Red Flags and Solutions: Revamping Your Total Rewards – Sandrine Bardot

Nena Dimovska (2): [00:00:00] Welcome to People Pulse, the podcast that brings the heartbeat of the workplace. I’m Nena Dimovska your host, and each week we are bringing bite-size episode packed with practical takeaways, interviews with industry leaders, and a dash of inspiration to fuel your people’s strategy and make your workplace thrive. We are here to dissect the trends, unravel challenges, and explore the triumphs that shape the modern workplace.

Nena Dimovska (2): The following is a conversation with Sandrine Barot, with over three decades of experience as a total rewards thought leader, multi-award winning consultant and educator for customized total reward solutions. Sandrine let’s kick off our discussion by delving into the current. Landscape of total rewards practices. When you’re evaluating and updating a company’s total rewards system, how do you pick up on signs that their current practices are outdated? What specific indicators or events act as red flags and what are some of the key challenges you have encountered in this [00:01:00] process?

Sandrine Bardot: So I’ve done 20 years in house and 10 years as a consultant, and I find it really interesting that triggers for companies to revise their total reward strategies tend to often be a similar set of circumstances. Either you see that there is an increase in attrition, so employees do not stay as long as they used to.

Sandrine Bardot: It’s more difficult to recruit so you have a longer acceptance cycle in your recruitment process, fewer people who, who accept maybe, so not just the time it takes them to accept, they negotiate higher packages and so on. You may have signs that your culture is not being perceived as so positive, and this would be coming either from your internal employee surveys, but I find that one of the aspects that a lot of organizations tend to neglect a little bit as an HR is to go on Glassdoor, to go on blind and similar [00:02:00] platforms and to check what people are saying about your company.

Sandrine Bardot: Because, guess what Candidates do check those websites and especially the senior ones, the educated one, your leadership’s team members, future leadership team members and so on, and they take it very seriously because it’s anonymous and people feel free, maybe to talk more than they would in an internal employee engagement survey. And so those are like, actually they’re not compensation and benefits signs, they are HR signs, that can be linked to the challenge.

Sandrine Bardot: And I would say that another frequent trigger would be if an organization has not reviewed their total reward philosophy and their packages for the past five years or more. You would be surprised I have clients who have done nothing for 12 years quite frequently in my region.

Sandrine Bardot: Then it’s time to at least have a look. Maybe you don’t need to change anything, but it’s good to know. Companies keep [00:03:00] saying that they’re data driven and when it comes to their hr, they don’t even look at any kind of data to, to make those decisions. So I think it’s important to look into those criteria, for example.

Nena Dimovska (2): Thank you. Those were some very insightful examples that you have shared. And if I just may add, I noticed that some of the indicators that you mentioned there were perhaps a bit legging. Some of them were perhaps more proactive so assuming that as we go on in the conversation, perhaps you can also recommend how companies can be more proactive and, you know try to prevent rather than, than than cure.

Nena Dimovska (2): Now we are about to explore. A realm that is both intriguing and well, a bit dusty, if I may say so. The total rewards landscape, believe it or not, witnessed minimal evolution over the past decade. Consider this, ways of connection and relationship building have undergone drastic transformations, yet total rewards may give off a vibe of being [00:04:00] stuck in a time warp before we write it off as a relic of the past. There has been some movement lately. While some of its core principles may appear unchanged, there’s a revolution underway with personalized rewards and AI inter integration, a new dawn if you will, where innovation is finally breaking through the cracks. Let’s delve into examples of this revolution, Sandrine.

Nena Dimovska (2): Can you share a framework or, or key processes for enterprises looking to kickstart their personalized journey in total rewards?

Sandrine Bardot: Yeah, I think the most important thing would be, to listen to the employee voice.

Sandrine Bardot: So, as an HR professional, maybe you have an idea what needs to be done,you have like a gut feeling, you have your anecdotal information and so on. But I think it’s really important to take a step back and get into the information. What we have seen when we talk about personalization or customization, it could be mass customization. It doesn’t have to be like [00:05:00] individualized in terms of personalization. You could also address groups of employees, and that’s what most organizations are gonna try to do.

