The implementation of reward management in your business can be a key motivator for attraction and retention of employees. When done well, it’s a way to elevate loyalty, engagement and provide self-enhancement.

Communication, information, processing, and security lies at the heart of good reward management systems. As your business grows, the need for automation and streamlining can become evident. Integrating automated processes into your business is often vital to reduce long term costs and generate more value from your teams’ time. 

Whether you are looking to improve a system already in place or considering making the transition from offline working to a central system built for purpose, knowing some of the key factors for change can help identify your aims, objectives, and approach:

1. Offline tools are important, but they may not adequately support your rewards management needs

While the value of MS Excel can’t be understated, at a certain point it can become limiting as it’s not designed to support your company’s individual processes.

There are many possible reasons why your organisation may be looking beyond your current processes, such as:

• Your business has grown, and the volume and breadth of data has increased,
• Processes and needs have become more complex, beyond the original design of the spreadsheet,
• The person or team who originally set-up the tools has since moved on, making maintenance and change of the tools difficult and risky, or,
• Your team find an increasing need to employ MS Excel to cover an existing system which is no longer fully fit for purpose.

These blocks could become a limiting factor when looking at improving your reward management strategies.

The further offline tools, such as Excel, are pushed, the higher the chances of error become. Information falling through the cracks or being misprocessed are less likely to be caught during manual validation processes. You may face further issues when combining or transferring information between spreadsheets when trying to centralise, or report on, data.

A reward and compensation management software solution helps you improve your data management and integrity as your data is consolidated into a single solution. Information can be entered or uploaded into the system as a single source of truth. Reducing the amount of manual data entry and data management mitigates the number of potential mistakes that spreadsheets can be vulnerable to. Data can be easily tracked and audited depending on your company’s data retention policies and reporting needs, a process that may be demanding for manual solutions. 

2. Free your (team’s) mind, and the rest will follow.

One of the most important points to consider when weighing up whether to onboard a rewards software solution is the time saving that your team could benefit from. Assessing the time savings available to you and the potential value of that time may help you make that choice. This can be considered in different ways; the day-to-day time saving and the greater business focus. 

a. Rewards management: Day-to-day

Many hours may be spent organising and managing your compensation processes and communicating to your employees. Inputting, QC, organising, cleaning, and maintaining data, then producing documents, emails, and reports, can be time-consuming and tedious. Most of this work can be automated or streamlined with a total rewards software. 

At a base level, you can calculate the cost of the time taken to maintain the data (and the potential need to recruit employees to manage the time commitment) then determine if the cost of a system rivals this. Additionally, it’s worth factoring in improved communication, reporting, security, and employee engagement.

b. The big picture

By freeing up time day-to-day for your team, the greater benefits of a compensation management system can be seen. Moving away from manual work, your team can shift to solely QC the data and processing. The time previously spent working through heaps of data can then be dedicated to working on higher value tasks driving your business forward. Redesigning and updating the overall employee compensation processes to embed technology can offer long term benefits as software can evolve and grow with your business. 

With the additional resource available when working alongside a system, your team now has room to consider and analyse the greater implications of the data available rather than worrying about the data itself. Using this information, the goal is to gain greater insights into what is working and more importantly, areas of the reward management and compensation process that could be improved upon or adjusted to better align with business goals. 

3. Organisation-wide visibility of rewards and recognition programs

In a centralised compensation software solution, employees can gain secure access to their own shareholding information. Facilitating visibility of rewards and remuneration on a greater scale than simply being given information by the share admin team can further motivate talent. It also gives those who wish to engage with their rewards in a more complex fashion a route to do so.

Alternatively, you may opt to have the system at a team level only, leveraging the time savings without opening up to the employees. Either way, with a consolidated and centralised solution, communications with shareholders can be automated, with cohesive brand messaging for your employees. A system that matches your brand’s guidelines and ethos can further ingrain a sense of importance for each employee individually. 

Total rewards software: final thoughts

There are many reasons you may need to look at options for systematisation. These are just some examples based on conversations we’ve had with businesses:

1. Time
2. Cost
3. Security
4. Flexibility and agility
5. Communication and engagement
6. Vision of data
7. Complexity
8. Regulatory compliance

If you are considering a shift to a new system and would like an initial chat – feel free to pop us a message and we’ll get in contact.

Alternatively, read more about HWC’s rewards software, Rewardflow. We cover all things total rewards, compensation, and stock option management.