Reward Your Employees in 9 Different Ways

Companies make a big deal out of how generous their total compensation packages are. But total rewards plans often end up being too broad, underpaying top performers, overcompensating average employees, and generally fitting no one perfectly.

Marrying rewards strategies with talent assessments can provide individualized options that improve employee engagement, says Bob Wesselkamper, global solutions leader for Korn Ferry's Rewards & Benefits practice. "Talent management practices aim to identify, develop, and retain talent in the organization, and could help create the right rewards to better motivate employees in individualized ways," he says.

In the new paper "Taking individualization to the next level," Wesselkamper and his colleagues outline a tool to connect talent strategy with rewards: the 9-Box framework. The 9-Box plots employees on both potential and performance over time, allowing an organization to better understand their consistent stars’ profiles and to identify critical competency, trait, and experience gaps that exist between these top performers and their peers. The 9-Box can also help to identify talent placed in the wrong role and can potentially indicate a bad hire.

Adding in a tool like the 9-Box can start the process of linking talent strategy to total rewards, but creating alignment is hard work and demands a lot of time and attention from top management, Wesselkamper says. Leaders need to consistently ask if their performance management system delivers business strategy performance, is transparent, objective, and encourages employees to behave in ways that will help the organization achieve its goals.