Episode 47: Beyond the Bonus: What We’re Really Rewarding at Work with Warren Land
Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday explores how we reward people
Trina Sunday: As we wrap up the year, I want to talk about something that sits right at the heart and the hip pocket of every workplace. Rewards, pay, bonuses, incentives, recognition. They’re meant to celebrate performance, but sometimes they send a very different message about what we actually value. So today we’re getting real about it. I’m joined by Warren Land, director of the Reward Practise, one of Australia’s most respected advisors on performance, REM and incentive design. And together we’ll unpack what’s shifting in total rewards, how data is changing the fairness conversation and why the way we pay people can either build trust or break it. And as we head into the new year, maybe it’s time we ask ourselves, are we rewarding what matters most or just what’s easiest to measure? Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast, where we challenge our thinking and our current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trina, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our, uh, bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started.
Warren Land is one of Australia’s most respected advisors on performance, remuneration
I’m joined by Warren Land, the director of the Reward Practise, one of Australia’s most respected advisors on performance, remuneration and incentive design. Warren’s seen it all, the trends, the traps, the quiet revolutions that are reshaping how organisations reward their people. And as we head into the end of the year, where rewards and pay packets seem to be the topic of conversation in my world, I thought, who better to join me to have a chat about all things rewards? Welcome, Warren.
Warren Land: Thanks, Trina. Gee, I’m really looking forward to this chat. I’ve been in and around watching people’s remuneration for many, many years and some might think that’s, that’s a sort of rather narrow sort of work that you’ve been involved in, but I think it’s one of those topics that everybody can sort of go into the financial space quite quickly and so, but it’s reward is far deeper than that and it’s terrific. I love these conversations because it really helps us rethink, uh, everything, um, our view and not just what’s Paid. But why we’re doing it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, absolutely. And I think because. And it’s in the name, right, the reward practise. And it’s in what I talk about, which is total rewards, which as you say is more about the pay packet. Um, you’ve been doing this for a long time. You can talk about how long yourself, but you’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m curious to kind of hear more about your background and what has led you to this space and kind of what you’ve seen. So talk us through a bit around what’s got you to where you are and what you’ve seen along the way.
Warren Land: Well, I think my background has always been quite an analytical one. So uh, right through from being I guess the son of an Air Force radar operator through to university, started in physics at uh, UWA and then moved into commerce. And so I’ve always been around that, sort of interested in numbers and the like. And um, my dear dad jumped out of the Air Force and took up a role out of Fighter Base Newcastle. Took us all over to up in Karratha. So I finished my last two years of school up in Karratha and dad was the HR manager out of Damp your Salt. And so he gave me a bit of an entree into this world of human resources and his career. Then sort of went through that area in resources right through to pharmaceuticals and then I went into business analytics and things like that. But I always had those conversations with dad and landed myself in to doing more things around the analytical side of human resources, which is where I found remuneration. Started the reward practise after stints in National Australia Bank Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and Ernst and Young, uh, before I saw the light and thought well I can go and do this myself. So I always have had the desire to do a bit of entrepreneurial work in my own right, but more interestingly sticking to the knitting on stuff that I really like doing and helping uh, organisations at that sort of more junior end rather than big mature companies like banks or uh, other large resource based companies. So working with a sort of smaller.
Trina Sunday: End of town, I think you can have a lot of impact in that space. Right. Because I think there’s a lot of complexity and there’s a lot of layers that go to rewards where the smaller you are like you just can’t navigate that. You kind of need the big, the big Org exposure to know kind of what the small basic foundations are. I love these conversations because I’ve known you for a while. Now and I never knew that you’re an Air Force kid that finished schooling in Karratha. And so you just always learn when you’re chatting with people in different contexts and different environments, you kind of get to learn more about them. And I love that rewards is more than the pay slip. Right. And you know that. And for me in the work that I do, especially in culture, it signals something, you know, like how we manage our rewards or look at things. It sends a message to people in our organisations. What do you think we’re really rewarding the most in our organisations today?
