Held in Cincinnati, Ohio from May 20 to 22, this year’s World at Work Total Rewards‘24 conference included eight dynamic session formats ranging from 25 to 90 minutes and covering eight key topic areas. Conference attendees learned essential industry updates and success-driving strategies to improve business results. In this article, Katie Coleman reviews some of the compensation and talent management trends impacting today’s HR professionals.

1) It’s Time to Modernize Total Rewards Strategies

As the name of the conference suggests, total rewards was a central topic for a number of presentations and workshops. Industry experts discussed the many internal and external forces influencing total rewards strategies, some of which include:

• Organizational culture and leadership
• Society’s changing attitude toward work
• Advances in AI and other technologies
• The volatile economy

Experts urged conference attendees to respond to these influences by modernizing their total rewards strategies, allowing their organizations to keep pace with employees’ evolving expectations. During their presentation “Compensation Role Is Transforming: Unleashing 2.0,” John Radford of Radford Compensation Surveys and Navneet Rattan of Compport described employees’ growing desire for personalized total rewards packages and that diverse talent needs customized solutions. While updating your total rewards packages can feel daunting, the key to embracing the change and overcoming challenges is to leverage data science and lean into disruptive technologies.

During the same session, Radford and Rattan discussed the essential hard and soft skills that compensation professionals need if they’re to develop and deploy successful total rewards strategies. Critical thinking, problem solving, and communication were among the most important soft skills, while crucial hard skills included financial acumen, digital literacy, people analytics, and competence with AI tools. Organizations wishing to modernize their reward strategies should invest in training for their compensation management teams. It’s crucial that those employees are prepared to tackle any challenges that may arise while updating their total rewards strategy, especially since every employee in the organization is likely to be affected by the change.

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2) Pay Transparency Is Picking Up Steam

With pay transparency laws being passed in various countries, states, and territories in recent years, it’s no wonder that HR leaders had thoughts about how organizations should handle these changes. Tyler Huddleston of Morningstar and Mariann Madden of Willis Towers Watson (WTW) expressed that pay transparency shouldn’t be looked at as “one more thing” for HR leaders to deal with. Their session, “Navigating the Smoke and Mirrors of Pay Transparency in a Global Workforce,” instead framed pay transparency as an opportunity for organizations to educate their workforces about compensation practices.

The idea is that educating employees about how compensation decisions are made will boost workers’ confidence and improve their engagement levels. That’s because they’ll have a better understanding of why they earn a particular pay rate (and what actions they need to take to be eligible for compensation increases). Pay transparency leads to improved pay equity. Compensation gaps can potentially be spotted more quickly, and HR teams can swiftly determine the reason for the discrepancy and make necessary adjustments.

Huddleston and Madden also noted that organizations need to have the following drivers of equal pay in place if they want to feel confident about pay transparency initiatives:

• Robust job and rewards structures
• Objective HR policies and processes
• Rewards data and analytics capabilities
• Employee communication and education regarding rewards

3) Prepare to Pay More for Critical Skills

It’s no secret that technology has been advancing at a breakneck pace, and with its progression comes a need for new skills and positions to manage these changes. The top emerging roles discussed during the World at Work conference were:

• Machine Learning Engineer
• Generative AI Engineer
• Conversational UX/UI Designer (intended to work with AI chatbots)
• AR and VR Developer
• Prompt Engineer
• Blockchain Engineer

Organizations will likely be fighting to hire skilled talent for these in-demand positions, and you’ll have to decide which skills are the highest priority for your business needs—and compensate people accordingly. During the session “Optimizing Compensation Through Business Cycles,” a panel of five HR experts from various industries advised conference attendees on how to prioritize budgets for highly skilled roles in their organizations. The experts agreed: it comes down to identifying which skills will produce the most value for your organization and yield the greatest ROI. Weigh that against how difficult it will be to acquire individuals with those skills, and use that as a basis for your pay range decisions.

The panelists also discussed compensation strategies to entice these highly skilled workers. Organizations should consider a variety of payment methods, including short- and long-term incentives and sign-on or retention bonuses. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to compensation, but a common suggestion was that the base pay for critical roles should be targeted between the 75th and 90th percentiles for these positions’ average compensation ranges.

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4) Employee Recognition Programs Bring Positive Business Benefits

According to presenter Paulo Fava of ITX Corporation, employee recognition programs are a crucial factor driving positive company culture, workplace engagement, productivity, and retention. In his session “The ROI of Recognition: Maximizing Impact in Total Rewards,” Fava explained that recognition programs can increase job satisfaction, motivation, and productivity levels in employees, and organizations should start quantifying the impact of these programs if they aren’t already. That’s because quantifying recognition programs can help to establish your program’s potential impacts on overall business performance.

Fava shared 19 potential metrics organizations can track to establish the ROI of their employee recognition programs. The metrics you choose will depend on how your recognition program is structured. For example, the ROI of performance-based incentive programs can be measured by tracking employee turnover and retention rates, engagement levels, and performance ratings. These metrics likely won’t be as useful if you’re measuring the ROI of an experimental program that awards employees with company-branded apparel for their years of service.

Whenever you invest in a program or strategy, your stakeholders will want to see how that investment is paying off, and employee recognition programs are no different. By calculating and presenting ROI findings to stakeholders, HR teams can find ways to maximize their program’s benefits and make continuous improvements.

5) Top Performing Companies Prioritize ESG and DEI Goals

Total rewards strategies may have been the talk of the conference (and rightfully so!), but presenters had plenty to say about other critical business factors. Among these hot topics was the need to align talent and reward strategies with your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals. In his session titled “Executive Compensation: Secrets of Top-Performing Companies,” CEO of Zayla Partners Chris Crawford stated that today’s best-performing companies are 3.5 times more likely to include ESG goals and two times more likely to include DEI objectives in their short- or long-term incentive plans.

PeopleFluent’s sibling company Affirmity presented on how companies can leverage their “organizational climate” to drive change in their DEI initiatives. Patrick McNeil, Principal Consultant at Affirmity, along with Gwynne Zodrow, Technical Director for Management Systems International, said during their session that an organization’s climate comes from a shared set of expectations that employees have toward their employer. These expectations influence various behaviors, including how employees interact with each other and what aspects of the business they value the most. A business’s climate can help or hinder its DEI initiatives, so it’s pertinent to understand the climate of your organization and how it’s impacting your strategies.

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