Secrets of success: Rachna Patel, The Walt Disney Company
What excites you most about working in reward?
Personally, the geek in me just loves that the reward area of HR is a combination of the numbers and your judgment. You have access to salary survey data, all the market data that you need, but then you have to make the call that is right for your organisation, your industry, and whatever the overall business strategy is. So it’s a bit of an art and science.
Of course, this is also the hardest part of the role, there is no room for mistakes, as you get more senior the more senior stakeholders you are in front of, you just don’t want to get the numbers wrong.
What is the most rewarding part of your role?
For me, developing my team, coaching them and helping them to succeed. I joined Disney as an analyst 14 years ago and worked up the organisation with secondments in LA and Mumbai, so have had great opportunities and I am a firm believer in making sure others get that.
I also feel a great sense of achievement knowing that our employees feel valued and that they understand their reward package.
What is the most challenging thing you’ve had to do as part of your job?
I head up compensation, benefits, global mobility and workforce planning, and have done for the past four years. I get quite a few things added on to my remit and this has been the most challenging part of my job.
Things like workforce planning, which we are still figuring out exactly what it is, whether it’s head count tracking or making sure the workforce is right and skills-based, is not necessarily my niche area and being asked to lead on that has been very unexpected, but super exciting.
As the head of reward I often say that it is not about always getting promoted, it is about lateral development and it is great that my leaders are giving me those opportunities to do something a bit different and know that I can handle data sets so that works.
What do you think reward will look like in ten years’ time and how are you preparing for it?
An area which will be a focus will be the development of different reward schemes across our employee groups. The older generation and millennials just do not view reward in the same way, they want different things, and want to access information differently such as digitally, and companies will have to become more comfortable with this. It’s a hot topic in HR and even in my own team of 12 there are a broad range of ages which provides a good snapshot of what the workplace looks like right now.