E-reward conferences

>>> Welcome

Employee Engagement and Reward
Date: Wednesday, 29th June 2011
Venue: The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), 66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD

--> Click here to download the PDF programme and brochure.

 

Devised by e-reward’s Michael Armstrong and Paul Thompson, this new conference will address the key issues, challenges and opportunities facing reward/HR professionals in understanding the contribution of reward practices and processes to building and maintaining employee engagement.

Leading speakers

So what part does reward play in driving employee engagement? In what way do reward practices influence performance through engagement? We have brought together a distinguished panel of expert speakers to offer some insights:

• Duncan Brown, Principal, Reward and Engagement, Aon Hewitt

• Neal Blackshire, Benefits & Compensation Manager, McDonald’s Restaurants

• Annie Coleman, Partner, Engage for Change

• Stuart Hyland, UK Head of Reward Consulting, Hay Group

• Helen Murlis, Director, Hay Group

• David Shears, Reward Partner, Everything Everywhere (the company that runs Orange and T-Mobile)

• Paul Sparrow, Director of the Centre for Performance-led HR and Professor of International Human Resource Management, Lancaster University.

Case studies

Leading organisations will share good practice in using reward management to enhance employee engagement:

• Case study 1: McDonald’s Restaurants

• Case study 2: Everything Everywhere (the company that runs Orange and T-Mobile)

• Case study 3 (TBC)

These case-study sessions will feature a range of organisations with well-developed engagement strategies and will:

• Offer practical insights into your organisation’s employee engagement strategy

• Examine what the organisation is trying to achieve
  

• Discuss the role of reward in delivering higher levels of employee engagement
  

• Describe how the organisation has designed new (or amended existing) reward practices and processes to leverage different aspects of engagement
  

• Include an evaluation of the contribution of your reward practices and processes in affecting employee engagement
  

• Outline the key lessons learnt.
  

 

OUR CONFERENCE

This conference is designed to offer insights into the complex relationship between reward and employee engagement:

1. Looks at current thinking in employee engagement

• What does employee engagement really mean?

• Why is it so important?

• How does it impact on organisational performance?

• What are the organisational issues that contribute to employee engagement?

• What do you expect from engaged employees?

• How do you build an engaged workforce?

• How can you devise robust employee engagement strategies?

2. Examines whether (and how) reward practices and processes can help contribute to improved employee engagement

• What is the relationship between reward and engagement?

• What is the evidence that reward can positively influence employee engagement?

• Is it possible to distinguish which specific elements of reward (base pay, incentives, intangible rewards etc) affect employee engagement (and how these may vary by employee group)?

• Does workforce involvement in the development of reward programmes help promote employee engagement?

• What role is played by fairness and procedural justice (process by which reward is introduced and managed)?

• How do you build strategic rewards in pursuit of higher levels of engagement?

3. Highlights case-study examples - leading organisations share insights into “good practice”

• What is the organisation’s current strategy for managing employee engagement?

• How is employee engagement measured?

• How effective has the organisation been in fostering higher levels of employee engagement?

• How does the organisation support employee engagement through reward?

• How do you know that your efforts to engage employees through reward programmes are working and what effect have these had on organisational performance?

Background

Faced with a bout of wage freezes, lost bonuses, “downsizing” and increased work demands, engagement levels have - all too often - suffered during the prolonged economic downturn. So, as the economy slowly recovers from deep recession, it’s never been more vital for employers to know that they are maximising the capabilities of their employees. Organisations that fail to re-engage their employees will face a “talent exodus of disengaged employees, overstretched and under-rewarded in the recession,” warns Hay Group.

But it’s not too late to take the lead from major organisations which have successfully maintained high levels of motivation and commitment throughout the recession. These businesses have investigated how appropriate reward practices and processes - both financial and non-financial - can explicitly encourage employee engagement. Reward practices in these organisations reflect a fundamental acceptance of the importance of employee engagement to business success.

As Duncan Brown, Principal, Reward and Engagement, Aon Hewitt, in a report he co-authored with Peter Reilly of the Institute for Employment Studies, explains: “Employee engagement is not simply a new ‘fad’ but provides genuine scope for reward professionals to leverage a more powerful impact on their organisational performance”.

For Brown and Reilly, a “wide range of evidence indicates that reward does affect employee engagement”. But the relationship is an “underemphasised, underleveraged and, still to an extent, misunderstood area”.

Benefits of employee engagement

• “Employee engagement is a route to business success. An engaged workplace encourages commitment, energy and productivity from all those involved to help improve business performance.” - businesslink.gov.uk

• “We believe that if employee engagement and the principles that lie behind it were more widely understood, if good practice was more widely shared, if the potential that resides in the country’s workforce was more fully unleashed, we could see a step change in workplace performance and in employee well-being, for the considerable benefit of UK plc.” - MacLeod Review.

• “Highly engaged employees can improve business performance by up to 30%.” - Hay Group.

• “Organisations with high engagement scores are up to 78% more productive and 40% more profitable. A disengaged employee can cost an organisation an average of $10,000 in profit annually.” – Aon Hewitt.

Key quotes from our keynote speaker

Paul Sparrow is the Director of the Centre for Performance-led HR and Professor of International Human Resource Management at Lancaster University Management School.

• “As a strategic function, HR should be most concerned about how it needs to manage engagement - how it gets employees to believe in the vision of performance the organisation offers, and not how engagement is measured. Yet the inescapable reality is that in shifting attention to how engagement is managed, it becomes clear that what you measure also has to change!”

• “The most fruitful way to think about engagement is to look much more carefully at how attitudes are formed and how they get translated into real behaviour - and to take engagement back to its fundamental roots. The key question is to ask yourself: What exactly is it you need your workforce to engage with?”

• “HR should ask what do they expect out of an engaged workforce? The answer to this question will be different for different organisations and in fact may be quite different within an organisation for its different business units. Once we know what to expect from an engaged workforce, then we must know how to influence this engagement.”

Source: “Engaged to Perform: A new perspective on employee engagement", White Paper 09/04, May 2009, by Shashi Balain and Paul Sparrow. Download the PDF at www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/research/centres/hr/WhitePapers/.

 

---

 

Networking and interaction

The conference has been designed so that it features numerous networking opportunities, allowing you to refresh your relationships, learn from your peers and meet new contacts. We also want to encourage as much participation and interaction as possible, so we’ll leave lots of time for delegates to submit questions, debate, comment and exchange views and ideas with the speakers and interact with other delegates.  

 

---

 
Want to know more?

--> Click here to find out more about the conference programme.

--> Booking is easy. If you are interested in attending, please let us know as soon as you can. To be assured of a place, click here to book.

--> Click here to download the PDF programme and brochure.

 

---

 

Who should attend?

Anyone involved or interested in reward across the private and public sectors:

• Reward and HR directors

• Heads of reward

• Reward managers, reward analysts and other compensation and benefits specialists

• HR professionals with responsibility for reward

• Reward consultants

 

What are the
research reports?