Sandrine Bardot: You want to do that because there is this movement in all other aspects of our life towards customization and so as consumers, we are expecting customization.

Sandrine Bardot: We can customize our, our cars, we can customize our shoes, we can customize our T-shirts. We, even when you buy a house, it might be in, in a, in a place where all the houses look maybe on the basic similar, but you can still customize the inside, the color outside and so on. So we do want that in our lives and people expect it into, into their workplace as well.

Sandrine Bardot: So the first thing would be if you are in a large organization, you might have an HR analytics team, then you can dive into your HR analytics. But the reality is that at least in my part of the world I’m based in Dubai, so let’s say the Middle East and Africa. A few organizations have [00:06:00] proper HR, analytics teams, but you can still have access to data.

Sandrine Bardot: You have your employee engagement surveys, you have your exit interviews. You can run focus groups, which are like subgroup of employees that you ask a number of questions, you can run market research. So what the first step you’re gonna do is identify those groups of employees, not just based on your gut feeling and based also on the critical segments of your workforce.

Sandrine Bardot: So I don’t want to to sound like I’m denigrating anybody, but you are gonna want to pay more attention to the employees who are in positions that are critical for the future of your organizations, either because they have high skills or specific skills, or, or because they have the potential to become the future leader of, of your organization and so on.

Sandrine Bardot: So you want to pay more attention maybe to those groups. [00:07:00] And how we think about that, we need to move in this framework from an old classic way of thinking about employee segmentation, which is mix of demographics. So an age group, a gender, for example, nationality, are life stage. Are they still young graduate, single, married, kids approaching retirement to an approach where you can look as well into their mindsets and their attitudes?

Sandrine Bardot: Because you might be surprised that those initial groups that we think of might actually have. Some very similar reactions on some topics and very dissimilar on other topics. And so the groupings are probably not gonna be the same. So once you’ve identified that and what they value, then you can run a pilot. If you don’t have capacity to, to run it immediately everywhere, to test how you’re going to segment the workforce and customize the total rewards, you run your project. And I think [00:08:00] one of the really, really important things that you need to do and that we tend to forget is to think about how you’re gonna measure success.

Sandrine Bardot: And this you need to think about before you start the project. Because if you don’t know from the beginning what is your baseline and how you’re gonna see the progress, it’s gonna be very difficult. And the challenge in total rewards is very often that how we value success or measure success is not always through compensation and benefits metrics.

Sandrine Bardot: It could be that what we see is that people stay longer, and so you have a better retention of your employees, that you can recruit more easily, that you have fewer people who decline, that you have more usage of certain benefits and so on. So the metrics are not necessarily all going to be coming from the comp Ben team, but it’s important to be able to think about those before you design your program.

Sandrine Bardot: So really it’s [00:09:00] about going into your data, identifying your critical workforce segments and how people react compared to the different let’s say elements of the, of the package. Run your pilot and measure your success so that you can rinse and repeat, improve over a period of time.

Nena Dimovska (2): Very interesting. You’ve mentioned tools that I think are quite popular now. can you perhaps drawing from your experience share a success story from let’s say enterprise client, that they have found effective in consolidating HR analytics to understand these diverse employee needs?

Sandrine Bardot: So I think I, I can share two examples. So let me first clarify one thing. Personalization of rewards is still a kind of a emerging topics. Few organizations actually do it, but I’m lucky that I’ve been able to network in certain, [00:10:00] exclusive networking groups. I’ve heard a number of situations and I’ve also worked with a number of clients on, let’s say, smaller parts of the project.

Sandrine Bardot: I can give you two examples that are semi-public, so I’m not gonna share the name of the companies, but you will see they’re very, very different.

