Taking a Total Rewards approach to compensation is the most viable method of keeping your employees satisfied, increasing retention rates, and growing your organization sustainably. Here’s a quick overview:
What is Total Rewards Compensation?
Total Rewards Compensation involves taking a fully comprehensive and holistic approach to how your organization compensates employees for their work. There are five components of a Total Rewards system:
- Direct Compensation. This involves the financial ways you give back to employees, like salary, base pay, commissions, bonuses, and equity benefits.
- Benefits. This includes any non-financial (but still quantifiable) benefits you offer employees, like health insurance, retirement plans, and PTO.
- Flexibility. This involves the degree to which your company encourages work-life balance and the level of flexibility you offer around scheduling and PTO usage.
- Performance Recognition. This involves how you award exemplary employee behavior, including peer and team recognition. Ample performance recognition increases both employee morale and long-term performance.
- Career Development. This involves how you encourage employees to not only grow within their roles but also within your organization as a whole. When you display a clear and actionable path that employees can take, it shows them that you value their involvement in your business.
Generally, direct compensation describes the direct financial ways that you compensate employees for their work. Indirect compensation includes all the other tangible and intangible ways that you give back to your employees. This includes company culture!
The main purpose of a Total Rewards compensation strategy is to help businesses strike the perfect balance of these categories in regards to their budget, culture, mission, and goals. By thinking about direct and indirect forms of compensation strategically, your organization can develop more effective compensation plans that support your long-term engagement goals while also making the most of available resources.
The Benefits of a Total Rewards Model
An extremely generous salary isn’t always enough for employees to stick with an organization over the long run. Company culture and benefits received are increasingly important when it comes to how happy and motivated your employees are. With a Total Rewards approach to compensation, your organization can:
- Better stand out amongst competitors when attracting new employees
- Increase employee engagement and retention
- Use your compensation plan as a persuasive recruitment tool
- Display tangible benefits to current and prospective employees
- Improve employee performance and productivity
Compensation consultants specializing in the Total Rewards approach can help you develop a strategy perfectly tailored to your unique organization.
Challenges of a Total Rewards Program
Creating a comprehensive compensation strategy that truly meets the unique needs of your employees is never simple or straightforward. It requires plenty of careful thought and strategy.
The most immediate challenges crop up around direct compensation and pay ranges. Many organizations turn to compensation (or salary) surveys to help guide their decisions. Astron Solutions can help your own organization with our custom Total Compensation Surveys.
Aligning the indirect components of your Total Rewards plan with your employees’ needs comes with its own challenges. Compensation consultants with Total Rewards expertise will be your best bet for navigating this tricky balance.
Total Rewards Consulting by Astron Solutions
Compensation consultants can be invaluable partners, especially when it comes to complex undertakings like updating (or creating) your approach to Total Rewards. Understanding your own needs and goals will be key when searching for the right type of support your organization needs. At Astron Solutions, we offer these Total Rewards consulting services:
Base Compensation
Employee Communication
Questions are inevitable when you roll out or modify an HR program. We design communication tools customized for your various audiences, using the formats and channels they prefer.
Policy Development
We develop the policies and procedures necessary to keep your compensation programs running effectively and equitably. We can create a policy document that outlines the program basics and details the roles and responsibilities of both HR and line management.
Exempt or Non-Exempt?
Avoid misclassifying employees as exempt or non-exempt. Contact us for our non-legal opinion when you’re not sure about how to classify particular employees. We can also assist with determining an employee’s regular rate of pay for overtime purposes.
External Market Pricing – Individual Positions
Are you losing out on high-quality talent for specific roles because your compensation program isn’t competitive enough? Are your costs excessive because your compensation program is TOO competitive?
We’ll help you right-size your compensation so you can attract and retain the right people for the right roles.
External Market Pricing – Large-Scale Projects
If your organization’s base pay system is out of touch with the market, you could be hemorrhaging money, talent, or both. If you have no formal pay structure, there may be internal inequities. Whatever your situation, we’ll help you get the most value from a limited compensation budget.
Internal Pay Design
We work with you to develop a job evaluation plan that addresses the relative value of jobs within your organization.
We also develop a job description system that 1) saves you and your managers time, and 2) reduces the expense of providing new job documentation.
Custom Surveys
Our salary and benefits surveys will give valuable information about Total Rewards for critical positions in any industry/region.
Give us a list of potential participants and details about the information you desire, and we will create a custom survey that meets your needs. We provide you with the data you need while meeting all legal anti-trust requirements.
Annual Retainers
We are available on an annual retainer basis for larger-scale HR and compensation efforts. Simply contact us to explore your options.
Specialized Compensation
Our powerful specialized compensation programs help motivate your employees to do their best work. And we help you better link pay to performance.
Compensation Strategy Design
We ensure that your compensation strategy supports your overall organizational strategy, that you spend your compensation dollars effectively, and that all of your compensation and benefits decisions are sound.
Incentive/Variable Programs
We help you measure and recognize performance more effectively by creating incentive plans and other variable compensation programs. The benefits of these programs include
- Improved teamwork
- Employee focus on common goals and a sense of personal ownership in your organization
- Increased employee engagement
- Suppression of entitlement mentality
- Positive impact on the bottom line
If you are interested in automating incentive compensation, check out our Flare® software’s Incentive/Sales Commission Tracker module.
Sales Compensation
With the right sales compensation program, you’ll raise revenues and profitability, boost morale, and minimize recordkeeping.
To design your sales compensation plan, our first step is working with you to determine organizational sales priorities. Then we meet with your sales force to get their take on the current pay situation and to identify what they’d like in a sales compensation plan.
The result? A compensation plan that will motivate your sales force like never before.
If you’re interested in automating sales compensation, check out our Flare® software’s Incentive/Sales Commission Tracker module.
Performance Management
We help you create a performance management system that is ideal for your organization. We create as many variations of your system as needed—one form for all employees, or different forms for different organizational levels or lengths of tenure.
If you are interested in automating performance management, check out our Flare® software’s Performance Management module.
Career Progression Programs
We help you build clearly mapped career paths that:
- Strengthen employees’ engagement and give them a sense of direction.
- Reduce turnover, saving you money on recruitment and onboarding.
- Strengthen your leadership pipeline.
- Facilitate recruitment from within, reducing “time to fill” vacancies and dependence on agencies.
- Provide a framework for recruitment and promotional planning.
- Improve communication with employees on professional development.
- Help you identify training needs and opportunities.
If you are interested in software that will help you automate and simplify career pathing, check out our Flare® software’s Staff Advancement Monitor™.
Executive Compensation
Executive compensation is a unique challenge that is critical to get right. Use Astron’s expert, independent guidance to avoid the legal pitfalls and achieve a successful result.
Performance Management Schedule
We help you navigate through the process of switching from an anniversary date performance appraisal system to a common review date system. This includes training your managers and employees to ensure successful implementation.
Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions … or to seek a bit of HR advice. And we’re always happy to offer more detail on how we can help your organization with its specific needs.
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