Are we seeing a shift in Reward & Remuneration?

I've been doing a lot of work in the Reward space recently.

By 'Reward' I mean 'Total Reward' as in remuneration (or compensation), employee benefits, bonuses like STIs/LTIs, superannuation, equity schemes etc. It can often include recognition and performance too.

People who work in the Reward/Remuneration area are often called upon to perform the critical thinking and develop solutions for incredibly complex scenarios that are intended to balance budgets, data, and numbers with one of the more emotive areas of organisational dynamics - salaries!

Some sectors, like Fin Services for example, or publicly-listed environments, have further complexity due to the degree of regulatory compliance that needs to be managed on top of the day-to-day.

Reward teams are often run quite lean, or standalone. There is also a fairly common theme of managing all of this complexity without an HRIS or comprehensive tech and therefore relying on the data and tools scratched out of Excel (don't worry, reward people LOVE Excel).

And, as one person described to me, you don't really have peaks and troughs in Reward, you have peaks and then peaks.

So by now you're probably asking yourself, why the heck would you want to work in Reward?!

Well, something interesting has been happening in the reward area over the last few years and there is a definite shift that has not just elevated Reward as an integral and critical people-oriented discipline, but also how organisations are leaning on their Reward functions more heavily than ever before.

Rewind a couple of years when we were coming out of COVID and into a very competitive and super fast-paced market, talent acquisition and, indeed, talent retention, were critical to support many organisations' views of sustainable growth. Reward professionals were the key messengers for many a People and HR Leader as they shifted the dialogue with executive teams and boards on viewing reward not as cost, but as investment. They were the people who had to respond when asked what more could be done to utilise relevant reward solutions to remain commercially competitive and to maintain growth.

More recently, we've seen an ever-increasing scrutiny on reward practice – from employees, potential employees and the general public wanting to gain deeper insights on a business's working culture and environment more than ever before; and also as an outcome of policy change from regulators and government.

With that comes a whole new suite of expectations outside what I'd call traditional reward and remuneration best practice. Areas that may have once been hygiene factors but are now climbing the prioritisation ladder; pay equity (eg gender pay gap), flexibility, mobility, career frameworks and talent development, ESG, market data and benchmarking methodologies that take into consideration broader talent markets, benefits that intentionally target impactful health and wellbeing initiatives.

The list goes on.



If all of this seems complex – it is. Balancing qualitative and quantitative analysis, understanding the yin and the yang of a healthy workforce, is where a Reward Leader in today's market needs to be every day.

The very cool thing that's happening here however is that the reward discipline is truly helping thrust into the limelight the people levers that create the environment necessary to help employees thrive.

So, when you think of it that way, why wouldn't you want to work in Reward?

Hats off to those folks who I know are working hard to make a real difference in this area: