Secrets of success: Richard Alberto, head of mobility and reward

Richard Alberto, former head of mobility and reward at Ogilvy and Mather – a global advertising and marketing agency – believes one of the biggest challenges facing reward professionals now, and in the future, will be attracting and retaining talent who face losing out on long-term incentives if they switch jobs.

What are the biggest challenges facing you as a reward professional?

Whilst there are a number of independent advertising agencies that are in our industry, organisations such as Facebook and Google and even management consultancy firms are coming into the advertising space. From a reward perspective, it is about finding out how the people in these new companies and organisations are being rewarded, understanding how their rewards are being triggered, and how are we going to change our rewards package structure in order to be competitive to attract and retain the right talent.

How do you think the reward landscape will change in the future?

I think technology will have a bigger part to play in how reward is delivered, and how we can use analytics to see the success of some of the rewards that we are offering.

But I think one of the really big challenges facing all reward leaders across different industries will be if employees have a long-term incentive plan in place. If a competitor wants to hire an individual they will compensate them for the stock they will be giving up. So, when thinking about remunerating and hiring talent at a senior level we will be needing to factor in what they are losing out on and how we can make good on that.

What would be your advice to those considering a career in reward in the future?

It can be an isolated role depending on the size of the company. But there is opportunity to make it into your own. There can be flexibility in how you want to structure reward in the company as long as you have management who can help support you and who understand the kind of challenges in reward you are going to have.

I would caution that you have to have an open mind, there are a number of ways to reward individuals, and human beings like to be rewarded in different ways so don’t try to fit everyone in the same box. Try to think about the data available to you and segment it to be relevant to the population, for example, by gender, by generations, by life-cycle, single family, etc. You have got the data in front of you to help you start to shape the way you put together your reward package and communicate it.