Sandrine Bardot: The first one is this Caribbean based tourism company who have people who range from I don’t know the boat drivers, if you wanna go do some parachute on the, on the, on the sea wherein you’re in the water to the waiters and waitresses in restaurants and so on. And in this company so they have lots of employees who are front facing, customer facing not necessarily super, highly skilled. But they wanted to make sure that they were, offering the best packages possible because there is competition to recruit this kind of people in, because tourism is one of the major industries in the, in that region. There are [00:11:00] smaller brands compared to maybe the big hospitality groups and so on. So they needed to be competitive. and the way that they worked is that they did a very simple survey that asked each employee, five to seven questions about every single aspect of the package and every single portion of the benefits and employee value proposition, and they looked into.

Sandrine Bardot: How much people knew about the existence of that particular element of the package, weather they knew if they were eligible or not, if they were using it, how happy they were with it, the kind of value they put to it. So the question was like, hey, if you were to move to another company that is not offering that, how much more would that other company have to pay you for you to give up on that benefit, for example, and the loyalty, you know, of the employee?

Sandrine Bardot: Like, would you leave if if for a company that does not offer that benefit or not? So what they did then is that they were able to prioritize all the different [00:12:00] benefits with respect to, a cost versus impact analysis because they had the information on their perception of the value and the satisfaction, and they knew how much it was really costing them to implement some of those benefits. And some of them were actually quite surprising.

Sandrine Bardot: Benefits that are put in place that employees value a lot and other things that are maybe more expensive that people are less aware of. So that’s how they prioritized and they were able to customize the, the packages more by what they did is that they slowly abandoned some of the, of the parts of the package that were not as interesting for employees. And they were able to refocus budget on other things that people valued.

Sandrine Bardot: The second example is a much, much larger organization in the Netherlands. is a much, very large company, mostly white collar, lots of technicians and desk based positions. And this company is bigger. So they worked with PWC, they didn’t [00:13:00] do the small survey by themselves. They used the big consultancy. And so, they went through kind of a similar process, basically going through a survey with the employees, asking them about the, the absolute performance or interest in that part of the package, the relative performance compared to other parts of the package. They asked them first choice questions, you know, to oblige them Which one do you like more? Which one do you like less? You know, on a kind of a continuum between two things. And then what they did is that they split the employees per grade or kind of salary levels. And they were able to kind of assign a prioritization and a value compared to the, to the average salary in that group of employees for each benefit and to also be able to say, where do we need to focus more? Where can we customize a little bit more what what we are doing? And so I think [00:14:00] this is quite interesting when we think of personalization, of total rewards. The usual that we think about is, for example, can I get more base pay and less variable pay? Or the opposite. Can I get more short-term incentive and less long-term incentive? Or the opposite, can I get more salary and less benefit or more benefits and less salary? So those are kind of the direct type of package elements that a lot of people think about. And there is one company which I can mention because they have been very public about what they did.

Sandrine Bardot: It’s Unilever. Unilever actually developed a program called UFlex which was offering this kind of flexibility to the employees. So if you wanted, for example more bonus for $1 of base pay, you would get, let’s say example, one, $1.1 or $1.20 of variable pay. But if you wanted less variable pay and more basic, you needed to pay [00:15:00] $1.20 of variable pay to get one into basic pay. So the trade offs are not one for one. And they did a few things This way,. And that was so successful that now the gentleman who was in charge of that actually left and has created this consultancy ’cause they developed a whole like software and so on. They can work with very large organizations to do that. And I think that’s the first step when we think of, of personalizing packages. But actually, I think it’s actually maybe one of the more difficult to handle because you need to have systems that are capable of handling that. And not everybody has the processing power that a large organization like Unilever would have with a strong HRIS system, a strong comp and ben team, a strong HR analytics team, and so on.

Sandrine Bardot: For mid-size organization and smaller size organization, you can actually introduce personalization in many, many other ways and different ways. [00:16:00] Personalization can come from how your organizing work, the work schedules that you give. It’s not just about can you work from home or hybrid it’s also your work schedules. It’s about wellbeing offering. It’s about offering the possibility for employees to personalize their job- it’s called Job Crafting to personalize their job a little bit. It’s about career development opportunities. It’s about enrollment in retention schemes. It’s about recognition schemes that also focus more on the, typically on individual as well. So there are many ways that even the smaller organizations who don’t have as much means, and sophistication in the tech support that they get can still go and, and put in place this kind of approach and do that in a very thoughtful manner.

