The Future of Reward Management: From Total Reward Strategies to Smart Rewards

Abstract

The author argues that the terminology and concept of “total rewards” is become increasingly meaningless and outdated in our postrecessionary economy of austerity and inequality. Its generic and unthinking application in uniform flexible benefits packages risks isolating the rewards profession into an administrative backwater. Instead he argues for a new approach that he provocatively titles “smart rewards,” following recent thinking and writing in economic and foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic. He discerns four components of this emerging reward management approach: a simpler and clearer focus on a few core values and principles, a stronger basis in evidence and measurement, more emphasis on employee engagement through rewards and improved and more open communications and line management of reward. Brown concludes that adapting and tailoring this type of approach is much more likely to create the genuinely business-enhancing and employee-engaging reward practices in our contemporary context that reward professionals and their policies aspire to.