Speak to an expert +44(0)1733 391377

Toggle Sidebar

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.

See an Example of a Total Reward Statement

Download NOW(pdf)

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.
1

Paper versus online Total Reward Statements

You will need to decide whether to go with paper or electronic statements (either online or an emailed file). Some employers tell us that many employees do not bother to log-in when statements are made available online, so this is very much down to individual preference.
2

Include as many reward elements as you can

Organisations often leave elements off if they are difficult to quantify financially. However, we often address this by including a glossary/descriptive section as part of the statement, e.g. flagging a discounted canteen or free car parking.
3

Include graphs and imagery

We often see statements that are made up of purely text and numbers. Take the opportunity to reinforce the brand, ensuring they comply with your brand guidelines and messaging. Include branded pictures to encourage employees to read the statements, highlighting to employees that they do not just receive a salary.
4

Timing

This varies from organisation to organisation, although many choose to produce and distribute their statements just after their pay review for maximum impact. This brings its own issues though, since post-review salaries and bonus payments are often not updated on systems until relatively late in the process. For that reason, it is important to...
5

Plan for the time/resources required

Organisations often underestimate the amount of work that is required in designing, producing and distributing statements. It doesn't have to be a troublesome process. We are often asked by our customers to print and distribute the statements on their behalf, in order to minimise the impact on their resources.

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


Related Articles

Read More
Employee Engagement

Top tips for producing Total Reward Statements

More and more organisations are looking to engage with, and communicate better to, their employees t...

Explore

Stay up to date

Sign up for briefings on pay benchmarking, salary surveys, reward strategy and statistical updates.

sign up for updates

© Paydata Ltd 2024 All rights reserved.
Registered in England no: 3632206
VAT no: 728 0808 28

Paydata Ltd, 24 Commerce Road, Lynch Wood, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE2 6LR