For years, the simplest way of attracting top finance professionals was to offer the highest salary. After all, there is a ceiling to the amount of annual leave you can offer to tempt in the top candidates and the inherent stress and responsibilities that come with senior roles have to be balanced by more than a healthy- looking bank balance.
For better or worse, our experience of finding and placing Finance Directors and CFOs shows us that has changed. Salary is no longer the key or sole factor when considering a role. While a good pay packet is always welcome, the door to staff benefits is well and truly open wide. Top candidates are very aware of the myriad of benefits offered by the leading employers and it can be tricky to decide how to attract talent while keeping your own team happy and engaged without bouncing from benefit to benefit on a whim.
Here we talk about some of the ways of attracting and retaining some of the best financial professionals with non-monetary rewards in a way that works for them, and your bank balance.
Understanding your Employees
While we all like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, we all do share a great many common traits. Among them are the needs that we all share – from basic survival requirements to the need for psychological safety. Job satisfaction and motivation feature in there too – we all want employment that satisfies some part of our psyche.
Money isn’t the sole motivator for most people. We all value, to varying degrees, recognition, responsibility and personal/professional growth. While those might show up in different ways across different groups or generations or backgrounds, the general pattern is moving towards placing a higher value on non-monetary rewards such as purpose and value than previously.
The Spectrum of Non-Monetary Rewards
When we think about non-monetary rewards, we are talking about a wide range of incentives.
- From career development opportunities such as mentorship, specific training or qualification, all of which increase future career growth.
- To the ever-present ‘work-life balance’ which includes factors such as flexible working hours or location and policies around, amongst others, out-of-hours communication or holiday planning.
- It also includes health and wellbeing offerings such as medical cover and the opportunity to take part in volunteer days.
- A community and culture which recognises both the team and the individual is becoming a real draw for talent – employee morale is strongly linked to contributions being acknowledged and rewarded when possible (in a way that is different to strict performance targets which often have the opposite effect).
More individual rewards:
Modern society, and work, are based around the individual. Understanding that what motivates one person might not resonate with another is key to being able to provide a well-rounded employee offering.
Ask your talent what works for them – in 1-2-1s, via surveys or even during performance reviews – find out what people want and value so you can provide them with exactly the kind of rewards programme that works for each person. Doing so will likely increase job satisfaction, retention and make it far easier to ‘sell’ your company as the place to work!
How to implement your reward strategy
As always, begin by taking a good look at your current rewards.
How did they come to be?
Are they still a good fit?
Do they make sense for the organisation that you are now and that you are building?
Take time to find out what your people want and communicate with them about your goals and plans. Be sure to tell them that you are open to developing and iterating the strategy so that people do feel comfortable talking about what works. Be clear on the challenges – budgeting, maintaining equity among the different levels and keeping company values front of mind when planning rewards.
Nothing screams ‘no thought at all’ than a reward which is in direct contrast to your company values or mission. Likewise, when it comes to the finance team, they’ll already know if your claims of ‘we can’t afford that’ are actually true!
Where is this all heading?
Continued changes in technology and employee expectations mean that what works now might well not be applicable in five years’ time. Think back to 2019 – you’d never have guessed that your team would have spent the best part of two years working from home, and that remote working would have become such a vital part of the package in such a short period of time.
As we don’t know what the future holds, it pays to emphasise the point that employee benefits outside of salary are ever evolving. What works now for your current employees might not be relevant in the not-too-distant future.
By remaining agile and open to new ideas while balancing what your team actually want, you’ll continue to attract and retain the very best finance professionals out there.
Here at Artemis Clarke, we might not be staff benefits specialists, but we do talk to a lot of top finance professionals as they evaluate the best companies to work for. So we know what makes the best Finance Directors buzz!
If you’ve been struggling with attracting those high-level finance professionals into your business and fill a key role, give us a call.
