The Last Frontier in Total Rewards: Managers

Over the past decade, Total Rewards has evolved into one of the most powerful tools for shaping the employee experience. Organizations have moved beyond base salary and annual bonuses to offer full-spectrum benefits that support health, wellbeing, financial security, and professional development. Many have also introduced flexible time-off policies, global mobility support, learning stipends, and mental health initiatives.

These are not simply add-ons. They are strategic investments designed to attract and retain high-performing talent, differentiate the employer brand, and create a workplace culture that feels human, supportive, and fair.

But a persistent question continues to surface across boardrooms and HR leadership teams:

“We’ve built a compelling benefits package. So why aren’t our employees feeling rewarded?”

It is not that the benefits are missing. It is that the value is not landing. And that disconnect points to a critical execution problem that many organizations are only now starting to recognize.

The issue is not what is being offered. It is who is responsible for helping employees understand, trust, and experience it. And that person is the manager.

The Strategic Shift in Total Rewards

The concept of Total Rewards has matured. No longer synonymous with pay, it now represents the full range of tangible and intangible benefits an organization offers to show employees they are supported and valued. It includes compensation, of course, but also wellness programs, development opportunities, time off, insurance coverage, retirement planning, and work-life integration.

The goal is to create a compelling and personalized value proposition for every employee. But there is a major challenge: the more comprehensive Total Rewards becomes, the harder it is for employees to navigate it. And the further HR teams move from day-to-day operations, the more they rely on frontline leaders to bring these programs to life.

In short, Total Rewards has become more strategic, but also more complex. That complexity requires an execution layer that has not been consistently developed and that layer is management.

Why Employees Don’t Feel the Impact

HR leaders work hard to design equitable, competitive, and engaging Total Rewards programs. They align policies with business goals, employee needs, and market trends. They partner with vendors, optimize costs, and localize offerings to meet global compliance requirements.

But when an employee has a question about their benefits, they rarely call HR. They ask their manager.

And here lies the gap. Most managers are not equipped to respond with clarity or empathy. They do not have a clear view into what each employee is eligible for. They may be unaware of updates to benefit policies. They might even avoid the conversation entirely for fear of giving incorrect or incomplete information.

This creates a damaging pattern: the more HR invests in Total Rewards, the more its success depends on managers, but the less support managers receive to deliver it. The result is that employees do not feel rewarded, even when the benefits exist. They feel unseen, unsupported, or overwhelmed.

A generous mental health benefit goes unused because it is never discussed. A career support program fails to engage employees because no one connects it to real growth conversations. A flexible work policy becomes a source of confusion rather than empowerment.

This is not a design failure. It is an execution failure. And it can only be resolved by addressing what happens in the last mile the point at which the strategy becomes a human experience.

The Manager Gap: When Execution Falls Short

Only a small fraction of managers feel confident having conversations about compensation, benefits, or career growth. Many feel they are not the right person to initiate these topics. Others worry about saying the wrong thing. Most are simply overwhelmed by the volume of decisions, tasks, and interpersonal demands they face daily.

When managers are uncertain or unprepared, they avoid benefit conversations altogether. They deflect questions back to HR. They delay important discussions. They miss critical life moments, onboarding, return from leave, promotion, where a well-timed conversation could reinforce value and trust.

This is not about intent. Managers care deeply about their teams. It is about enablement. If managers do not understand the benefit landscape, cannot easily access the right information, and do not feel supported in how to talk about it, they will not act. And when they do not act, the employee’s experience of Total Rewards disappears.

You have to educate the managers, explain to them what it is, why it matters, what it means for the company, what it means for the employees. And then they become your allies, and they will communicate and they will implement.
— Sandrine Bardot, People Pulse Podcast, Episode 1: Revitalize Your Total Rewards Strategy

Managers Are Not Just Stakeholders, They Are the Delivery System

Most companies treat managers as secondary stakeholders in their Total Rewards strategy. They are informed, occasionally trained, and sometimes consulted. But they are not given the tools or ownership they need to drive impact.

This is a mistake. Managers are not secondary. They are central. They are the people employees trust most to guide them. They are the people who frame benefits in the context of daily life and work. They are the ones who can make a benefit feel relevant and human or invisible and transactional.

To unlock the full value of Total Rewards, organizations must start treating managers as the primary delivery system. That means rethinking what support looks like. It means giving them tools, not toolkits. It means embedding Total Rewards into their workflows, not adding it to their list of responsibilities. And it means enabling them to lead conversations, not just forward PDFs.

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What Managers Need to Bring Total Rewards to Life

To activate the manager layer, organizations must invest in a new kind of support infrastructure, one that reduces complexity, increases confidence, and makes value delivery effortless.

