Secrets of success: Meera Mistry, reward director at Ascential

Meera Mistry, reward director at Ascential, has seen reward develop from just being about executive compensation and a handful of benefits to a more focused employee experience.

How did you begin your career in reward? I just fell into it! I trained as a company secretary and part of the role was managing the business’s share plans. That was the part of the work I enjoyed the most – I found real satisfaction in seeing a project all the way through. My career’s grown from there. Every day is different and there’s such a lot of variety.

Has the skillset in reward changed? Definitely. Reward used to be about executive compensation and a handful of benefits, but now it’s much more focused on the employee experience for everyone.

You are fighting for people’s time and interest, so you’ve got to use creative ways to get people’s attention and tailor messages appropriately.

Wellbeing has been another big change, especially for Ascential. There is real recognition now that it’s not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity. You need to be able to sell the importance of a happy, healthy workforce to the board – and explain that it’s not just bonuses that make people happy, it is other things too.

The way that we deliver wellbeing at Ascential has also changed. In the past, different parts of our organisation ran health and wellbeing activities separately, but in 2016 we brought these together, to make sure that we deliver it in a consistent way. We want to be an employer of choice, so it’s important to have a coherent approach.

What keeps you awake at night reward-wise? It’s not one single thing. There are a lot of projects to juggle, technology changes to keep on top of and job frameworks to review. And, a new share plan. I’ve loved working on that. We had a great response and 50 per cent of our employees are now in the share save scheme. There was a lot of work involved – we used videos, webinars, booklets, flyers, posters… and made ourselves available to talk about it over some food.

If you could pass one piece of reward legislation, what would it be? I think it would be financial education-related. I’d introduce dedicated financial education in schools so that everyone learns and understands the importance of financial wellbeing from an early age. That would then flow into pensions and other savings so that every employee has a plan for their short, medium and long-term financial growth.