Achieving the Specific Aims | Reward Management

Support the Achievement of Business Goals and High Performance

Reward management supports the achievement of business goals by helping to ensure that the organization has the talented and engaged people it needs. It contributes to the achievement of high performance by ensuring that the reward system recognizes and encourages it.

Support and Develop the Organization's Culture

Reward management can support and help to change the organization's culture by:

• stressing the importance of high performance through contingent pay and performance management;
• reinforcing the behaviours required in a high-performance culture;
• emphasizing that upholding core values is a major criterion when assessing performance;
• linking rewards specifically to behaviour that is in line with core values;
• demonstrating that the organization cares about the well-being of employees through the provision of pensions and other benefits.

Define the Right Behaviours and Outcomes

Reward management can define expectations through performance management and contingent pay schemes.

Reward People According to the Value They Create and What the Organization Values

People are assessed according to the contribution they make to achieving organizational goals and rewarded accordingly. Having defined expectations, reward management can provide for people to be rewarded in line with the degree to which people meet them. Managers should be aware of the results expected from people and the behaviour needed to achieve these results and to support the organization's values. The reward system should ensure that the results and behaviour are valued and recognized.

Align Reward Practices with Employee Needs

Employees need to be paid fairly for what they do, in line with the principles of distributive and procedural justice and equity as defined above. Their needs for recognition can be directly satisfied by the reward system and a total rewards approach will enable other needs such as those for growth, responsibility and autonomy to be met. Segmentation of rewards may be appropriate to reflect the different needs of employees.

Help to Attract and Retain High-Quality People

Pay levels are important means of attracting people to organizations, although the employer's reputation and the opportunities it provides for career development and scope to use skills and abilities are also important. Decisions to remain with an organization are affected by expectations on pay growth, feelings about the fairness of the reward system and comparisons with what could be earned elsewhere. This is what labour economists call the ‘sorting effect’.

Win the Engagement of People

Employee engagement takes place when people are interested in and positive, even excited, about their jobs and are prepared to go the extra mile to get them done to the best of their ability. A total rewards system can win the engagement of people through a mix of elements tailored to meet individual needs. These elements will include financial incentives but also other forms of non-financial rewards in the form of recognition, scope for growth and job design.

Factors Influencing the Achievement of the Aims

The achievement of the aims is influenced by the context and the reward strategy as affected by the context. The aims of total reward management are also affected by the concepts of the resource-based view, human capital management, human process advantage and HR process advantage.