Our client, a major mutual organisation, is a long established life insurance and pensions provider.

The organisation is committed to providing a quality service and market-leading products for its customers and prides itself on its friendly and professional service. To do this it needs to be able to attract and retain high quality staff.

As with many firms that evolve over a number of years, the organisation had what is termed a ‘spot’ salary system – each employee was on an individually negotiated salary. Generally salary and benefits were determined at the point of offer and re-negotiated when the employee felt that their ‘lot’ compared to others was slipping. And these offers and re-negotiations had been made in isolation over a number of years.

As a result, there was little harmonisation of pay and benefits between staff. And unless managed, salary and benefits systems can cause disquiet with staff, ultimately heighening their intention to quit.

The organisatin needed a complete review of its salary and rewards strategy, policies and system.

TimelessTime worked throughout the project with the organisation's HR team lead by the Head of HR and Finance. TimelessTime started by analysing salary and benefits data and setting out how the project would be done in a Method Statement.

As the Head of HR and Finance mentioned, “By working jointly, my HR team learned about the theoretical underpinnings of salary and benefits and hence came to understand the the new system from the outset. They needed to understand because they would, of course, be responsible for implementing and running the system at the end of the project.”

A statement about the relative worth of each job was built based on objective job evaluation principles. The job evaluation activity used existing job descriptions for each of 100 jobs. This statement of relative worth then formed the core of the future system.

There are many forms that a salary and rewards system can take and each was assessed. A dual progression structure was favoured, with managers and technical specialists progressing in parallel. And a method was developed to define movement between the various bands based on competence.

No salary and benefits system would be sufficiently robust without benchmarking with the labour market. A method of system calibration through benchmarking was built into the system.

The project lasted four months and resulting in a comprehensive report on how the proposed new system, policies and structure would work along with an implementation programme.

As the Head of HR and Finance noted, “The project delivered a viable and maintainable organisation-wide rewards strategy, system and structure.”