Warren Land: I think unfortunately in a lot of ways it will often start at that what we should pay piece. And the reality is that organisations that we work with, which is why we work with them, work out the right number and think the job’s done. And as you say it’s a signal. So if I pick up an annual report of a company and I read the remuneration section, to me that’s the window into culture. And pay is an absolute symbol of what that means to an organisation. If I go to a Macquarie bank and I pick up their REM report and it’s a millionaires factory, that’s the culture. It’s dog eat dog. If I pick up and work with in our number one, our ah, first ever client is a technology based organisation based here in Perth. There are about a hundred people. They are uh, to me a shining light of the other end of the spectrum. They pay everybody equally. Right. From the CEO, uh, gets the same amount of increase as everybody else. They have team based initiatives, they don’t have bonus schemes, they have uh, published salary bans. Yes. They pay when I say people equally, that everybody gets the same amount of increase each year when they do the annual review. It’s a fixed dollar amount. Yes they have differences in pay rates but everybody knows how much everybody’s paid. So it’s an absolute different culture. And that is a uh, you uh, know there are examples that works, it works for them. I’ve spoken to them about bonuses but it’s not a. What is the problem that we’re trying to resolve here. So it’s important to understand what culture you want because that’s the starting point.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And I think it’s one of those things where individual effort rewards when it’s not an individual effort that’s got the achievement is fraught with kind of danger. Right. In terms of where people are and it’s where we unintentionally start rewarding presenteeism Just because someone’s showed up or, you know, there’s risk aversion and burnout where we end up unintentionally rewarding things that are not healthy for people in our organisation. So I love that your client is looking at it kind of more with that team and in my world, you know, that more kind of human first lens. But how do we make sure we’re rewarding the right things? Like I think about things like courage and collaboration and humanity. Then people say, trainer, stop being all woo, woo. Like this is business, like this is the REM stuff. Now you’re the REM guy, right? Yeah, I say that endearingly, but how do we make sure we’re not rewarding just the loudest KPI? Like how? What do you see? You talked about some good practise there, but what do you see people doing that does help kind of behaviourally look at total rewards in a different way?
Warren Land: I think it’s like I said before, it comes back to start with the end in mind. And uh, you know, that can be an overused term in a lot of cases, but it is so true. I’ve seen horrific outcomes where organisations, sales incentive schemes are set so aggressively the reps would discount their products just to reach volume targets. And so that doesn’t help the company. It runs them down, uh, an alleyway that, uh, you try to rescue and recover from that, but it’s great for bonuses, terrible for margin, but then we go in and try to help them clean that up.
Warren: Think about what behaviours you expect to see as a result of remuneration
So I always think about starting with what are the behaviours that you’re expecting to see and as a result of your remuneration programmes, then I. And we’ll talk about this towards the end as well, but because I’d ask that, that’s one of the things that I would be thinking about as I go into the end of the year and saying, looking back on 20, 25, what would you expect to have seen based on the payouts that you’ve provided this year? I think there’s collective success as well, not heroes. I worked at the National Australia bank for seven years, right through from the trading desk to the Institutional bank and ran the remuneration structures for that. And I tell you what, Trent, the things that you see in those, uh, organisations where people live and they’re highly paid people that live from bonus to bonus each year, they don’t live their life on their salary, they live on the bonus. And that’s what you get. You get behaviours that uh, result from that pay regime. So think about collective success. When you think about embarking on a programme, how do you want to reward success in the organisation and build in those behaviour anchors? You know what say if we don’t have these anchors that uh, are set such that we’ve got collaboration, we’ve got thought leadership, we’ve got, um, the customer first in mind, those types of things. If we don’t achieve those, then there is no bonus and make it sustainable. I think that we can sit and forget these programmes, which is an old age thinking people we work with. Well, we haven’t changed things for the last five years. I spoke to someone yesterday, they’ve got an it firm, um, 20 years, they haven’t changed their commission structure and now they’re coming to us and they’re saying, well, AIs come in and our sales guys or our techs are, uh, based on commission that relates to chargeable hours. So the more hours I work and charge the client, the more I get paid. What’s happening now? AI allows them to do much more efficient work. Doesn’t take them as long. So they’re what, they’re buying into that and they’re saying, well, we’re still going to take as long as we used to because I need to get paid the amount that I used to get paid, notwithstanding the fact that AI has taken over.
