Rewards Strategies for Real Moving from Intent to Impact.docVIP

Rewards Strategies for Real: Moving from Intent to Impact By Duncan Brown Towers Perrin The graphics for this article are available in a separate pdf file. Click here. People who influence pay and rewards practices would today regard it as a criticism to describe those practices as non-strategic. In earlier decades, compensation practitioners were strongly influenced by government policies, ideas of professional best practices and tradition. In the mid-1980s, many practitioners were criticized for their narrow-minded, reactive, technical and administrative approaches.i Since then, though, the notion of strategic human resources management has become pervasive. Pay has apparently been revolutionized by increasing competition, globalization, skills shortages and new technologies. They have moved pay from a peripheral role to center stage in influencing and achieving corporate objectives. Armed with copies of Edward Lawlers Strategic Pay and Jay Schuster and Patricia Zingheims New Pay as guidebooks, industry professionals have spent the past decade enthusiastically righting yesterdays wrongs and pursuing the strategic approach, defined by Lawler as an integrated rewards approach linking company strategy, pay systems and employee behaviors. In their latest book, Schuster and Zingheim paint an enticing portrait of sweeping and dramatic pay transitions, and of companies using pay to lead change. HR practitioners have been transformed, shedding the persona of backroom administrators to don the hat of respected boardroom advisers and change agents who help bring strategy to reality. The exhortations and claimed benefits of the strategic rewards approach have become more strident and expansive than ever, while non-strategic rewards have taken their place on the back-burner. Schuster and Zingheim concur, describing the old steady state approach as a recipe for organizational road-kill. And, with regard to the gains related to this new, more strategic