NURTURING TALENT THROUGH TOTAL REWARDS
Just as plants flourish with the right care, your employees will thrive with a well-tended total rewards strategy. In today’s competitive business environment, it’s essential for organizations to effectively nurture talent. This is part three of our four-part guide on Nurturing Talent Through Total Rewards. As you read this series, you will gain invaluable insights into enhancing your organization’s total rewards offer and improving employee engagement, retention, and productivity.
Series Overview:
- Part One: Introduced the five key components of Total Rewards: compensation, health & wellbeing, paid time off, recognition, and development.
- Part Two: Explored the three essential steps to fostering a thriving workplace culture: assessing employees’ needs within your Total Rewards offering, aligning rewards with your organization’s values, and communicating the rewards offer clearly.
- Part Three: Now, we focus on evaluating and adapting your rewards program to ensure it remains aligned with employee expectations and organizational goals.
Part 3: Evaluating and Refining Your Rewards Program
To thrive, a garden needs regular care and the right conditions for growth. In much the same way, your Total Rewards program requires ongoing attention and thoughtful refinement for your employees to flourish. Just as plants respond to proper care, the evolving needs of your workforce will be met — and their potential realized — through consistent support and nurturing. Here are four essential steps to evaluating and refining your rewards ecosystem:
1. Benchmarking Your Rewards Program
Just as a gardener checks that their soil is well-balanced, fertile, and aerated throughout the growing season, you can ensure that your Total Rewards program attracts and retains key talent by regularly benchmarking compensation and health and wellbeing benefits against industry standards and competitors. This provides a baseline of information for your organization’s offers to remain relevant and competitive in a dynamic talent market.
Compare your compensation packages annually using reliable market data from sources like Mercer, Willis Towers Watson, or Radford. These firms offer detailed compensation surveys tailored by industry, region, and job function, helping you understand where your pay stands relative to competitors. Compare salary ranges more frequently for high-demand roles (e.g., information & technology jobs) to stay competitive.
To benchmark health and wellbeing benefits, leverage surveys like the SHRM Employee Benefits Survey, which provides an interactive platform to compare your offerings — such as health insurance, retirement savings, paid leave, and wellness programs — against a broad range of employers. Mercer and Willis Towers Watson also offer comprehensive benefits-benchmarking reports that allow you to assess your programs across categories like medical coverage, retirement, paid time off, and life/disability insurance.
Participating in these surveys and using their insights allows you to:
- Identify gaps in your offerings
- Align your strategy with evolving employee expectations
- Strengthen your employee value proposition
By regularly tending to your rewards program through benchmarking, you ensure your organization remains competitive and attractive to key talent.
2. Soliciting Employee Feedback
Throughout the growing season, a gardener assesses the changing needs of each plant. Likewise, to ensure your Total Rewards program continues to meet the evolving needs of your workforce, it’s essential to gather employee feedback. On an annual basis, you can collect employee feedback through employee surveys and feedback sessions.
- Employee Surveys: Capture the voice of your workforce through an employee survey. A well-structured employee survey is a powerful tool for evaluating the effectiveness of your Total Rewards program. It allows you to gather broad, quantifiable insights into how employees perceive and engage with various elements of your rewards strategy.
- Feedback Sessions: To deeply understand the impact of your Total Rewards program, go beyond metrics and engage directly with your employees. Feedback sessions provide a valuable opportunity to gather qualitative insight into how your rewards offer is perceived, experienced, and valued across your workforce.
To be truly valuable, surveys and feedback sessions must give employees from all generations, backgrounds and categories a voice. Surveys provide structured, measurable insights, while feedback sessions offer a more nuanced understanding of employee experiences and preferences. Regularly assessing employee feedback is key to keeping Total Rewards strategies relevant and impactful. By responding to employee input, you demonstrate that their voices matter — nurturing a culture of trust and continuous improvement.
3. Measuring Return on Investment (ROI)
Just as a gardener evaluates the yield of each planting season, it is critical to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your Total Rewards program to ensure your efforts are producing meaningful outcomes. Begin by developing a Total Rewards Scorecard that tracks key performance indicators, such as employee engagement, productivity, benefits utilization, turnover rates, and time-to-fill for open roles.
According to WorldatWork (a Total Rewards professional association), leading organizations are shifting their perspective, viewing Total Rewards not as a cost but as a strategic investment in people and organizational growth. Rather than merely tracking expenditures, forward-thinking employers now ask, How can we maximize the impact of every dollar, pound, yen or euro spent?
This shift underscores the importance not only of measuring outcomes but also of demonstrating the tangible value a Total Rewards program brings to both employees and the business. A robust ROI analysis enables you to:
- Demonstrate the value of budget allocations through data-backed insights
- Identify underperforming programs and reallocate resources more effectively
- Strengthen the business case for future investments in employees’ experience
- Link rewards strategies directly to business outcomes, such as improved retention, reduced absenteeism, and higher performance
4. Refining Your Total Rewards Program
Refining your Total Rewards program is much like weeding a garden. It ensures that every element of your program nourishes employees’ growth and wellbeing. By thoughtfully assessing your offerings and discontinuing components that no longer resonate with employees or support organizational objectives, you can better meet the evolving needs of your workforce and business — while staying within budget. This refinement should support shifting priorities such as innovation, agility, and global expansion, while also anticipating workforce trends like hybrid work, generational diversity, and skills transformation. Aligning your strategy in this way makes your approach resilient over time so that it continues to drive engagement, performance, and long-term value.
When you make changes based on employee feedback, be sure to connect the dots clearly. Let employees know that their voice matters. For instance, you might say something like: “We heard from many of you that learning new skills and growing within the organization is important. That’s why we’re thrilled to launch a new partnership that gives you access to free, on-demand, online courses to support your development.” This not only shows you’re listening, but also ties into the growing focus on upskilling and reskilling, key strategies for staying competitive in today’s fast-changing world.
By consistently monitoring, assessing, and refining your rewards strategy, you ensure your investment continues to support sustainable business success and employee wellbeing. You help your garden grow.
Conclusion
In today’s competitive business landscape, nurturing talent is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. A Total Rewards strategy is your garden plan, ensuring that each individual element thrives with the right combination of resources. By understanding the core components of total rewards and by regularly refining them through evaluation and adaptation, you create an environment where diverse talent can blossom.
But even the best gardens need ongoing care. Regular benchmarking is like checking the weather forecast, ensuring that your strategy aligns with external conditions. Soliciting employee feedback is akin to walking the garden paths and assessing the needs of each plant. Measuring ROI is your harvest check — confirming that your efforts are bearing fruit. And just as a gardener adapts activity to meet changing conditions, refining your Total Rewards program keeps it relevant, impactful, and aligned with both employee expectations and business goals.
By continuously tending to your rewards garden, you not only attract top talent but also cultivate a culture of motivation, resilience, and growth — season after season.
Ready to elevate your Total Rewards strategy and cultivate a workplace where talent thrives? Partner with Next Level Rewards — your expert guide in designing programs that attract, engage, and retain top talent. When your people thrive, your organization blossoms. Let’s grow that future together.