lot sexier. Working with compensation professionals who rapidly assume what the business needs are and sitting by their side while they do the magic on Excel is one of the best things that could happen to a HR Director. And the fact that we co-create a salary banding (I do not mean asking them to do it, but doing it TOGETHER even if my contribution is only 5%) is an awesome learning experience.
C&B has traditionally been one of the less flexible expertise areas. For the amateur user, trying to understand the old-fashioned bandings of big corporations was very similar to diving into the deep ocean. It’s a relief to see that, thanks to the challenges linked to an ever changing environment where talent does not stand still and new organizational models pop up, C&B evolves at a quick pace. I am so glad to see how Rewards leaves behind its backoffice scenario and changes its focus: instead of being the team who continuously maps positions and slowly creates salary proposals, they make an appearance in the business as one of the key elements for proper Talent Management. However, we agree that the evolution is much quicker in specific industries and countries, especially in the booming ones, where anticipating the demand of the most coveted profiles is crucial for the company’s success. I still remember, in my times as International HR, memorable sessions with my C&B manager when we tailor-made our bandings for our Russian or Chinese teams. Here, we used to activate levers we would never use for the non-booming countries. We learnt then that a compensation scheme could only last for 6 months and that was the secret which makes the difference between having a local lined up team who makes a country grow exponentially or fully depending on expats, which is not an economically sustainable model.
Whatever the case, C&B adaptation to the current scenario is not only a corporate thing. It does have a social outreach, since the debate about fair compensation is directly linked to concepts such as equal opportunities or diversity. That being said, every organisation should estimate to which extent its C&B scheme fits within the market and its internal equity. And moreover, the company has to rethink the way its bandings match with the talents the company already has (or wants to have).
The Agile Rewards tooling demystifies the solid, monolithic bandings which took months to develop and that, once you started to use them, you needed to make a thousand exceptions. The devising of flexible C&B scenarios where you always have in mind a hint of an organisational framework and can create individual solutions, is the main focus of compensation specialists: Scenarios where goals and KPIs match with the VUCA world we ALL live in (even if some companies pretend to be in a different league) and where the final user should be the star. That means personalization. Therefore, salary is a very limited trigger, so benefits are and will be the quintessential modern lever when aiming to differentiate our proposals according to who is receiving them. Once again, if we want to know what really motivates our final user, we definitely need to ask him/her. In short, we need to go beyond conventional benefitting, as retirement plans are not interesting to everyone.
So, the real structure and DNA of the company and the role of its internal customer will define the success of its C&B scheme. We may wish to move towards Agile rewarding and propose an OKRs model, but if, deep inside, we are a hierarchical organisation where nobody listens to the internal talent, the model will not be sustainable.
This fact opens the door to the main C&B challenge nowadays, which goes beyond finding the perfect flow when creating bandings. The big question is how to line up global company goals with individual co-worker targets. Which concept should have a heavier weight in the package? The company’s global results or the ones that the co-worker delivers individually? Here, we need to talk about profiles. For the talents whose personal purpose matches with the company’s purpose, his/her contribution merges with the corporate results. For the talents whose purpose follows a different path, his/her performance and the global turnover of the company are parallel worlds. So, do we need to consider contribution or performance? Debate is ongoing.