Trina Sunday: It’s just so interesting because I had a conversation on Last Episode with Aubrey Blanche, who, um, is doing a lot of work in AI, ethics and ethical leadership. And so that’s really poignant coming off the back of the. The last episode and my conversation with her, because I think I was thinking about what you were describing there as well. It’s not just the what’s the how. Right. So you’ve got to have skin in the game behaviourally to secure the bonus. That’s how we. I would advocate that it should roll. But I think about. And I was in a session with Michelle Redfern last week and she talks about the brilliant jerk. So all of her work is about addressing the leadership gender gap. Gender pay gap. Yes. But she’s looking at the leadership capability gap, the leadership gender gap, in terms of women in leadership roles and why that gap’s arising and all the other things rewards one element of the equation, but it’s an output, not an input. But she talks about the brilliant jerk. Right. Uh, so she talks about that person that’s bringing in the most sales. You know, the business, you know, sees them as so critical, but you have this toxicity where you reward that with the bonus structures and the Bonus games at the expense of everyone else’s morale, productivity, engagement. And so we don’t look at the cost which offsets the reward. Right. Uh, the cost of that toxic behaviour. But so many rewards programmes, reward systems. Don’T look at it that way. And I guess that what comes back to the loudest KPI thing that I’m thinking about and that is, you know, it’s all about the numbers and the sales and the revenue targets at the end of the day, right, in terms of shareholders. And so we’ve got to deal with it at so many different levels. And that’s where I feel like HR leaders I work with. It’s just too hard, Warren. It’s too hard.
Warren Land: One of the reasons I think it’s so darn hard is that you get various stakeholders in the organisation that pick up the incentive plan. It could be the cfo, it could be the head of hr, it could be the cosec, it could be the CEO. Uh, and then all of a sudden what I think is a pretty darn simple programme turns into a quagmire of complexity and it’s like a black box. It just, you know, the secret squirrel calculations that sit in these programmes become, you know, it diminishes people’s engagement with it. And, you know, there’s a lot of money at stake. How much? Every organisation that we work with, the highest cost in their business is 95% of the time people and yet ask them to furnish their incentive design. And you get this in many cases of a level of complexity that, you know, we. We work at a Day in, day out and sometimes we struggle to understand. Understand the damn thing.
Trina Sunday: M. Transparency is a big part of that, though, right? Like, because I think about trust or lack of trust in our organisations, which also impacts kind of how we show up as a collective in terms of our performance, like it impacts performance. The black box is just making me think the plane’s gone down, our REM structure’s just gone down. But there is a lack of transparency. Right. The Secret Squirrel thing is part of why so many work or employees in my experience have such an issue with this. And is that what you see across the majority of clients, as opposed to the minority? Is Secret Squirrel more prevalent than the open, transparent? Let people see how the calcs on the napkin were done?
Warren Land: Yeah, And I think it’s absolutely prevalent. And that’s not just about the bonus structure, that’s about how we decide what your guaranteed salary is going to be. And there are movements I’ve mentioned before in jurisdictions outside of Australia that are grabbing hold of this black box, if you like, of, um, opaque ways in which companies are determining rates of pay and saying, you know what, Enough’s enough. Legislation is driving the us, for example, on publishing pay bans when every role is being advertised in the market. So there’s absolutely a definitive movement now that says that if you can’t explain how you come up with that number, people are going to disengage and they’re going to find an organisation that they feel comfortable with. When you look at some of the studies around what motivates people at work and you look at pay as part of that, one of the things that I find really quite interesting is that there’s a study that Harvard did a few years ago and they partnered with PwC, and one of the things that they found as a result of surveying a number of leaders across multiple organisations, multiple countries on the topic of remuneration and what drives effective remuneration and what drives ineffective remuneration at organisations was one area that said if you pay someone differently to the next person within the same organisation, you pay them under market from an external comparator. They don’t so much care about being behind the market, but they care when it’s actually the person sitting next to them. Um, and if there’s no reason for that and there’s no legitimacy, no objective rationale that sits behind that difference in the workplace, that breaks a huge amount of trust and they won’t stay very long with that organisation.
Trina Sunday: And that comes down to fairness, I’d imagine. Right. Uh, especially in an Australian context, I see this a lot. Fairness is really important to people and to me that’s, uh, at the core of equity. You know, fairness is about equity and levelling the playing field and it, uh, being fair. And so I think people are realist that, you know, the labour market does determine kind of supply, demand. Right. And sometimes you gotta pay what the market demands to get people in. But this is where we have remuneration come up against job evaluation. So we have two things, right? We have the value of the work, uh, but then we have kind of the labour market and they’re kind of two different things that impact what we pay people.
