HR - what's in it for me?
The compensation and benefits of a businesses employees and directors represents a significant proportion of any businesses cost structure. This is therefore a particularly emotive area, not only for the business, but also for the businesses most valuable assets, their employees.
Compensation and Benefits specialists play a fundamental role in the medium/large organisation. They are there to source well structured and reasonable Compensation and Benefits schemes that operate effectively and provide best value to the organisation, whilst structuring remuneration schemes that will attract and retain the best talent available. This work is often carried out within a multi-country geographical framework.
Compensation and Benefits roles tend to be more technical and analytical than other HR roles, the incumbent needing to be able to grasp the detail of complex renumeration and benefits structures and able to analyse industry trends. Compensation and Benefits roles can be found both in-house within medium/large organisations and within consultancy environments, such as Watson Wyatt, where C & B specialists will provide specialist services targeted at the development, analysis and benchmarking of benefits and compensation schemes for organisations who lack the resource, skills, market knowledge or time to handle the projects internally.
The typical entry-level position tends to be that of C & B Analyst, a role that has a hefty statistical bias. As a C & B specialist develops up the career ladder, they will become involved in areas such as the establishments of share option schemes, the selection and procurement of benefits providers, the development of bonus and performance management reward structures, international assignments reward and assistance structure and in times of Merger and Acquisition, due diligence on the content of reward structures within the acquired business to investigate compatibility, risk and integration of the organisations schemes once the deal has been completed.
C & B specialists tend to receive a premium of reward on top of their generalist colleagues. However, there can be a ceiling on their reward as it is unlikely a C & B specialist role will take an individual to board level within an organisation, generally they will still report to an HR Director and may need to make the step into a generalist role to climb still further. An alternative to this is to continue joining ever larger and more complex international organisations, where employee reward is of critical strategic importance, hence increasing the value and seniority of the Head C&B role.
