Canadian HR Reporter

Canadian HR RepoRteR december 15, 2014 20 FeAtures/News total reWarDS Maximizing total reward statements Employers need to tap into available sources, make data work for them By Karim Kurji e very year, companies cre- ate total reward state- ments for employees with the hope these statements will attract, motivate and retain employees. some are designed to reinforce an organization's hr brand and diff erentiate the company from other employ- ers. others raise awareness and appreciation of the benefi ts of- fered by the company. some statements, albeit electronic or paper, try to do all of this with varying degrees of success. e total reward within a com- pany is usually driven by how athe company operates. Some are global, with localized opera- tions, while others have very cen- tralized operations. Big or small, each has its own prescribed ways of operating. In all these cases, the only com- mon factor is the bottom line — after all, isn't that why companies are in business? What if a total re- ward statement could go beyond pinpointed employee engagement and help the dollars and cents of a company? With ever-increasing pressure to maximize profits and grow business, companies need to be smart about how they spend their money and understand the impact of reward decisions. For example, if a company wants to give each employee a two per cent raise on base pay, that's not just a two per cent increase on the books, it's more like 10 to 15 per cent depending on benefi t struc- tures or jurisdictions. So how do employers know they're making informed deci- sions? In our time of instant access to information, speed and accura- cy are expected. e world we live in today is bursting at the seams with data and information. Com- panies spend obscene amounts of money on human resources information system (HRIS) im- plementations but, with all this capability at their fi ngertips, how quickly can they really crunch the numbers? Organizations need to get smart about tapping into available sources and making the data work for them. For starters, many hu- man resource professionals create a total rewards statement every year and release it to employees with great fanfare. But in a matter of days all is forgotten, the data is stale, spread over numerous excel fi les, and not really in any state to be analyzed quickly, easily and accurately. How unsatisfying must that be? Months of eff ort to compile, collate, check and publish a state- ment that is all but forgotten soon after it's released. To add insult to injury, the data is dated and not very useful. Companies need a total reward system, not a giant mail-merge application. If an organization is going to spend the time and eff ort pulling all this reward informa- tion together, then it should get smart about it. at means lever- aging the massive investments in its HRIS systems to provide driv- ing data, such as the location you work at, pay scale level or various eligibility criteria. Formulae within the system use these values to calculate the vari- ous benefi t values. ese stored values, in turn, help the enterprise and its employees make better, in- formed decisions. Companies shouldn't stop there. Once the statement is pub- lished, survey technology can be used to gain insights into a work- force's psyche. How do employees feel about their benefi ts? Would they be good advocates for your company? Data and modern tools can analyze comments, tag them, pick out trends and visualize these trends to make it usable. Using feedback from the crowd, elements of gamifi cation and audience participation will help manage reward spend and improve employee performance. By understanding reward value from an employee's perspective, organizations can make better decisions on their reward spend. Another way data can help make better spend decisions is through calculations and track- ing. Because benefi ts are being calculated, actuals versus pro- jected budgets are tracked in real-time. Plan administrators can use total reward data as the basis for benchmarking stud- ies, annual salary budget plans or future expansion modelling. Systems like this should be inex- pensive and easy to implement, along with being very intuitive to use and, most importantly, justi- fying ROI. HR professionals should ask themselves: What will my next spend be on? Will it make my job simpler, more complex or just plain miserable? Will it allow me to do more with less? How can I make my total reward statement investment worthwhile? Companies need to shift their perception of a total reward state- ment and what it does for both employees and the enterprise. It's time to move towards sticky employee engagement through participation and data-driven insights to make informed spend decisions. A total reward state- ment is no longer just an annual statement — it's a strategic busi- ness tool that can help a compa- ny's bottom line. Karim Kurji is a Toronto-based prin- cipal of technology and delivery solu- tions for Buck Consultants at Xerox. He can be reached at karim.kurji@ xerox.com. By understanding reward value from an employee's perspective, organizations can make better decisions on their reward spend. TVO goes back to school TVOntario (TVO) was another award winner that put a strong focus on digital innovation. Fac- ing a changing media landscape, it was challenged by how to keep employees' skills up to date. "We really