PERFORMANCE AND REWARD – MEDIA COMPANY

The issue
A major television company had gone through radical change – a merger and acquisition, restructuring, new working practices, ever-changing technology – and faced greater competition from established and new players in a global media market. All this demanded improved performance across the business – not least in terms of what the company expected from employees and the way in which they were rewarded.

Strategic Reward’s approach
Initially we were brought in to work on company-wide profit sharing arrangements. However, many employees had a strong allegiance to the pre-merger company in which they worked rather than the new corporate identity and some of the individual businesses were very successful financially. This led us to believe that a range of financial and non-monetary incentives at business unit level, coupled with rewards linked to organisational performance, could help create the desired high performance culture and engage people in the new organisation.

We worked on executive incentives (annual cash bonus plans and long-term share option plans), business-unit incentives (including sales commission for programme sales worldwide), and performance-linked salary progression. The organisational profit-sharing scheme was backed up by an action-based communication process for identifying efficiencies, such as cost reduction, shorter procurement times and process quality.

The outcome
Consultation with management and employees was critical to gaining commitment to reward schemes that were designed to improve efficiency and profitability. This included road shows to all employees, posters campaigns and help lines. By transferring our knowledge, the HR team was able implement the new schemes without further consultancy assistance.

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