Modernising total rewards

Our client needed to optimise its total rewards offerings to support the multi-country operations’ growth and maximise the capacity of the local HR teams. By leveraging OLAM Group’s expertise and market insights, the client was able to successfully transform its total rewards strategy, execute the strategy by reducing pay inequity, driving employee engagement and increasing corporate governance.

The Client

Our client is a privately owned, diversified business group with over 40,000 employees across 19 countries on 3 continents. Each division of the company operates as its own separate, legal entity.

The corporate leadership was concerned about the competitiveness of their total rewards offerings against market practices and internally. Simultaneously, the local HR teams followed very manual and paper-based work with little to no corporate oversight or governance.

Challenges

Each country operation was running independently of corporate guidance to define its total rewards programmes, including the compensation structures, additional benefits and merit planning.

All programmes were managed locally. Due to the manual nature of processes, the Total Rewards programmes were prone to human error resulting in pay inequities across the division and often within the same department or team.

Strategy

OLAM Group undertook a comprehensive review of the company’s HR data, total rewards programmes, policies and governance.

The goal was to replace inefficient manual processes with streamlined programmes based on analytical insights and better understanding of the HR data

OLAM Group benchmarked the company’s programs against local market competitors and best practices, identifying any gaps in their offerings. We conducted financial impact analysis and proposed areas to target with special adjustments to reduce the inequity within the organisation.

OLAM Group then designed competitive, holistic and equitable total rewards programmes that reflected corporate leadership mandates while allowing enough flexibility to meet local market conditions. OLAM partnered with the client to identify outdated and redundant policies and developed and implemented efficient and market driven programs and policies.

Developing and training on the streamlined processes and HR data analytics, we helped the corporate and local HR teams to increase their capability and efficiency.

Outcome

The client was able to integrate comprehensive corporate compliant total rewards practices and programmes into its multi-country operations.

The client reduced the pay inequities with focused and high-impact adjustments while staying within budget. Local employee engagement has increased, thereby strengthening the company’s reputation as an employer of choice.