1. Clear, Personalized Visibility

Managers need access to a centralized Total Rewards Hub where they can quickly see what benefits are available to each team member based on their role, location, and tenure. This allows them to initiate better conversations, answer questions accurately, and proactively offer suggestions in moments that matter, from career transitions to life events.

2. Feedback Intelligence

Managers are often the first to hear subtle signals: someone feeling burned out, confused about benefits, or concerned about fairness. But without structured tools to capture and surface this feedback, valuable insights go unrecorded. Feedback Intelligence systems help managers understand how employees are experiencing benefits and give HR real-time visibility into needs, gaps, and sentiment trends.

3. AI-Powered Guidance and Nudges

Manager Agents, an AI tools that provide in-the-moment support, can offer prompts, conversation starters, and policy reminders tailored to context. For example, nudging a manager to remind a team member about open enrollment or helping them frame a career conversation with inclusive, equitable language. These agents reduce decision fatigue and increase consistency in how benefits are discussed and delivered.

4. Embedded Simplicity

Perhaps most importantly, all of these tools must live where managers already work. Not in separate portals or static documents, but in the systems they use every day such as calendars, messaging apps, and performance tools. When benefit guidance is embedded, not bolted on, it becomes part of the rhythm of leadership.

From Infrastructure to Experience

Think of your Total Rewards strategy as a city. You have designed the infrastructure, the transportation, the utilities, the services. It is comprehensive, well-planned, and full of value. But for people to thrive in that city, they need to know how to get around. They need guidance, context, and support. Without it, the best-designed system becomes confusing, inaccessible, or simply unused.

The same is true for Total Rewards.

A thoughtfully curated benefits portfolio is only half the equation. The other half is experience. This is how employees discover, understand, and engage with what is available to them. That is where managers come in. They are not benefit administrators, but they are the translators and facilitators who connect the strategy to everyday moments in employees’ lives.

When a manager reminds a new parent about available leave options, that is experience.
When a team lead discusses tuition support during a growth conversation, that is experience.

When someone returns from a difficult personal moment and their manager guides them to mental health resources, that is experience.

These are not tasks. These are moments of trust.

And they are only possible when managers have the right visibility, tools, and confidence to act. When they do, Total Rewards stops being a set of policies and becomes something employees can actually feel.

Employees begin to understand their options. They see their benefits as part of their personal and professional journey, not just a checklist at onboarding. They make more informed decisions. They feel seen and supported. And they stay longer because they believe their company genuinely cares.

On the other hand, without manager enablement, all that investment stays stuck at the infrastructure level. Benefits sit in systems. Policies live in documents. Support gets buried in HR portals. Employees might be told they are supported, but they do not experience it. And when benefits are not experienced, they cannot drive engagement, trust, or retention.

This is not just an operational gap. It is a strategic failure.

The Strategic Impact

Organizations that successfully close this gap by enabling managers to activate Total Rewards unlock meaningful business outcomes:

Higher utilization of benefits and wellness programs
When managers are proactive, employees are more aware of what is available and more likely to engage with it.

Improved perception of fairness and transparency
Managers help ensure that access to benefits is consistent and equitable, especially in decentralized or hybrid environments.

Greater trust in leadership and HR
When managers confidently support and reinforce the benefits strategy, employees begin to trust the system and the people behind it.

Increased retention of high-value talent
Employees are more likely to stay when they feel their organization is investing in their wellbeing, growth, and stability.

Stronger correlation between benefit offerings and engagement outcomes
When benefits are experienced, not just offered, they become a lever for loyalty, motivation, and performance.

In other words, Total Rewards becomes not just something the company provides, but something employees feel, talk about, and believe in.

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Final Thoughts

You have already made the strategic investments. You have built a benefits package that is equitable, thoughtful, and competitive. You have aligned it with your culture and business goals. You have partnered with vendors, optimized your portfolio, and rolled out systems to manage it all efficiently.

But no matter how good the infrastructure is, it will not drive impact on its own.

It must be activated.

And activation happens not in HR systems, but in conversations. In check-ins. In team meetings. In the quiet moments when someone needs support and their manager knows what to do.

The future of Total Rewards is not about more offerings. It is about making what you already offer more visible, more accessible, and more human.

And that future depends on one critical role: your managers.

Equip them with tools. Support them with insights. Trust them with ownership.

Because the last frontier in Total Rewards is not a policy or a platform.
It is the people leading your teams.

When you empower managers, you close the gap between strategy and experience. And when that gap closes, everything changes for your people, your culture, and your business.