How does Reward Heads help clients ensure that their benefits offer aligns with the organisational values and culture? And how do we do it ourselves?

We are frequently asked by clients to review their benefits offer. Often, they ask us to benchmark against similar organisations, by sector, size or geography. Benchmarking benefits can provide useful context but we believe that the benefits offer needs to be more about organisational values and culture and hence that is what drives the variation in offer, more than sector, size or geography.

Our first questions are “What are your values? What do you share with your team about what the organisation is about?”. We somewhat take it as read that they have values even if these are not formally written down or on the website. It answers the question “What is it like to work here?”.

We then review each of the values as if we were new hires or someone thinking about joining the organisation and ask “What reward or benefits would we expect given these values?”. That is where we are bringing in our own market knowledge and experience; we would not expect every recruit to know what we know is out there. Often when we feed that back, clients are not aware of the expectations that they are building through their values of what employees, or future employees, would expect from them.

Let's share an example and let's use ourselves, Reward Heads, as the 'client' here. We have recently updated our values as a team, and so a key next step was to ensure that the reward package lined up with them.

What are Reward Head's values? They are E.P.I.C!

• Expert. We proudly deliver to a very high standard and are constantly learning to ensure that we are up to date with the market and best practice. We are always developing to fulfil our potential as individuals and collectively.
• Personalised. We work flexibly in time and place to maximise our own work/ life balance. We have benefits that are right for our needs.
• Integrity. We do the right thing with integrity at the heart of everything we do and are rooted in respect, fairness, diversity and inclusion. We are open and honest. We are reliable.
• Care. We care for each other as people and support one another with knowledge and experience and to maximise our personal wellbeing. We are one team.

What would we expect to see in an organisation with these values and what do Reward Heads actually offer?

Expert. We would expect to see a real commitment to learning, not 'get professional qualifications and then you are done'. We would expect ongoing learning supported by the organisation in technical skills, personal development and knowledge of the market and best practice.

What do Reward Heads offer?

• We set our objectives around learning rather than delivery. Delivering projects on-time and in-budget is a given expectation, and often client needs move so fast that objectives would be immediately out of date. We commit to constantly driving our learning so we are always in the best shape for an assignment.
• Paid for and scheduled time for learning. We provide a minimum of one hour per week in diaries for this regardless of contract size for individuals to self-programme. It can be delivered in lots of ways, e.g., learn and shares, online modules, whatever enables our team to meet their learning objectives.
• We developed a bespoke Skills & knowledge framework for our team (which we then went on to customise for use when we are recruiting on behalf of clients). This clearly sets out what is expected in each role and what the next steps are and hence flows into learning objectives. It covers all areas of Reward but also critical skills.
• Learn and share sessions help us to share our expertise but also learn from each other internally as we are not all on every assignment. This reinforces that we work as a team not a collection of individuals.
• Our Forums help us to share our expertise but also learn from each other and our clients, contacts and partners and keep abreast with the market and trends.
• Our team meetings are around personal development as well as a critical means of connecting and getting to know each other better as individuals.
• We have a culture of 'knowledge sharing is power' not 'knowledge is power'.

Personalised. We would expect to see benefits that enable individuals to be individuals, to fit work into their lives not their lives around work. We'd also expect them to be able to make some choices about what benefits they have.

What do Reward Heads offer?

• A key tenet of Reward Heads is offering flexibility of place and time of work and indeed contract type. We have contracts from 12.5 to 37.5 hours per week and some team who work on an annualised basis to enable them to be off all school holidays. We also offer the opportunity to buy further holiday. When recruited, people are asked what works best for them in terms of contract size and how this plays out weekly. Most of the team are fully remote. There is the option to work in the office some or all of the time but this tends only to be taken up by two people for whom it is convenient.
• As a small business, we don't have a fancy platform or system but this does not mean that we do not offer choices in benefits. We offer holiday buy, a choice of wellbeing allowance or paid time, and our team can flex up their pension and opt to do it via salary sacrifice. We explain more about our wellbeing allowance in Care.

Integrity. We expect to see a strong set of principles in Reward which support diversity and inclusion, fairness and equity.

What do Reward Heads offer?

• Our benefits are the same for all regardless of seniority or contract size.
• We are working on our own Pay Policy so that we can have full Pay Transparency of pay ranges and how someone progresses through and up pay ranges and roles.
• We developed a Levelling Framework that allows our team to understand what is expected of their role, how they move to the next stage of their career with us, and how they fit more widely into our organisation.

Care. We would expect to see benefits that support someone's wellbeing in its fullest definition and particularly around health and family (children and eldercare).

What do Reward Heads offer?

• We recently gave our team the choice to have weekly paid wellbeing time or an annual wellbeing allowance. Our definition of wellbeing and what they can spend the money on is broad, covering all areas from mental to physical, social to financial. The point is that wellbeing means something different for everyone and the solutions are different. We just said that they needed to be legal and moral!
• Flexibility for personal commitments. It is not just about having contracts that suit. We are genuinely flexible in moving around arrangements if someone has an ill family member or needs to attend a medical appointment, or simply leave earlier than normal for a weekend away.
• Above statutory provisions in areas like maternity and paternity. Explicit policies on how we support the individual through fertility, miscarriage, early births, and pregnancy loss.
• We offer a Health Cashplan with the usual ability to claim back dental, optical, physio, etc. and a virtual GP and EAP but also including eldercare as many of our team have elderly parents (both financial provision and advice). We offer more than the standard level of cover with children as standard and some benefits for partners. Of course, our team can also add partners and flex up levels.
• We recently extended our sick pay provision and took out Group Income Protection to give the team longer term security.

We didn't use Reward Heads as an example to show off - there is loads more that we could do - but we feel we have taken the right steps with what we have done to date and aligned to our values.

We would love to use our experience to help other organisations review their Reward and Benefits packages in the light of their values and culture. Do get in touch with us at rewardsolutions@rewardheads.co.uk or any member of our team.

Victoria MIlford - CEO