Warren Land: Yes.
Trina Sunday: And I feel like from a HR leadership or a HR team perspective, that’s always a challenge in terms of, you know, we talk about salary creep and, you know, well, we can’t just, uh, you know, increase everyone’s salary order. It’s like. But sometimes the devil’s advocate in me Is like. But we need to be. Why aren’t we like, what’s the storey? Because it’s. To your point, people will leave, they won’t stay very long.
I feel like we’re not using data well to predict future pay changes
But I feel like we’re not using data well to predict, preempt and understand what’s coming with that. Like. And I think that, you know, uh, there’s some organisations I’m sure that you see that do use data well for this. But there’s others where it crosses into dangerous territory where, you know, that transparency of sharing what we pay people and the pay scales and those kind of things. I feel like there’s some other payments then going underground that are not in what’s being disclosed. Discuss.
Warren Land: Yeah, I think there’s, there’s a few bits in that, I think. And you touched on it before. Uh, I can’t remember the phrase that you used, but the, the leadership side. Right. So I think data’s been with us for many, many years. Right. Good quality data. You know, as practitioners, we think about data that’s sourced from a, uh, reputable either provider method, whatever. And it’s not just one data point, there’s a few different data points. That’s just data. And the problem is that I find some organisations are so hell bent on, um, saying, what’s the market rate of pay for this? And we’re going to hit the 50th percentile and that’s our target. Yeah, it’s not an exact science. And so there’s another study that I was reading recently that I think is so very, very true, which helps explain the transition away from being so data reliant. And don’t get me wrong, data is very important to a transition where empowering line managers to have a good quality of understanding on and a level of confidence that they can make pay decisions that are in the best interests of the business and the individual. Now, I think managers, line managers hate that empowerment. They hate it. Would you agree?
Trina Sunday: Yes, agreed.
Warren Land: Yeah. And I don’t blame them because if I’ve got no substance to the REM philosophy or the REM framework or the uh, market positioning, I’ve got nothing like when I’ve got a disgruntled employee coming to me and saying I’m underpaid. Okay, well how do we fix that? Oh, there’ll be a 5% increase or whatever. It’s not actually. It’s just band aiding an underlying problem. So the leader plays such an important role. And hr, and I’ve worked in HR as part of the HR team, we over the years were getting lumbered with taking away responsibilities from line managers where they’re the coal face, but in their defence, they just didn’t have the, uh, skills, the capability and the tools.
Trina Sunday: Tools is at the core of this, right? Like, I think if someone gave me a power tool to use, I think I love going to Bunnings, but the thought of actually using the things in Bunnings gives me anxiety, right? I’d rather hang out in office works. That’s my space. But if we give people tools and they don’t know how to use them and they’re not confident and they can generally cause more harm. Right? And I feel like that’s with lots of these conversations where empowerment’s lost its power as a word as well. Like, you know, we throw the word empowerment around so much that people just think it’s fluffy. But at, uh, the core of it is equipping and arming people leaders with the information knowledge they have so they can actually talk to their people about the whole experience they’re having at work. That’s the way I look at it, right? Uh, when you distil it down. And REM is a big part of that because our entire livelihoods, lifestyles, supporting families, all the important stuff which is not at work is linked and funded by whatever we earn at work. And I think that the gravity of that’s lost on people sometimes. But I also think that it supports some leaders to throw HR under the bus because they want to avoid having that conversation. And behaviourally, we don’t hold that people leader to account, right? To say, no, uh, you’ve got to show up and have this chat with your people to explain to them, like, how we’re approaching this, but we’re not giving people enough information or we give them some email briefing, uh, note or something to say, ah, oh, this is the REM increases, this is what you say to people. But it’s so much more than that, right? To your point about, this is how we used to do it. This is what’s in the black box. This is how the things we have to think about, like, help people leaders understand how complicated it is so that they can at least get the headline of, you know, well, the organisation’s factoring in this, this and this. And so this is how it spits out the other end. And. But in a language that makes sense for the area of the workforce as well. Right?
