Reward Innovation: Dare to be Different?

It is quite understandable that there has not been much innovation in the reward area. Mistakes in this area have much more impact than in other areas of HR. Employees and recruitment candidates also have ingrained expectations about the type of deal they will find.

Retaining an untransformed set of best practices is not without risk either. There is increasing evidence that the traditional ways of rewarding people need to change. Actually the whole idea of following generic best practices is probably misdirected anyway. There is an interesting new article on Linkedin’s Talent Blog reviewing the development of Netflix’s unconventional HR and reward practices described in its famous culture deck (no annual reviews, market based pay, unlimited vacation etc).

This came after 14 years of a heads-down approach where Netflix’s Head of HR isolated herself inside its walls to come up with the streaming giant’s revered culture:

“During that decade-and-a-half, she wasn’t out and about chatting up human resources professionals or regularly attending talent acquisition conferences. Instead, she refused to read what other companies were doing and only attended HR conferences every two or three years. Consequently, Patty says she didn’t get influenced by what others were doing. And it paid off.”

That does not mean learning about new practices is unimportant - this is after all the purpose of our event. It just means that after learning about what may be possible HR and Reward professionals need to put their heads down and focus on what is going to be important for them.

Here is a summary of our reward innovation event, which was on 15th November 2016, in London.