Using Total Reward Statements to engage employees

Total Reward Statements can help you to engage employees and demonstrate the overall value of the reward package you provide.

Reward statements are a simple, yet underutilised, method of helping employees quantify the advantages of your business’ reward strategy. At Paydata, we have created this brief guide to highlight everything you need to know about total reward statements, including what they are, why you should make use of them and how to effectively implement them into your existing rewards strategy.

What is a Total Reward Statement?

A total reward statement is a personalised document, used to outline exactly what an employee has received from their employer over a set period of time. The total reward statement is designed to highlight everything that the employee has benefited from, both financially and non-financially, as part of their overall reward package. This is a very simple way of showing the true value of your business reward scheme.

Why use a Total Reward Statement?

All employees seek fair remuneration packages for their work. Total reward statements are an extremely simple, but effective, way of helping to overcome an employee’s potentially negative perception of their reward package. The concept of the reward statement is to highlight every benefit of an employee’s reward package, both financial and non-financial, including bonuses, benefits and holiday entitlement. This offers both the employee and employer an easy-to-reference tool, which quantifies everything on offer to the employee, much of which is often overlooked.

This is particularly effective if your business operates on a ‘low-pay-high-benefit’ system, where you might pay just below the average wage but in exchange, offer significantly better benefits than other organisations within your sector. Ultimately, total reward statements are an excellent method of improving employee engagement and retention.

By systematically and methodically outlining the benefits, it becomes clear just how much you are investing in your staff, building trust in the employer-employee relationship. If you are struggling with low staff morale, motivation, retention or engagement, total reward statements are often seen as a quick win that will have a large and noticeable impact – as long as your reward scheme is appropriate.

What should be included in your Total Reward Statement?

The total reward statement should be comprehensive and cover every aspect of an employee’s reward package. This includes traditional benefits like base salaries, bonuses and pension schemes, as well as additional benefits like gym memberships and medical insurance.

Most importantly, the total reward statement shouldn’t just list these advantages, it must also illustrate their value. You should never be afraid to highlight your business’ expenditure on an employee. Being honest and clear about how you value staff is appreciated, recognised and remembered, so be as transparent as possible.

The reason why making the monetary value of each benefit package clear is that numbers and statistics are innately seen as more valuable and accurate. Simply listing the benefits that the employee enjoys risks rendering the total reward statement obsolete because it would just be compiling information from an employee’s contract into a shorter document.

Instead, make sure to include monetary values for each item and a total of these amounts showing each employee the value of their rewards package in a simple and easy-to-absorb manner.

Five top tips to produce a Total Reward Statement

From our experience of producing statements for organisations over a number of years, we have pulled together some useful top tips to consider for producing effective Total Reward Statements.

Contact us now to introduce Total Reward Statements and help your employees to see their value and boosting your retention.