Sally Purbrick: Friend or enemy? Working in reward at salary review time

And I’m not indicating any redundancies or salary freezes – just the normal annual cycle.

Keeping staff motivated and budgets lean

In my organisation, despite the employment market becoming more buoyant, most employees remain happy in their role and are not looking for a move. But we need to strike the right balance between needing to tighten our purse strings and paying employees the right level of pay to motivate and retain them.

I’ve learnt over the years this is tough but critical part of my role. Although I’m not responsible for setting the overall salary budget I am the one who plays a significant role in how the overall budget should be split.

Should you ensure the proactive manager who provides a detailed but maybe over-egged budget submission receives what they have requested and their staff are the lucky ones? Or should you secure budget for the manager who missed the deadline, forgot or didn’t think their team needed any increases, so they miss out on their share of the pot? I’m a firm believer that an equal pot for each manager is not the way to successfully manage pay.

Remaining compliant

All of this is against the backdrop of my role to ensure legal or internal compliance, which includes an ever-increasing number of factors to firstly understand and then consider. There are the obvious components of equal pay and the new living wage but, with the reduction in the annual and lifetime pension allowances, we also need to highlight to employees the impact pay increases and flow through to pensions may have on their personal tax positions.

This is an area in which we can be seen as a friend to prevent employees not knowingly incurring an unexpected tax bill.

Managing stakeholders

Once my colleagues in the talent team and I know who our top talent is we need to make sure we set the right budget allocation to manage salaries to retain talent. Salaries should always be set in conjunction with line managers but for this group, engagement with wider stakeholders is always key.

Only last week I was presented with an 'urgent' salary increase request for one of our top talented employees. Despite careful management of their salary, an offer was put on the table by another company and our employee was set to go. And suddenly I become a friend by creating a revised reward package. Now the talented employee is set to stay.

Reaching the organisation’s goals

But when you need your workforce to consistently perform at a high level and they are very unlikely to leave, what budget should be provided to keep them engaged and motivated?

I’ve learnt when you have a limited budget you need to set the budget allocation to what is most important to your organisation at that time. That’s what I am paid to do. Some won’t agree it’s always right all the time, but with the vision of what’s important to the company I believe we are doing it right.

This article is written by Sally Purbrick, head of reward at Anglian Water