Neovation – Dialling Up Digital

This year, the technology worked, and what a result.

As advertised, “Dialling up Digital Reward” - this year’s Neovation Conference - was indeed fast-paced and interactive, and confronted many of the biggest challenges in the workplace today: how to use technology and data analytics to make ‘Reward’ compelling, valued and effective.

This was a very useful meeting of fellow professionals. I was privileged to be a part of it and to chair some of the panels.

To pick on a few highlights, we covered:

• What actually motivates behaviour: a set of terrific insights from Ovul Sezer (Cornell) discussing things like Loss Aversion, Status Quo Bias, Choice Overload, FOMO (fera of missing out)
• The importance of Recognition: an area which is far more important than we realise. The value of ‘points’ recognising great performance, regularly, with some value attached, is immensely powerful [Meisha-ann Martin, Workhuman]
• Two panels I chaired which covered (a) the harnessing of data [Louise Sutton - Astra Zeneca; Nicola Wells – Unilever; Stuart Smith – Uflex] and (b) the reward organisation of the future [Meisha-ann; Yvonne Prang – McDonalds; Dennis Palman – GSO]

These presentations, backed up by Peter Newhouse’ excellent ShoeMars case study, and the contributions from participants along the way, tackled a great deal that remains an issue today. Questions such as:

• Which parts of the typical Reward organisation are antiquated?
• What works to motivate and incentivise people? (Answer – gradual improvements in opportunity, frequent recognition, beating the expectations of employees as far as ‘engagement’ is concerned)
• How is data useful? Answer: it feeds decisions, enables a focus on what is working…
• What do we do with employee feedback? Not enough

The Reward Organisation of the future needs to juggle centralisation (ability to create ‘data lakes’) against de-centralisation – HR teams that fully understand the day-to-day tensions and priorities of business units. Each business is different, and will need to find its own balance.

As I mentioned to those attending, we are thrilled to have merged Remuneration Associates with Farient Advisors. You can reach us at

Simon Patterson
Partner
Farient Advisors
simon.patterson@farient.com
https://farient.com/