Nena Dimovska (2): True. Yes. They have many ways how to be creative. You’ve shared very interesting examples from, let’s say companies of different [00:17:00] sizes from, let’s say smaller tourism company to large enterprises. One thing that I’ve found, let’s say similar to all three examples was that it all starts with listening to the voice of the

Sandrine Bardot: Yes.

Nena Dimovska (2): Would you say that the path towards this personalization, when it comes to total rewards for all companies, would you say that the core principles should be listening to the voice of the employee?

Nena Dimovska (2): Like from a,

Sandrine Bardot: Yes.

Nena Dimovska (2): from that approach, or would you add else?

Sandrine Bardot: would say that’s the first thing. What’s the point for you as an HR team to develop and personalize things if that’s not what your employees are interested in? There’s no value for you to do that. And so I think it’s very important that you find a way to find the information from the employees whether you do it by looking just at the past through an employee engagement survey or [00:18:00] by looking at intention, by doing a specific survey to ask people what they think.

Sandrine Bardot: You also have to remember that. It’s important to, when we’re talking about measuring success, let me say why it’s so important. For example, you may have some intuition that people, for example, are not really interested in pensions in your company because most of your employees are young millennials and gen Z. And let me be honest, for example the company that I was mentioning earlier, for example, found out that in their company the pension was something that everybody was saying Don’t touch it. And they had been thinking to kind of reduce the pension scheme because nobody was really talking about it or anything like that.

Sandrine Bardot: And everybody was like, no, no. This is one of the benefits that we value. The most, they were just not vocal about it before the survey. they also found in Unilever, I remember watching presentation from the gentleman and they were [00:19:00] saying in the survey, the millennials were the ones who were telling us we want more variable pay. And we want less base pay. We want more opportunity to earn more. And so we would want to reduce our base pay and actually increase our variable pay. And when it came to actually offering that opportunity to people, they found out that the people who were actually decreasing their base pay and increasing their variable.

Sandrine Bardot: Where the older generations, people like me in their Gen X and the boomers and the millennials were actually exchanging some of their valuable pay for more base pay. Why? Because they were in a period where maybe they had to pay back a student loan. were having kids, maybe they were starting to have parents that they needed to take care of and stuff like that.

Sandrine Bardot: And so the reality between the intention and the action. Was very different. So the survey is a starting point, but it’s important to, that’s why I was saying it’s important to measure [00:20:00] because the reality might prove to be different and it’s not a, a fault or that people are intentionally lying and so on. But, you know, we’re human and intention and action are sometimes a little bit a little bit different.

Nena Dimovska (2): are sometimes

Sandrine Bardot: So that’s, that’s that’s, I would say really, really the most important point. Start by listening, but also measure those are like your two most important things that you can do. And just like any other total rewards project, you have to understand that those are kind of long-term. are not gonna measure success after one month or two months. Those are like. of the cycles that we work on are on an annual basis, and it might take a number of years before you really start to see the impact of what you’re doing. So you have to also educate your executive leadership team that expectations to see a quarterly return or something like that is probably not realistic. Stick for this kind of project. Maybe on other projects, like [00:21:00] if you’re working on talent acquisition and you change your process, you will see very quickly ’cause you have lots of candidates coming in quick processes, you can probably see a, a result faster. But in comp band you would have to be there in the long haul to see really the, the impact as well.

Nena Dimovska (2): Sandrine, I really enjoyed the conversation today. I hope that we’ll see you again here on People Pulse.

Nena Dimovska (2): Thank you for listening. People Pulse, I guess that we can, we are safe to say that we have just unlocked another workplace heartbeat together. remember to use this practical takeaways. Stay inspired and keep your workplace heartbeat strong. Don’t miss out on the future Insight. Subscribe and get free to power up your HR strategy. Thank you.