Warren Land: Ah, uh, you know, and I saw, you know, this is a classic case and, you know, the, the recent economic climate that we’ve endured through obviously the world little in Australia, and the inflationary result that we’ve been grappling with for a few years and this conversation that’s held at the very senior parts of organisations, right through to the broader employee base where inflation’s running hard, my cost of living is going up, then I expect a pay rise to keep me whole. And technically when you pull that apart and you say, well, what’s inflation got to do with the rate of the wage growth? And so is it fair and reasonable that an organisation should stump up 4 or 5% increase in, um, salary and wages when salariing wages are a, uh, function of a market dynamic, as in the supply of labour and the cost of labour, not inflation. And so organisations were faced with a fundamental question around employees, quite rightly saying, well, my cost of living is going up and I want a salary increase. Leaders struggled with that and the talk sheets were drafted and sent out to leaders, line managers. And here’s what you should say. But, uh, look, I’d suggest that many of them really struggled with that concept. And that’s where I find these days. The resulting outcome in workplaces is that you’ve got this pay compression and the levers for organisations to pull are, uh, now such that we run out of an ability to just keep adding on fixed cost to our, uh, employment base year after year. Now we’re seeing pressures on the old bonus end of year. Well, people are probably looking at that and say, uh, there’s gotta be some value in that. And that’s where bonuses now. And this is the other transition we’re seeing in the, in the market from the old days of here’s the Christmas bonus to how’s it calculated? Don’t know, but we’re sort of expecting it to now having a lot more energy behind and structure behind. How’s it calculated? What do I need to get it? How does it relate to organisational success, all that sort of stuff. So that’s a really interesting dynamic that we are seeing and I think that’s an opportunity for many companies to say, well, we’ve run out of juice for, uh, putting more fixed cost in the organisation. How do we now put some more substance behind those other things that actually hold meaningful value for people? And it’s not just incentives, it’s all the other stuff too.
Trina Sunday: And I think, you know, a client that I have that’s kind of meeting the cost of living crisis in a different way. Cause we’re not very good at, as humans, of giving things up, right? That’s my Observation. That’s my expert opinion. Um, we’re terrible at giving things up. And so going backwards or.
Warren Land: I’m going to challenge you on that too, Trina.
Trina Sunday: Challenge. Go.
People aren’t very good at giving up things, right?
Warren Land: So I came to you and I said, I’ll give you an extra day off per, uh, week, but you’ve got to give me back 20% of your salary. Would you do it?
Trina Sunday: No.
Warren Land: Do you know what we do? Straw polls.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, tell me.
Warren Land: And whenever we do client presentations and we do. And they’re live audience polls, right. And we ask those types of questions. And the latest one that we did, we asked a similar question. Actually, I think the ratio was a bit different to that. Cause I wasn’t expecting your answer to be that. Maybe I needed to give you an extra day. Maybe they needed to give you two days off for a 10% salary reduction. I’m sure there’s something that. There is a threshold there, surely.
Trina Sunday: Now we’re talking. See, I’m a negotiator.
Warren Land: Come on.
Trina Sunday: Like, I’m good at this REM stuff from a personal perspective.
Warren Land: Yeah. But here’s my point, right? So you said before people aren’t very good at giving up things. I reckon they are. Uh, uh, you just need to have some flexibility in your reward structures to cater for it. Not everybody’s the same. And this is another challenge, this old age thinking of one size fits all. It doesn’t cut it.
Trina Sunday: No, I absolutely agree with you and I talk about that a lot. In my mind, what I was thinking about in terms of people not giving things up, it’s more a lifestyle one than an organisational one. Um, so it’s that pure. My pay packet needs to fund these parts of my life. That’s important. So I love travelling, right? Love travelling. I make some pretty big concessions financially out of the family budget because I don’t want to give up the travel. If I was being a responsible and adulting at a really good level, I should probably not go on that holiday. Now, this example is steeped in privilege, right? Because there are people that are struggling to put food on the table. And so there’s a relativity in this. But a client that’s meeting that issue, where it’s at, though, is not throwing the bonus stuff at it, to your point, or increasing the fixed rem. And we know that opex, you know, is off the chart with the salary component, right? So we know that that’s going to push businesses to not be performing well, which then sustainably and long term doesn’t help them look after their workforce either. But A client that I have that’s really trying to lean into this. They are running financial wellbeing so sessions, they are partnering with financial organisations to try and, um, help people be more creative and informed about how to manage their tax, minimise their tax legally, you know, how to look at different ways of diversifying what they do with their salary when it comes in. So they’re meeting it with knowledge, they’re meeting it with solutions that at the same time help people level up just in terms of how they can manage their own personal. So it gives them agency as well to not be expecting the organisation to solve all the problems arising out of cost of living and the inflation and where we are from an economic perspective. But they’re giving people skills, they’re giving people options. Now that to me is just good stewardship of your people.