wanted to be able to ensure that our employees were up to speed on these changes and had the best skills to really be nimble and agile on the media landscape," said Clara Addo-Bekoe, training and organizational development specialist at TVO in Toronto. "Now, the media landscape is on so many diff erent platforms, we wanted to be able to use what we bring to TV (and) to enable our employees to do it to a greater degree." ey realized they needed to be very ambitious about how they trained employees, said Addo-Bekoe. "If we really say (and) mean that they are our most important asset, then we wanted to make sure that we are demonstrating that in a vis- ible way and in a way that makes our strategy come alive." So TVO formed a partnership with OCAD University in To- ronto to create the Digital Media Training Program, with a goal of training TVO's content producers around digital media skills. "Most organizations will prob- ably take a few employees and train them but we wanted to be able to train cross-divisionally, and we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just a few days but it was a long enough program to take into account the full scope of digital media training that we wanted to build," said Addo-Bekoe. In phase one, they took 37 T V content producers, as- sessed their skills and created individual learning plans. "It was really tailored not just to their skills but also as a strategy in terms of where we wanted to get to as an organization in the digital landscape," she said. Training took place over a three-month period and employ- ees went off -site to the university to work with professors. Employ- ees then brought that learning back to the job and shared it across the organization. "Eighty per cent of our par- ticipants really found everything they learnt was very useful," said Addo-Bekoe. "We wanted to give them tools to (succeed) in the digital world, and to add value to the organi- zation. So if you can indicate to employees through such career development and learning that you are really interested in their development, then the engage- ment level really increases. "You may not be able to always provide top-rate pay or promo- tions, but you can fi nd other ways to engage your employees. And one of the ways to do that is when you talk about total rewards, you're not just talking about the money, you're also talking about opportunities." AwArds < pg. 3 TVO partners with university 2014 CATE award-winners •Alzheimer Society of Ottawa and Renfrew County/GEVC •Ellicom •Enbridge •Global eTraining •Home Depot •IAMGOLD •PepsiCo Canada/The Executive Roundtable •Service Canada College/Employment and Social Development Canada •TELUS Communications/Global Knowledge Canada •TD Bank Group •TVO/OCAD University dealing with job sites such as Workopolis and Monster; then LinkedIn arrived and Twitter, and now it's Google Plus and YouTube, said O'Grady, along with search engine optimization and pay per click for lead nurturing. "It starts to get very compli- cated and confusing: 'How are we meant to keep up with this…?' If you're a recruiter in a company, that's a serious challenge, espe- cially because the organization is trying to solve that problem to sell products — not hire people." LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter irty-fi ve per cent of employers don't have a dedicated employer- branded career page and for those that do, LinkedIn is most popular, found the Hays survey of more than 1,000 hiring managers, HR professionals and candidates. As a social platform, LinkedIn has had the greatest impact on recruiting, said Crystal Furtado, marketing co-ordinator in re- cruiting services at the David Ap- lin Group in Mississauga, Ont. "It's like having a live database that refl ects the candidate's busi- ness profi le in real time, 24-7, so it works really well for us." Facebook or Twitter are often about branding, she said. "With Facebook, it's easier to brand ourselves towards the can- didate side because most of the time that's who's following our page. I mean, most businesses fol- low or conduct business through Facebook but a lot of candidates do. And Twitter, it's really easy to target both because there's such a big presence from both a business side and the candidate side." Randstad is actively pursuing social media to get its name out there, said Turpin. "It's more about our name and the brand recognition. It's still completely unproven as a recruit- ing tool," she said. "And a lot of the companies, even with their websites and whatnot and their Facebook, I don't know what percentage of my clients have actual search engine optimization (SEO) individuals looking at their websites. ey're just building them, their market- ing guys are building them, but do they have SEO specialists work- ing on them? No." While many employers would like to grow their social media presence for recruitment, said O'Grady, more than one-third are unsure how eff ective their digital channels are. irty per cent are concerned about the growth of social media aff ecting their ability to recruit. "You've basically got people saying, 'We really want to do this but we're kind of scared of it,'" he said. "Social media is very attrac- tive because it can communicate with many people and directly with people but it's also a little bit unnerving." socIAl medIA < pg. 6 Content strategy

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