When rewards and incentives become part of your culture and brand, your organization can fully leverage these tools for optimal talent management. Learn how organizations are re-thinking both the concept and practice of reward and recognition to connect your talent with goals that matter to them and your organization’s business strategies. 

Our Nov 13 webcast  ”Money Can’t Buy Love, But Rewards & Incentives Can” will explore these ideas…we hope you’ll engage in a lively post-webcast dialog with presenter Paula Godar and share your insights, experiences and questions below…

HCI members ask: 

Do rewards and recognition always have to work together?   What are examples of when one might be effective without the other?

How might organizations find out which of the six motivations would work for individuals in their company?   Is a menu a feasible approach to customizing R&R on an individual basis?

In a stressed economy, does cash have more impact than non-cash rewards?

Since the presenter’s research shows that non-cash rewards have an emotional connotation and meaning, might they be better suited to initiatives to encourage creativity and innovation?  And…isn’t that what companies will need most in a stressed economy?

How might organizations connect their investment in rewards and recognition to business results?

With organizations wanting to build their talent benchstrength, more responsibility lies with managers to coach talent and develop potential to have a talent “pool of strong swimmers.” 

In some cases, managers will inevitably face identifying talent for future leadership positions beyond levels that manager ever attained. Is this necessarily a problem?  Think of Olympic coaches who get due credit for preparing the competing athlete. 

What are managers in your organization encouraged to do to develop the talent your organization will need tomorrow?   Is this a more of a challenge in medium-size organizations, or does size make it easier to know your talent?  Our presenters Kim Ellis  and Frank Horvath, and I look forward to your comments and questions in our post-webcast dialog below… 

HCI member JeanAnn asks, How does a company prepare employees, have them “ready” and then have them NOT want to relocate to the region/office that needs the assistance. So many of our employees do not want to relocate to the parts of the country?

When I was a kid, my big sister had an autograph book in which a friend wrote: “Pam, Pam sitting on a fence trying to make a dollor oout of 99 cents.”  Well, companies, too, are trying to get more for their money these days, in terms of a smart spend in talent management.  The science of talent management, drawing from sound research, can position your company to be amongst the best in class for total compensation ROI.

What do you see in your organization as the challenges to effective total compensation?  

Is it parity across business units?  Time required to design and keep plans fresh?  System to award bonuses?  Look forward to your postings and related thoughts below…

As integrated talent management advances, the line between performance and a development plan becomes increasingly blurred.   Throwing reward and compensation into the mix adds fuel to talent’s “motivation fire.”   I had a great conversation on skill-based pay and its impact on performance with expert Gerry Ledford recently after he presented at an HCI webcast.  I wanted to know more about how SBP (skill-based pay) can be used in a development plan to develop potential.  Gerry replied, “An easy way to do this: think of an annual bonus or merit increase as having two components - performance and skill/competency development. The latter makes future performance possible. They could be equally weighted or differently weighted. The skills/competencies can be based on concrete goals or ‘learning contracts’, just like bonuses are often based on meeting performance goals.”  I think there is great merit in organizations taking this intentional approach, especially in a knowledge economy. 

Let’s take this approach of “earning for learning” another step…since organizations are more committed than ever to building vs. buying talent, and giving attention to the competencies that will be needed in stretch assignments, I want to know more about
factoring strategic competencies into (development for) succession plans…  if you’ve seen this in practice, please enter your posts…

Recently I read that effective incentive plans run about 60 days; taking this into consideration for skill-based pay, what if it takes longer than 60 days to learn a competency?  This HBR article  recognizes the time it takes to learn a skill, and supports the value of separating out the compensation for performance from compensation for learning a skill.   “Leadership is essential for fostering the mindset, group behaviors, and organizational investments that promote learning now and invest in performance later… start with the general proposition that learning promotes performance.” 

I would suggest that talent managers who wish to promote learning in support of performance improvement can light their “earning for learning” platform on fire.   And, leveraging learning for performance may reasonate particularly with the millennial generation who may not always know what they don’t know (the “unconscious incompetence”). Though by no means does any one generation have a corner on unconscious incompetence…personally as a boomer, I like the idea of ending every week with the question, “what did I learn and how does this fit with my performance goals?”   If you have experience with skill-based pay or ideas on how to communicate and implement it with development plans, I hope you’ll enter your posts to this blog…