Warren Land: Right.
Trina Sunday: Like in terms of where you can help meet an issue, cost of living, with a different solution, that’s not the REM one, but I don’t see that happening as often as I’d like. Right. You know, it’s a different way of thinking, it’s different mindset. And so for me, with the leaders that I work with and coach them to think differently around how we show up for our people, uh, I’m preaching to converted and I generally have people gravitating to me that want to do things differently and so it’s not always representative of kind of where most people are at.
Maso says more innovation is seeing in other sectors than the resources sector
So I’m curious to know if you’ve seen any innovative things that organisations are doing to counter the REM solution. What are you seeing?
Warren Land: I think the most innovative stuff that I’ve seen, unfortunately. And it’s probably an opportunity for us where, you know, a lot of our clients are based in the resources sector. Um, obviously being head officed out of wa, there’s a lot of those. But the more innovation is seeing is in other sectors. Uh, I find the resources sector to be a little bit of a laggard when it comes to doing things differently. We’ve always done, we’ve always done seems to work. But I think that, uh, the innovation that I’ve seen is where organisations have sort of stood back and said, there’s a few parts to the onion if you think about the reward. And in its. The innermost core is a foundational expectation the organisation provides, like Maso’s hierarchy of needs. Give me the things that actually are compliant, give me the rate of pay that is fair and reasonable, a superannuation contribution that’s going to be appropriate based on the legislation, et cetera. So there’s this foundational piece, then there’s the piece that goes above and beyond that, which is where the organisation will have uh, an ability to share in its success. And often bonus programmes, those sort of things flow in there. Then there’s a layer that I think that we see most innovation, which is where be famous for something. This is a market where we continually find good people are hard to come by. So what is it that you’re famous for? If I pick up your value statement or your purpose for having this organisation, what reward programmes do you have there that actually talk to that? If I’m a technology company and I’m into innovation, do you have rewards that actually provide those things to your staff? For example, there’s a technology company that uh, I think it was about a couple of grand each year, that was the innovation allowance they called it. And people can basically use that to buy the new shiny piece of technology. Doesn’t matter what it is, go out and test it, go and try it. And another organisation that was really into, I think that I can’t remember what they were providing but any let’s, they’re a lifestyle type of service offering and they had this programme called Health, wealth and Time. And it was initiatives that were built around those three pillars. So, uh, your health, okay, gym membership, um, yoga, whatever it might be, your wealth. I mean you mentioned before there was seminars around financial acumen. It’s amazing how people, a lot of people really, once you take some of those things that are happening at home away from them in their workplace, they become far more productive. Right. So if I give you ah, an ability to understand more about your finances and you feel comfortable, you’re not going to perhaps worry about them as much. So have a plan in place and then the time things around, time management, how do we provide you skills or opportunities to give you more time back in your day. So those sort of initiatives that when the onion sort uh, of starts to grow out, you can get uh, a great proposition to then market like you would do, using those typical marketing tools to go out and source your best and brightest.
Warren says it’s important to understand what motivates people. If you could change anything to make rewards more human
Trina Sunday: I think this goes back to the storytelling, right, like so even with the data you talked about, which is always interesting when you hear an analyst talk about data is not that important, even though you said no is important, but it’s the storey the data tells, right? And then these interventions, whether that’s health, wealth, time, other programmes, that’s about meeting people where they’re at in terms of the storey they need to craft, to live their best life. So what does that look like? And you give people some ability to customise that so it meets them where they’re at. Because the one size fits all days are over. But at the same time I get a lot of resistance to that as well.
Warren Land: Right?
Trina Sunday: That the, oh, we have to customise and individualise everything. It’s, you know, like, we need 20,000 more people in HR if we’re going to do that. And it’s like, no, no, we just need to upskill those people. Leaders we were talking about earlier to have a chat to some people around how we could do some things differently. It’s not about building out process after process, it’s about decisions we make which can be fluid and in the moment and not require a big process if we’re giving people the tools they need to make good ones. But I think that storytelling then flows through the brand. So as you talk about, I love positioning it that way. Like, what are you famous for? Because it definitely kind of hones people’s attention in as opposed to language that I hear all the time around employee value proposition. And you know, how that flows to employer branding is like, no one knows what that means. No one outside hr, lots of people inside hr. But it is what your differentiator is, right? And you’re an entrepreneur. Uh, I’ve got my own business. It’s like you need to know what’s different and how you want to show up differently. And I think, you know, for me it’s about the human first part. And I think if we have that at the core of rewards, I do think it would look completely different. If you could change anything to make rewards and total rewards more human, what would you want to see change?
Warren Land: I think it’s got to come back to the age old processes of thinking that it’s about what we pay. It’s actually encouraging more organisations and leaders to think how and why. And that invokes a conversation that goes way beyond, uh, what the salary is. And so there’s got to be a connection when you start to open those pieces up, the how and the why to programmes that are, they’re not incentive schemes that erode trust. They’re not just doing publishing salary bans for the sake of doing it. They’re not trying to retrofit programmes into hybrid working environments where we’re going to incentivize people if they come back into the office. I mean, what an absolute excuse the French shit show that’s been. How can you possibly expect to win by incentivizing people to come back and work in the office, that horse is bolted. So I think that’s the thing where historically it’s easy to do the blunt instrument, just pay for it for more. But that’s the easy way out. If you actually try to get to the heart of understanding what motivates people. And I absolutely don’t dismiss what you’re saying before about it’s hard to be more adaptable, uh, and dynamic in your reward structures to cater for different types of cohorts, different types of Personas. Yeah, I get it. But if you don’t, then I reckon that you are just paying good money after bad.
Trina Sunday: I agree. And I think, you know, as much as I said it was challenging doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s absolutely critical and necessary. And I think that even having a conversation where I get people dispute to me all the time that pay is the biggest motivator for people. And I know that Dan Pink’s done a lot of work in this space where, you know, his research says, well no, actually like the pay packet’s not the most motivating factor. And I think about it, uh, a pay packet and money hitting your bank account, which is a transactional thing that happens, does not in my experience, and I would put my house on this any day of the week, does not make people feel valued. And I think the opportunity we have here is to ask ourselves, you know, what are we rewarding that matters most? And to my passion around equity and fairness, I, uh, then go further and ask myself things like who benefits from this, who is excluded from this and what do we need to do to make sure that everyone is being valued in a way that’s consistent with how our organisation wants to show up. So there’s a lot in that Warren.
Warren Land: You know, but it all comes from the top of the organisation. If you want to try to really wrestle these big topics down and try to do something different in the REM space and reward space, then you’re really looking to the most senior people of the organisation, the executive, the board. And that’s damn challenging because the historic pay structures don’t lend themselves to, at that very senior level, to a lot of variance in traditions and norms. You look at CEOs of large organisations that are uh, remunerated through 30% salary, 30% STI, short term incentive, 30% long term incentive. You know, when you, when you’re seeing that an executive has got sometimes uh, over two thirds of their pay at risk, that’ll Invoke behaviours and the way that they’re designed, the way that they then manifest themselves through the rest of the organisation, it’s how the culture will be determined. And like I said at the start, the REM report for public companies is the window into the organisation.
Trina Sunday: Enjoy the view. Thanks, Warren. Appreciate your time.
Warren Land: Been a pleasure. Uh, thanks, Trina.
Trina Sunday: What a way to close out the year. Talking with Warren reminds me that rewards aren’t just about the money, they’re about meaning. They tell the storey of what we value, what we celebrate and sometimes what we overlook. And the challenge for leaders is simple but brave. Align, uh, your reward systems with your real values. If you say you value collaboration, don’t only pay for competition. If you say wellbeing matters, don’t design bonuses that burn people out to get them. The systems we build shape the cultures we get. So make sure yours tells the right storey. And as you step into a new year, take a moment to ask, what are we really rewarding here? Because fairness, trust and motivation, they don’t come from the size of a bonus. They come from the heart behind it. Thanks for tuning in and leaning Tuning in to this week’s episode. As we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organisations and community, reach out to us via our website@, uh, reimaginehr.com with your HR horror, storeys or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore.
It’s all about people, purpose and impact and we are here for all of it.
Until next time, take care, team.
